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lioetersyesterday at 9:32 PM4 repliesview on HN

Also a few days before that:

> I expect OSS to go the opposite direction: no human contribution allowed. Slop will be a nostalgic relic of 2025 & 2026.

We should have seen this coming after they got acquired by Anthropic, but it's still disappointing. I'm not against large language models as a technology, just thoroughly disgusted how these "AI" companies rose to power, eating the software industry and the rest of society. It's creating a very unhealthy dependency.

Think a few steps ahead and start preparing a slop-free software stack and community. That includes Zig and its ecosystem. Even if we (and future generations) don't manage to live entirely without slop, it's more important than ever to ensure a sustainable computing culture, free as in freedom.


Replies

tempaccount5050yesterday at 9:41 PM

Software companies have been about automating human labor since the invention of computers. It's the whole damn point. Why do you think finance used to be (sometimes still is) the head of the IT dept? Because we automated accounting away. Then typists. Then secretaries. Then drafting. Etc etc.

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shmichaeltoday at 11:43 AM

So you argue we discriminate based on who/what wrote the code, instead of what's in it?

Let's take this to a different domain, self driving cars. Would you equally argue for human driving? I'm pretty sure over time it will become clear to everyone that machines will be able to outperform humans consistently at this task, to the degree that human driving will become illegal. But for now the press likes to focus on any failure of machine driving, taking for granted human drivers are the largest or second largest cause of premature death in many countries.

Coding (in many ways, but not all) is a more open ended and versatile task than driving, so it's natural that current iterations seem untrustworthy, but ignoring the trajectory is erring on conservatism, and doesn't seem to me to be grounded in any sound reasoning.

foxesyesterday at 11:09 PM

How could it possibly be open source if it requires proprietary models developed by a few companies to writs the code.

Seems like that would make open source entirely controlled by open ai, anthropic et al.

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andy_ppptoday at 2:13 AM

It isn’t really slop anymore and it will keep improving.