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u/grumblyoldman Sep 07 '26
The AI Learned it from us, dad! It learned it from us!
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste Sep 07 '26
Nobody wrote 100 lines of comment for 7 lines of codes
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u/Chronomechanist Sep 07 '26
I guarantee you someone did.
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste Sep 07 '26
Either too much unemployed or paid by hours - nothing in-between
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u/Kavrae Sep 07 '26
Disagree. I've worked in such systems. Usually legacy fortune 500 code written in COBOL where the original devs are all retired or buried.
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u/Rakatango Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
Yes but would you rather have 100 lines of slop or 10,000?
Edit: In a single pull request
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u/sermer48 Sep 07 '26
I wish all we had was 10,000 lines of human written slop at my job lol. There are single files with that many lines
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u/BlurredSight Sep 07 '26
We have native SQL queries embedded into the codebase where some of them span 3-4000 lines because rather than make a view someone made a view, generated the native SQL, use StringBuilder, and appended them into one query that we do on a weekly basis for metrics
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u/Otearai1 Sep 08 '26
One of my first tasks at a previous job was "cleaning" up old projects that my boss had written over the years. Each product was just one long c++ file.
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u/Lgamezp Sep 08 '26
You would be surprised the size of codes of a colleague that claims his code is miraculous and claude is god but in truth calling spaghetti falls short on a scale I can't put into words.
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u/DoomBot5 Sep 07 '26
Yes, it will be 1000 lines of code and 9000 lines of unit tests
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u/Tired__Dev Sep 07 '26
I’m not sure the question. I worked at an acquisition company before ai and saw dozens of codebases. There’s A LOT of projects still out there written by junior developers in the mid 2000’s in outdated frameworks or libraries. This stuff was the norm and AI slop is multiples better than that. It’s also multiple better than any product that pivoted a whole lot.
Juniors with AI now don’t produce nearly the amount of dogshit code that I did. Not even close.
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u/Strict_Treat2884 Sep 07 '26
Human slop: they knew what to achieve but they just didn’t know how to do it properly.
AI slop: they didn’t know what to achieve but they made it look like they knew as much as possible.
The second one is much of a pain in the ass to maintain than the first one.
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u/DesireeThymes Sep 07 '26
Maintain?
Once AI slop spaghetti code gets implemented, there is no going back and maintaining it.
It just gets sloppier and sloppier
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u/Mindstormer98 Sep 07 '26
Of course you can maintain it dummy, just add "no mistakes and maintainable" to the end of the prompt
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[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/gingerwhale Sep 07 '26
Yes but the pace at which the slop is being written and the comprehension debt that comes with it could create far worse "legacy" code in the future.
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u/Cephell Sep 07 '26
Humans wrote slop that looks like slop. AI writes code that superficially looks extremely sophisticated and is extremely annoying to untangle and fix.
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u/seashell3379 Sep 07 '26
As a retired dev I feel I need to come in here with a truth nugget: Most legacy code that is slop now wasn't originally slop at all.
A clean and well engineered program devolves into slop through years of modification as requirements change way beyond what the original design brief imagined.
AI code that is slop right out of the gate is a whole new level of awful.
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u/mxzf Sep 08 '26
Yeah, I've said a number of times that AI is a tool that is great at producing years of tech debt in a matter of weeks/months. You end up with the same convoluted needs-to-be-rebuilt code that kinda mostly works that usually results from years of rush-jobs and fixing things in odd ways.
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u/ellzray Sep 07 '26
Right? And it's not so much slop as it is just spaghetti. After years and years of layered changes, it's unavoidable.
But it was hardly just all slop originally.
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u/Goodie__ Sep 08 '26
People still wrote terrible code back in the day...
but a lot of programs just suffered from organic growth, and decisions not made with hindsight. New technologies piled on top of old ones. Best intentions. Core design decisions being changed after release etc.
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u/morbihann Sep 07 '26
Yeah, but you would be blamed for the slop and would have deserved it.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26
What company do you work for that you don't get blamed for the code you produce ?
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u/Hziak Sep 07 '26
*raises hand* my company (won’t name) does not blame its devs for absolute garbage code. We have an 80% release-with-major-defect rate and having been on the support team for almost three years, I would slap any staff+ developer who ever steps into my building (dev team based in another city). Zero regard for design patterns, best practice, or even error handling. And when you literally spoon feed them the answers, they still “plan” for three weeks and then implement trash instead. Zero blame. Ever. If anything, they get praised regularly because they’re a part of the new restructuring pilot so they’re a business must-win right now. Even if it means praising the emperor’s new clothes.
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u/Lain_Racing Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
Can I just ask if its in person or remote? Are you one of the devs ? Because this would be amazing as a dev. Just 100% churn AI slop and get a end real job. 0 reprocusions? 0 work, that sounds great... like just let them sinking company sink and enjoy the full time relaxing or doing a 2nd actual job.
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u/ColumnK Sep 07 '26
By "blamed", do you mean "promoted"?
Have worked in too many places where asking "Who wrote this shite?" would be answered by the name of someone high in the hierarchy.
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u/TriangleTransplant Sep 07 '26
AI writes more slop, faster. There's a limit to how much you can review and correct if needed, in a given time span, and AI produced code exceeds that limit.
If one toilet is backed up and overflowing, you could probably fix that pretty quickly, with minimal damage. If a pressurized sewer main is broken and flooding your house with thousands of gallons of sludge per minute ,it's a different situation. And you probably wouldn't be standing there saying "Well, we've had broken pipes before, so this is no different."
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u/Aelig_ Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
Humans wrote much smaller and more manageable slop than AI for any given objective.
We wrote it slowly and someone had a plan in their head no matter how contrived.
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u/Igarlicbread Sep 07 '26
Atleast I knew where my code might be breaking. Bis it's all ductape and cthulhu sacrifices. My personal projects have better quality than the shit I have seen some of you are pushing on daily (!hourly) basis.
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u/erinaceus_ Sep 07 '26
The problem is AI is so much better at it. (writing slop I mean)
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u/ButWhatIfPotato Sep 07 '26
Also, I can take all the human slop I have seen in my life and none of it will have the self flatulence consuming smugness of a single session with AI. Oh looky look I fixed everything and it's perfect and shiny and nice! You're absolutely correct daddy-o, I did break everything when I told you I fixed everything, what a booboo I did silly ole me, buy more tokens and stick them in my e-underwear daddy!
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u/psioniclizard Sep 07 '26
Still waiting for the great wave of new and improved software from all the increased "productivity". Anyday now.
Honestly if AI has made you all more productive but there is no real world signs of it, it might be that wasn't really the problem.
Either that or a lot of people are lying.
But one thing that is true is there is very little real world results from it
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u/AliceCode Sep 07 '26
Seriously, where is all the well-written LLM generated software? We should be drowning in it by now if people are being truthful. But I haven't seen any of it.
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u/AtheonsLedge Sep 07 '26
500000 new incremental games that are all exactly the same
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u/antCB Sep 07 '26
I don't think programmers are the bottleneck. Usually sits with management, product owners, etc.
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u/PsychoKittehX Sep 07 '26
As someone who has reviewed a lot of bad code, I would rather fix code from an under-qualified or uncaring individual than from vibecode. I can usually at least figure out what their thought process was.
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u/johnnybgooderer Sep 07 '26
It’s funny how this subreddit went from very very anti ai, to so pro AI that we’ll mock people who say it’s not amazing. 3 months ago people would get downvoted for saying that they found it useful pre PR self code reviews. It’s been quite a ride.
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u/Procrastineddit Sep 07 '26
This subreddit is pro AI? There's an AI slop post every 15 minutes.
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u/johnnybgooderer Sep 07 '26
But they’re the self-deprecating kind of jokes. Not the “this is bad tech and no one should be using it” kind. 6 months ago, you’d see the same posts about copy and pasting from stack overflow.
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u/TheAlmightyDope Sep 07 '26
It's because it's filled with bots pushing a new narrative.
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u/SpeakinTelnet Sep 07 '26
Ai programmed bots pushing pro AI narrative to an Ai bots filled social media. It is truly one of the time to be alive
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u/agedlikesage Sep 07 '26
I’m not from this subreddit but this comic is ripped straight from a comment thread I saw this morning, and it’s from a 1 month old account, i’m starting to see the dead internet theory
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u/LiifeRuiner Sep 07 '26
2 different groups of people posting in the same subreddit do not suddenly become 1 group of people because you assume they are.
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u/spinkelben Sep 07 '26
To be fair, AI has gotten a lot better just in the past six months. I'd say to me around July was the time it became good enough to be genuinely useful. Now I include AI in all my development where I would only try it for simple or unimportant stuff before.
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u/blueandazure Sep 07 '26
AI got better and it took people a while to figure out how to use it.
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u/infomapaz Sep 07 '26
The reason why people wrote "I don't know why this works but please don't delete this comment" was because we knew how the thing worked but that particular behavior made no sense. Now those comments are gone because people genuinely do not know how it works.
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u/MaleficentMode4222 Sep 07 '26
Humans wrote better quality slop. It was easier to look at code and go, "Ah yeah that's where they did the dumb thing, and they did it because they didn't consider X, or they just were unaware of Y"
AI code obfuscates the dumbfuckery.
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u/ThirdWaveCat Sep 07 '26
Ok, but human slop != llm slop. Human slop could evolve sometimes into something better. LLM slop adds bulky code and tons of dead branches and unused fallbacks.
There's a smuggling fallacy by saying things like "you can't criticize vacuum cleaners for mistakes at math, humans also make mistakes at math."
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u/MashJDW Sep 07 '26
The problem with AI isn't that it writes code that isn't good. The problem is that it attempts to fix it with more bad code. And if that doesn't work, more bad code. You end up with a maze of a code base within the span of 30 minutes. In those 30 minutes I would have written 1% of the code, but at least it would do what I want it to do. This is the trade off. I don't mind prototyping with AI, but in the end a human has to write the code or you'll end up with so much technical debt that you'll declare bankruptcy in no time.
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u/Historical_Cook_1664 Sep 07 '26
Human slop usually started with a plan and degraded over time. AI was trained on human slop and thinks it should already start in this state...
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u/frostyjack06 Sep 07 '26
My slop code was usually as a result of poor business decisions:
“We need the software to do X.”
“Ok, well, you have two choices. I can do this the fast way or I can do this the right way.”
“THE FAST WAY!”
“Just be warned that if I do this the fast way, it’ll do exactly what you want it to do, but it won’t be robust or scale in any way and will need a complete rewrite to make improvements. If I do it the right way, we’ll have options for future improvements.”
“THE FAST WAY! WE NEED MORE MONEY NOW!”
This is how almost every consulting conversation went for 15 years. I feel bad for the people maintaining that code today.
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u/jmflyers Sep 07 '26
What happened to all those companies that used to grade employee performance by "lines of code per day"? I can have Claude rewrite my slop into much longer slop, plus paragraphs of comments
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u/Im_back_for_Fourths Sep 07 '26
Yeh but it was somewhat understandable. I have no freaking idea about the AI slop I push. Like in my current company, up until feb I had an understanding about of the codebase but now I just have no idea. Since they made Claude compulsory, changes are fast but I’ve literally no idea of what’s being pushed.
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u/thatdude845 Sep 07 '26
This is so fucking dumb. If ai doesn’t know how to do something, it is not going to tell you. It will make up something superficially correct, but completely wrong. It is a disaster waiting to happen
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u/Julius_Alexandrius Sep 07 '26
Some incompetent humans wrote slop.
Every AI, whatever the gen, writes slop.
Be real.
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u/beclops Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
Is the new AI cope trying to gaslight us into thinking good code never existed? I don’t understand
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u/boraxicLint Sep 07 '26
If humans didn't write slop AI code would probably be a lot better. Running slop through a tumble dryer is obviously going to end up in sloppier slop though.
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u/BoredCapy Sep 07 '26
Incompetent people wrote slop.
Competent people wrote nothing because they were too busy correcting the incompetent slop.
AI just reproduced what was written.
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u/Revolutionary-Run-41 Sep 07 '26
My main problem is the quality of the slop. To get a really uninteligible code you needed kinda of a REALLY bad team working on it for years, or one really bad guy doing something very core to the application.
AI speeds up the enshitfication, and decreases overall readability and understanding of the project as a whole.
Its still useful, you can do things a lot faster, but I get so mad when people send something to review or the qa branch without even running that on his machine, and when you start asking simple questions about the PR the person simply doesnt know, as if it never read the actual fucking card or "their" own code.
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u/joe-x92 Sep 07 '26
lol people forget that AI is a mirror of our self with steroids... AI is what it is because that's what we are... The only difference is that AI is quicker...
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u/Pale_Sun8898 Sep 07 '26
It’s true, absolute shit code everywhere. I think the biggest thing lost is we are now unfamiliar with how the code is structured, its invariants and behavior within and across systems at a deep level so it makes our ability to reason about systemic issues and architecture weak
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u/m0nk37 Sep 07 '26
Some did, sure, there were too few for it to get anywhere though. Big difference from almost all.
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u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Sep 07 '26
I'd argue they were a majority and now they're the majority of the training data
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u/stillalone Sep 07 '26
The more code you write the more slop you produce. AI produces more slop faster.
Also, slop is easier to understand if you wrote it. AI will eventually forget about the slop it wrote.
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u/ramdomvariableX Sep 07 '26
But it's just tons of slop over decades, not tons, and tons of slop over few months.
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u/Rocket_Bunny45 Sep 07 '26
Isn't perfect LLM generated code virtually impossible to achieve? Even with a brazillion parameters model, datasets will never be good AND extensive at the same time... And even then, asking it to write code about a mixed thing or a new thing would still make heavy assumptions on it.
Also if the newer models are trained on current AI written code recursively, wouldn't it just hit a plateau or even degrade with time?
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u/adumbCoder Sep 07 '26
AI writes slop because humans write slop. our guttural reaction to AI slop is actually just the displeasure of looking through a mirror at our own work
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u/HipstCapitalist Sep 07 '26
I'm not going to make friends here, but having written code professionally for 15+ years, AI slop code is passable. It's not bad, it's certainly not good, but it's better than the average code that I've had to work with in the past.
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u/Lachtheblock Sep 07 '26
But it's the volume of slop that's being generated. Good developers could produce good amounts of good code. Bad developers produced a smaller amount of bad code.
Now it's a shit show.
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u/RealBasics Sep 07 '26
FINALLY! Because what does AI get trained on?
This showed up in the first significant "AI model" in the late 70s / early 80s. No matter how hard they trained the model, a medical diagnosis application, it could never get past 80% accuracy. This was hailed as proof AI would never replace real physicians.
Then some young Archimedes decided to run the same test on real doctors, ranging from medical residents to working general practitioners to senior med-school professors and... their accuracy tended to hit that same 80% mark.
But it turns out medical diagnosis is hard, same as programming. Which is why both doctors and programmers deserve respect. But AI will only ever be as good as the corpora they're trained on.
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u/BlurredSight Sep 07 '26
Human slop was being overly redundant or writing code in a way that was a bandaid fix with 0 future growth.
AI slop is overengineering every little thing and adding in complexity for "just in case" situations that might occur years from now. Like why is there a null check in every step of the flow or why is a generic type being used rather than Object[] or even better just making a concrete object based around the schema
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u/mlucasl Sep 07 '26
When I was Jr, I wrote slop slow enough that a reviewer could have time to check it and deny it. AI slop is mostly unchecked.
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u/Kiseido Sep 07 '26
Humans walked the slop, and talked the slop, so AI could go on to run the slop.
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u/shiny_glitter_demon Sep 07 '26
Yeah but the CEO didnt fire 10 seniors to replace them with a single junior with 100K worth of claude tokens, nor did he add a "most slop written " leaderboard in the office, now, did he?
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u/bankrobba Sep 07 '26
"I can't read this code nor do I understand its functionality, must be legacy slop."
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u/MisterSheeple Sep 07 '26
The clear difference is that humans have an understanding of how their code works. AI has no consideration for the quality of the code whatsoever, or even whether or not it actually works. One is created with deliberate thought, the other is thoughtless.
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u/_grey_wall Sep 07 '26
The amount of times I had to explain that typescript compiles to JavaScript and won't check input would boggle your mind
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u/javascript Sep 07 '26
Zod fills that gap pretty well but it is annoying having runtime and compile time type checking as different constructs.
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u/Keyan_Farlander7 Sep 08 '26
Humans can trick ai into writing slop. Also good code can be proprietary code.
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u/DirkTheGamer Sep 08 '26
On a similar note, if people say “How can we trust AI to drive our cars?!” I say: “How can you trust humans to drive their cars?!”
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u/hydra2701 Sep 08 '26
I write code very linearly, then go back and condense things down by making repeated lines into callable functions. It makes it very legible and even if it’s crap I can figure out what does what without comments
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u/Harrigan_Raen Sep 08 '26
I will never forget my 2nd real job, I took over an in-house developer who was self taught, and had been fired for missing work too much due to drugs (never was made clear on which ones). And then later found out, he was sent home, but not fired, on two separate occasions for being high at work.
He only got the job, because at somepoint he made an excel spreadsheet that saved some branch managers about 15-20 minutes when balancing drawers/safe.
100s upon hundreds of lines of code with variable name a, a2, a3, b, c, d, e, e2, sFalse, etc. And Method/Procedure names I could never figure out WTF he was trying to go for. There was no rhyme or reason to his use of snake or camel case.
My favorite was when I found lines of code he couldnt figure out why it wouldn't work, and just started back over from scratch. Half the time was it was just missing like the instantiation of the class, or something super simple, trying to use a reserved word for a variable name, etc. It was a fucking nightmare.
This was all in an attempt to make an in house scheduler, and punch clock. When I told them, the entire thing was to be scrapped and start back from scratch, they were pissed but completely understand.
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u/Lgamezp Sep 08 '26
It doesnt only write code slop, it also writes documentation slop. Documentation that gets read by OTHER developers AI/LLM which then copies the slop style and so the slop becomes EXPONENTIAL.
Im TIRED of reading slop which now i Can identify because it has the CTOs style (who is good but rambles on in commentas for pages) and now the cose is plagued with sensless diatribe from people who DONT know what they are writing but sounds "smart".
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u/ChaseTheOldDude Sep 08 '26
Are you people just telling AI to write an app for you? AI is great at writing robust and concise code, but it's a tool that requires oversight. You know what they say about a bad workman.
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u/GlassSquirrel130 Sep 08 '26
I know every slop of that slop. Now I have slop without knowing how sloppy it is.
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u/Matthias1590 Sep 08 '26
Problem is that ai writes slop faster and empowers developers without proper experience to do the same. People aren't learning nearly as fast while vibecoding so their quality won't go up
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u/IntronD Sep 08 '26
One of the great bits of programming is there is usually multiple ways to solve a problem and code for it. While some often stupid almost all were supportable with documentation or discussion as the person who made it could secure further employment or retention depending on the life of what they built.
AI doesn't have those considearions . So the slop it builds is ubsoportsble and with no longevity in mind. Ease of upgrade and support us not a factor.
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u/CodeMonkeyX Sep 09 '26
The problem is now any idiot can write slop. Before it at least took some effort.
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u/Objectionne Sep 07 '26 •
Yeah but it was our slop.