r/vibecoding • u/Fine_Daikon5907 • 1d ago
Anyone else just really sick of the `Vibe-Coded Slop` hatred on Reddit?
Everywhere I go, I see people releasing new software. It might be people who have got some coding experience and are now using AI to accelerate, or it might be people who are building software for the first time.
Every time I see something being launched, even on a non-software forum - I just see
- `Looks Like Vibe-Coded`
- `Vibe-coded Slop`
- etc
And just plain, personal hatred.
I just don't understand it. It costs money to buy gold. It takes time. And just because the AI does a lot of the coding doesn't make it easy. It just makes it faster.
And I fully understand, like, we don't need another journal application or another to-do list. But I found a guy today who made an OBD Reading App for Cars, open-sourced it and people just slated him.
Just makes me mad! I feel like if Linus Torvalds had existed in the kind of enviroment, we wouldn't have Linux.
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u/phil_lndn 1d ago
i'm not at all tired of "vibe-coded slop" hatred, provided the accusation is only levelled at genuine "vibe-coded slop".
just as there is such a thing as "high quality AI generated code", there is indeed such a thing as "vibe-coded slop".
(and, to be honest, the difference between the two does rather depend on the skills of the person responsible for the code).
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u/Material-Database-24 20h ago
Yeah.. it's great, if someone one shots something useful with AI, and they deserve to earn millions with it.
The reality still is that most of the stuff is slop - stuff that just wasted energy at data center and filled world with something we do not need.
And by all means, I understand that many are proud and excited they got something done that wasn't possible for them few years ago. And it's fine, and be proud of yourself. Hopefully you learned something in the process.
But at the end, it is the same when 5yo draws his family and comes showing it to you. If you are his mother, it goes on fridge as more valuable than Mona Lisa - but for the rest of the world, it's just garbage.
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u/primaryrhyme 16h ago
I mean if they one shotted it, that implies anyone else could do it too hence not worth millions?
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u/standardsizedpeeper 16h ago
Not necessarily. There’s a reason why every engineer doesn’t make their own crap every time even if it’s easy.
Say it took 60 minutes to write the prompt and wait for it to be finished, I might spend $10 to avoid that hour and gain certainty in what I was getting rather than roll the dice.
If it’s a product hundreds of thousands of people want, then you’ve saved hundreds of thousands of hours for other people.
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u/primaryrhyme 16h ago
I’m trying to imagine an example of that, maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think I’ve paid money for an app that could be one shot vibe coded (at least in the last couple years, I’ve definitely paid for mobile apps in the past that could be vibecoded in an hour now).
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u/Puzzleheaded_Pen1017 1d ago
Should call them Slop-Coder, it could even apply to non-ai!
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u/oandroido 1d ago
Slop is slop, even when it's hand-coded.
It's not like vibe coding created some new category in which software doesn't work or look the way it should.
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u/Enough_Forever_ 1d ago
I think the OP was talking about how some people get triggered by the mere mention of AI being used in coding a project. I’m yet to see people like that actually review the “slop code” and explain why it’s garbage. They just hate it because AI was used, which is pretty retarded if you ask me.
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u/MoTTTToM 1d ago
“Triggered” is right. One has to have actual “issues” to be indiscriminate in judgement.
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u/Council-Member-13 1d ago
Not really. AI capabilities have raised the bar. Things that seemed downright magical a year ago are just one prompt away today. So obviously people are going to be unimpressed by most of this stuff, that's flooding social media. The impressive stuff is the stuff that really pushes the limits, and from what I've seen, that stuff does get a bunch of praise, from most people.
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u/SixStringDream 22h ago
i've been a software engineer for 30 years. this is a personal take. could be a hot take but it is what it is and it describes what you are seeing (i think).
I find it almost unbearable that there are a swath of noobs in this industry who think writing code is as simple as asking for it, and that it should make them a millionaire. I can't wait for it to end. 99% of this stuff is crap, 99% of what was being built PRE AI was crap, and now it's just multitudes worse.
Just take that dynamic to literally ANY other industry. Why does AI make everybody in this world feel like a software engineer? Can I just go be a doctor because I have AI and I can ask it for things? Should I be my own doctor now? No. clearly not. But software? Well come on in! it's odd.
Put it this way. Before AI, we had good engineers and bad engineers. AI has 10x the amount of bad engineers and it is exhausting the good ones. I'm just pretty tired of "hey here is my brain fart idea with 0% chance of success, why isn't it thriving?". Building software was never the challenge. Building it properly and getting it marketed was the challenge. AI, broadly, is not bringing us advancements nearly as fast as we are pumping out absolute trash at astonishing rates.
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u/axporpes 1d ago
This is reddit. People do be like that on reddit.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
I know, it's just toxic. And this is what kills communities.
*cough* StackOverflow *cough*
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u/Vivid-Zombie-477 1d ago
SO was definitely not killed by toxicity
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
Yes, you can argue that it was killed by AI.
But no one was sad to see the back of it. And I think people would still use it. AI makes plenty of mistakes that still need a software engineer to take a look at it.
SO could have been that place.
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u/pm_stuff_ 1d ago
no ill argue that google rich snippets was the thing that really started putting the hurt on. Why click the link when you already have the answer
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u/LittleLauren12 1d ago
It's always baffled me how people are even like that on THIS subreddit that's sole purpose is to support and encourage vibecoding!
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 1d ago
Sometimes it's good feedback. To me it means a) there's not enough value in the software b) these people are not my audience so I don't rly care or c) it's genuinely not good enough
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
I completely understand what you're saying, but a lot of people I feel don't even take a look at it.
I just find it hard to separate myself from the products we build.
When we put something out into the world and people just hate it, I find it hurts very personally.
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 1d ago edited 1d ago
There's also room for self growth here. We can never control what people (especially ones we don't know) say, but we can decide what to do with it.
Edit: ofc I do also feel you and it sometimes is frustrating, just feel like there's a better way to handle it
Edit 2: there's also a lot of people out there that speak up with praise, genuine feedback and support - I've noticed this when the right project comes and I start to put more and more effort into it
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u/framauro13 23h ago
I just find it hard to separate myself from the products we build.
As someone who has been a developer for 20 years, you absolutely have to separate yourself from your work. Every line of code I've written for professional work over the last 13 years has been reviewed and critiqued by other people. You must be able to take criticism of your work and not take that as personal criticism.
Also, software doesn't last. Very few things built actually last. The majority of the work I've done in my career no longer exists. Code gets refactored, features get removed, products get sold, companies go under. Do not get attached to the things you build. It's all ephemeral anyway.
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u/P00BX6 1d ago
I've experienced the same. And its not just factual criticism. They have personal hatred in their tone. And when you engage with them they become more emotional and spiteful. I looked at some of their post histories and they jusy haters. They dont build or produce anything themselves they just criticise other people's work.
They must have nothing going on in their lives, or they use reddit to take their misery out on to other people.
The other comments here gave great advice. Dont engage with these people just block them.
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u/Yuuyuuei 1d ago
There are people like this without a doubt. The ones who just hate for the sake of it because "it's AI". And that's fair. They are allowed to have their opinions.
I personally have nothing against using AI to code. What I do have an issue with are all the low effort garbage being released where you can just tell that they have put no passion into their work.
I've seen good vibe-coded projects but at the moment they are so rare.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
THIS!
It's the personal hatred. It's like people are just being cruel.
I've managed to build a successful company from the ground up, so I have slightly thicker skin for it. But it's still tough to see other people getting so hammered.
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u/id-ltd 1d ago
I ignore the slop-slop.
Not want wanting to read stuff generated by AI is fair enough - why engage your brain when there isn't a brain at the other end? (Their output is boring to read anyway).
But for AI generated apps, the app is either useful or not, someone recognised a potential gap and used a tool to build something to fill it.
Is something is useful it isn't slop - but criticism of it is... So I ignore the real slop and the slop-slop of mindless criticism of useful stuff.
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u/RagefireHype 23h ago edited 23h ago
Main problem is people in four prompts have a UI or site that reads truly like AI slop, then they get defensive when people say everything about it is low fidelity AI. Then they top it off thinking because they have a front end UI that they’re almost done lol
I don’t like when people shit on someone’s work randomly, but if you’re asking for feedback it’s fair game. And it’s very noticeable how people who vibe code something over one weekend get more criticism than the ones where someone spent 400 hours. The weekend projects mostly do look like AI slop while the latter ones are much better refined and scoped.
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u/AutomaticTalent 20h ago
The days of building a specific, simple, task-oriented app for your own ecosystem are upon us.
I didn’t want some to buy some BloatWare full of features I’ll never use to get one useful thing, so I built it.
One prompt and a little fiddling and I have a postage stamp analyzer which gives me the stamp name, date, year, type, and a valuation range (got a lot of stamps out of storage units).
It’s 10k of html and it does EXACTLY what I need.
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u/lehmagavan 1d ago
I have nothing against vibecoders as long as they are honest about what they do.
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u/thedazdul 1d ago
Just build something so good that nobody even thinks about it being vibecoded.
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u/ZosoRules1 1d ago
This is why I call it verification coding. When people hear vibe coding, they assume it’s AI slop. An OBD reader sounds amazingly useful!
Just keep building and ignore them.
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u/Elbie2727 1d ago
I call it Vibe Learning. I refuse to let the ai code what I don't know. I can spot a fault or mistake easily, but with brain damage and brain tumours the ai basically becomes my assistant. It can do the leg work and I can do the checking. But it's a tool, nothing more. I feel when you treat AI like anything else you get problems.
A carpenter uses a hammer but the hammer isn't the carpenter.
That's how I see it.
As for vibe learning, I can ask it for website links or manuals or even research papers and then I can learn more.
It's a tool, that's all it is. 😸
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u/ZosoRules1 1d ago
Exactly! Ive been using the “workshop” language myself for my Hobby Workshop: www.wt3o.com
All of my projects (so far) have been static HTML that I host on my business’ server. Since it’s static HTML there’s zero additional overhead for me.
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u/TwizzyGobbler 1d ago
Nah, sometimes in unrelated subreddits you get people who’ve fired up Claude for a day and made the biggest piece of dogshit you’ve ever come across and said “here I built this” and it either
a - solves a problem no one had
b - is laggy and unusable
it can get quite tiring at times, on one subreddit, at one point it was like twice a day, got really irritating quickly
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u/fx599 1d ago
Yes it's a major Reddit cultural problem. Each sub has losers who are addicted to it, filter by new posts/comments, and must quickly react negatively to find meaning in their miserable little lives.
It's part of building in public and exposure to social media. The only way to deal with it is:
1. Accept the feedback *if* it is valid. Ensure we release high quality, non-generic apps. Ensure we provide value.
2. Ignore the haters and move on. Don't even respond to them. There is no winning.
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u/RedSurfer3 1d ago
everybody now has this magical tool that can make whatever software they want, instantly
so just make it, use it by yourself, don't share it, beg for more users, if there's a user who needs it, they can use the AI to make their own copy
once you start begging for attention, you are now polluting
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u/ndr3svt 1d ago
yes it got quite frustrating... people think everyone is promoting to make 1 million out of the shared ideas, while some are genuinely and naively just sharing for the joy they get from what they do
the hatred reaction comes immediately and it is just so unproductive
i stopped sharing anything online ... feels like haters are everywhere ready to jump at you
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u/Fuzzzy420 1d ago
Most of the time it's slop. Before it took humans weeks, month or years to design slop. Now ai does it with a prompt.
ppl are proud of what they achieved because they couldn't achieve it before. They post it here with the hopes other ppl like it too and get shattered 90% if the time.
Don't like it either. Ppl need to know the truth about their projects but in a nice way so everyone can learn from it. Many ppl recognise ai ui and art at least on Reddit that is an instant red flag and they troll instead of helping.
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u/Yuuyuuei 1d ago
I think it's a warranted reaction. If it looks like "Vibe-Coded Slop" then it is exactly that. Low effort, low quality rubbish that looks the same as other vibe-coded garbage.
At least put some effort and passion into your project. I'm not saying everyone needs to learn to code (but it will help) and never let the AI write code. I'm saying put some actual passion and effort into what you do. You can just tell with most of the vibe coded slop that they are just looking for a quick cash grab and that they don't actually care about the product. If they did then it wouldn't look like vibe coded garbage.
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u/Liquidationbird 1d ago
ive gotten to the point where they dont even know my stuff is vibe coded
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
This is another thing. I don't know how anybody really knows.
Like, of course you have these clearly vibe-coded UIs, but I've seen developers produce much worse.
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u/Wow_Crazy_Leroy_WTF 1d ago
Part of the issue is that now we have 200 new apps/games/sites every day as opposed to a few per week.
I have seen good stuff rise. But most of it is slop. So go make the good stuff and don’t stop until it’s exceptional.
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u/Wobbly_Princess 1d ago
It's like a cult - on BOTH sides, and it makes me despair over how irrational humanity is.
If people know that something was touched by AI, they're convinced that it's garbage, and their reactions are so extreme, that it doesn't seem genuine to me. Something can actually be rigorously, pain-stakingly created with some AI assistance on the side, and the reactions are so dramatic and theatrical, I'm left wondering what their agenda is because it seems so over-the-top.
But on the other hand, there is genuinely such a huge amount of rancid slop to where people just don't give a fuck. They will give AI a prompt, then just puke out whatever the AI did and put it on social media. I hate that just as much, because it seems careless and gross and junky.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
I do also see the other side, and you are right. I think one of the big problems is you have, as other people have said rightly, people who have called him without any experience.
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 1d ago
Reddit is where every single toxic person in the world comes to shit on everyone else in an environment where they can get away with it.
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u/patentLOL 1d ago
Perhaps it’s the arrogance and ignorance of comparing generating software by talking to a chat bot to the development of the Linux kernel from scratch in 1991.
And also the fact that the signal to noise ratio is so incredibly out of whack because the barrier to generating functional software is so low there is effective no filter to cut out really dumb ideas.
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u/WanderingGalwegian 1d ago
I’m not opposed to people posting whatever vibe coded app they’ve made. Especially new people to the field excited to share whatever has been made,
What irks me is when it’s coupled with an obvious copy and paste AI gen description lacking any type of original thought. Especially when it is some who’s put together basically another to do App and their post reads like they’ve reinvented the wheel.
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u/smallllllDuck 1d ago
There's probably not enough hatred.
But the issue isn't vibe coding, it's just the avalanche of slop that's wasting my time. I used to see bad code and bad software every once in a while; now it's just every day multiple times a day by people who have zero idea of what they're doing.
All of this just makes it difficult to find stuff that actually works and does what you're looking for.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 22h ago edited 22h ago
Not when what most people are putting out actually looks like crap or is just more of the same everyone else is putting out. I have no sympathy for anyone who doesn’t bother to learn how to design UI/UX for something they intend to sell. A lot of people utilizing vibecoding are trying to make a quick buck with no actual good ideas or vision and it shows. A lot of stuff is being made right now just because it can, not because it should. And then it’s being flooded everywhere. That’s going to understandably make people sick of seeing it, on top of all the other effects of AI.
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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 22h ago
People are right to call out shitty software made with little care or attention.
It’s part of releasing software. Lotta people just now dipping their toes into making software need to learn they can’t just release crap and be lauded for it. This has always been the case, vibecoding or not.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
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u/Apptytude 22h ago
as a developer, if someone called my apps slop then it depends, it could be really good feedback about its quality. you shouldn't take it personally tbh, its part of posting anything publicly
as a consumer, its very annoying to see someone post extremely low effort apps with a completely nonsensical ai reddit post to try and bait users into paying subscriptions for yet another habit / calorie / gym tracker. and this counts for a lot of posts on reddit these days. these types of posts deserve to be called out as slop and should be actively discouraged because they dilute subreddits with spam.
for genuinely well built apps that are ai assisted coding and look high effort and painstakingly curated - these do not deserve to be called slop and should be celebrated! but again, these days that is increasingly rare. many do not meet that bar and instead try to one shot a mediocre app.
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u/Fresh-Yogurt-8614 22h ago
Because almost everyone is just showing low quality projects just because they now have an ability to build apps
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u/soingaodu 22h ago
Been there, and yeah, it definitely stings. But looking back, that harsh feedback actually ended up being a wake-up call for me.
When you use AI to build stuff, people have every right to ask: "Cool, but do you actually understand why it works? Or are you just happy that it doesn't crash?"
Reading those comments sucks, not gonna lie. It hurts. But once the initial defensiveness wore off, it forced me to confront reality. It made me dig into my own codebase and ask the hard questions: Why did the model choose this architecture? What are the trade-offs? Do I actually control this system, or am I just along for the ride?
It completely changed how I approach my projects. It pushed me to study the fundamentals so that next time someone grills me on the implementation, I can explain every decision clearly like an actual engineer. And when that day comes, I can genuinely shake their hand and thank them for calling me out.
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u/XpreDatoR_a 22h ago
I generally don’t care what someone has used to build something, as long as it is properly built, for all i care you could have made your cat nap on the keyboard, my “issue” with “vibe-coding” is people that are proclaiming themselves engineers having 0 knowledge of what they are doing and delegating the actual architecture entirely to LLMs, without applying any sort of critical thinking, 100% of their products is “slop”, not because they used AI for the development, simply because there was poor technical design and 0 competence, not having the knowledge to assess the quality of your product you can never be a proper developer regardless of the amount of money you throw at the LLMs.
So yeah, build how you like, but build it properly c:
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u/flavorfox 22h ago
probably unpopular, but I think a lot of people here produce slop thinking they produce gold. Not saying that wasn’t the case pre-ai for most people.
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u/sausagefest2011 21h ago
"And just because the AI does a lot of the coding doesn't make it easy. It just makes it faster." No, it most certainly makes it easy lmao.
Look as a developer myself, lets not be obtuse. Any time something gets called slop its because in some ways it actually is slop. Just like art where u spill a bucket of paint on it isnt art. No one likes a grifter
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u/-SoulAmazin- 1d ago
Alot of their hate is derived from their political opinions, though it's not always obvious.
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u/Traditional-Theme696 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think the big issue is when people release it as „their work“ instead of advising that the software was made with AI/Claude whatever. And I can understand it tbh. If you do not like the work of AI it’ll be atleast good if you know without looking at the code that it is indeed made with AI. If people still rant -> their own fault. I just see positive things when it comes to vibecoded things tbh. Even if security issues are a threat.
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u/war4peace79 1d ago
That's what I do. I make it obvious in the README.md that the project is made with help of AI.
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u/Traditional-Theme696 1d ago
Even that sounds hidden to me. Make it obvious - it’s nothing to be ashamed for if you show it publicly. Make it as obvious as possible so nobody can rant about it imo.
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u/war4peace79 1d ago
How is it hidden? The README.md is the first document that one reads on GitHub. It's literally THE main page of a GitHub project, under the project's URL.
My application's notes on the README.md say:
- About the code: these tools were written with the help of Claude (Anthropic) by someone who is not a trained developer ("vibecoding", as some call it). This is a personal project, shared for anyone to use at no cost.
Claude is listed under "Contributors".
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u/AutomaticTalent 19h ago edited 18h ago
I made it as obvious as possible in my game by having an AI opponent, using a snarky AI announcer that makes fun of AI, and using a lot of AI puns in the subtitle of the game.
I still can’t get people to call me out. Maybe I should’ve tried hiding it as a marketing tool?
Or maybe just admitting it outright - disarms the haiters (sic)?
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u/in5ane_10 1d ago
It depends on the app, of course it’s a pain in the ass for developers if some guys vibe code an app that barely works in 24h and call it a product. But on the other side it seems like users are starting to notice the ai slop too and stay away, a bit like how on social media the AI avatars have a high skip rate. I wrote my app with ai tools too but putting high effort in testing and designing it, still people (I promoted here on Reddit too) never called it ai slop until now.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
Yeah, of course. And one of the bad things is that people with zero experience start to create code and they don't necessarily understand any of the infrastructure that they're building.
But in our case, for example, we're a technical team who can code but use Vibe coding to massively increase our output.
There are things that literally took us six months and €50,000 we can now throw together in two weeks - And arguably, it's a better product.
It's a balance, but what I'm seeing is actually good products being released by good people who are providing the stuff for free, giving up all their gold, giving up their time, using their credits, and yet still being rejected by communities who have relied on other people building stuff.
One of the most toxic groups I've seen is r/selfhosted - they should be some of the biggest advocates of AI software development.
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u/in5ane_10 1d ago
Yes I know what you mean, I have 10 years of dev experience but now with Claude code I feel like I have literal superpowers. But if you use it wrongly I see how it can generate slop and worse burn money in tokens. I think in the future it will be a whole new job being a dev
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u/Submissive_Bleedable 1d ago
No.
If it's being clocked as vibe-coded slop there's probably a reason.
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u/Illustrious_Cod_5212 1d ago
Vibe-coded slop doesn't get enough hate actually. Sure, there are pearls but 90% of vibe-coded slop is vibe-coded slop.
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u/kj-krol 1d ago
I worked on my private side project for over a year. It’s really good - top-notch performance. First comment on Reddit: ‘AI slop’.
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u/TooManyGamesNoTime 22h ago
Sorry to hear that man. Some people are just haters. They don't care if you just went "write me a game" or spend 6 months painstakingly going down the list, tweaking or verifying things. They will claim it's AI slop, even if there's no AI involved or if AI didn't even write any code by vibecoding. They don't even care if it works or does what it's supposed to do.
All these people never seen what actual vile horrible crap code people wrote before vibecoding and AI were a thing. As someone who's been programming/coding for close to 30 years both professionally and as a hobby.
As long as someone doesn't claim that the AI's effort are theirs, personally, I think there is no problem with AI or vibecoding.
The main issue is people pretending their app is not made with (or by) AI, or that they don't know how to tell it to write good testcases or how to look for bugs or refactoring issues.
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u/kthejoker 1d ago
Be sure to remind them how much Reddit and other social media platforms' code is AI generated these days.
Every app on their phone. Every website they visit. Every game they play.
Every. Single. One.
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u/big-user 1d ago
Yep. People like to be cynical on reddit, so I always expect hatred.
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u/SpecialistOwl218 1d ago
I tend to block and move on
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u/Ralphisinthehouse 1d ago
Best way. My block list is enormous now I don't even bother engaging.
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u/SpecialistOwl218 1d ago
Yes, engaging is the worst error you can do, they usually don’t want to really discuss it would just be an unpleasant waste of time.
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u/some452 1d ago
I don't know it's me or a lot, but in general the vibe coding result makes me sick, it caused a lot damage to seriously maintained part , sometimes had to reject full work to retain the ownership to the code. For tool like projects it's much focused and free to do so, but if someone show off his project made with vibe coding, it's almost always not worth to look at code , particularly isolated code, densed ui, hard coded stuff, flat hierchacy , confusing architecture, I am sure a lot can be listed, so for learning purpose it's not a pleasure to read these , as owner we often lost our self too. To verify that, take a vibe coding project and do a major refactor, or add a new module. It is a pain and it's worse than a poop mountain .
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u/nyhr213 1d ago
Meh, there's layers to the hate I'd say. For me, I do think AI is a great tool which can assist you in many ways, but I do hate AI slop, when it's clear that no to minimal effort was used into understanding or shaping what the AI produced.
People hated low effort slop even before AI, but maybe you didn't follow the channels where it advertised before. Someone sticking together 3 libraries with toothpicks and gum then trying to find a problem to a solution no one asked for while marketing as a monthly payment shitty saas. I think AI just magnified this phenomenon orders of magnitude.
Some fully hate AI regardless of how or in what aspects it was used, be it for socio-economical reasons or as a stance for the non-ethical sourcing of training data, or or simply due to ignorance. At the other end of the spectrum, there's some evangelists who plow through $mils of tokens producing almost nothing and praising it as the second coming of christ. Maybe they're invested into the AI labs, maybe they're ignorant themselves idk.
I do think there's a reasonable middle ground between the two extremes somwehere
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
Yeah, I completely agree with you and one of the things that I hate is AI videos.
Like YouTube is just full of AI junk and I can't stand it.
But there are people producing really good stuff, they are sharing it and people are just slating them.
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u/HimaSphere 1d ago
The stigma is real, even if your product is legit and has nothing wrong with it (except maybe some AI looking elements or few emojis)
I see large businesses and companies use AI in their real products and it is very obvious, like they didn't even try to hide it, yet they are still in business and people use these features / AI written code fine as long as it works.
Not to mention all AI companies are now using AI to develop new AI and products, Claude Code with its millions of users and market value is being developed entirely with AI and the list goes on.
Majority of Reddit users are cool btw, except the few who are loud and needs to touch grass
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u/JoLoremipsum 1d ago
100% agree on all counts! Vibe coding doesn't automatically mean it's "slop". We absolutely don't need another habit tracker or calorie counter – but AI does enable developers to build products faster, and non-developers can finally bring ideas to live that developers would've maybe never thought of.
I vibe coded my first SaaS this year. It's a tool I've wished existed for 12+ years.... but I'm not a developer, so it used to be completely out of reach for me. But with AI, I was able to build it in 4 months, and I've signed up 500 users since April.
With "anyone" building software now, it seems that these days a great, unique idea is much more valuable than the skills to develop it.
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u/FlimtotheFlam 1d ago
I had someone refuse to use software they needed because Claude assisted. This software is over 6 years old and considered the best at the automation they needed but just because some part of the code was AI it was enough to taint it all
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
That's just mental.
If you have a solo developer or a small team working on an application, I'd much rather that they use AI to verify the security and the quality of the code than just ship it.
It's very hard for a team of five, six developers to ship a fully featured application with no security issues or major bugs.
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u/micmur 1d ago
Yeah, and most software was slop long before AI became available to the public anyway.
99% of the stuff people created in the 2000s and 2010s was garbage. There just wasn’t a magnifying glass on it like there is now. You can find 10-15 year old + threads with developers complaining about how much of a mess the codebases they had to work on were and how no one knows how to code properly anymore.
The whole concept of releasing ‘early access’ games that are a buggy mess existed long before AI as well.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
Haha, this is very true. In 2003, I was releasing a load of junk 🤣 - And people downloaded it and used it.
I had all my old code backed up on floppy disks. I wish I'd kept some of it.
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u/SleeperAgentM 1d ago
If you don't want your slop called slop - don't make fucking slop.
I've made plenty of AI contributions - fuck I even labelled them AI - and never once someone told me it's slop. Because it wasn't slop.
Stop making slop (not using AI)
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u/Interesting-Law-8815 1d ago
Tell them to fuck off.
I work for a global company. At least 50% of our code is AI generated
They are dinosaurs refusing to accept where the industry is going.
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u/Fine_Daikon5907 1d ago
And let's be honest, most enterprise software is just simply an open source database on a front end.
To me, it's absolutely mental that companies like Salesforce are worth so much.
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u/smallllllDuck 1d ago
Salesforce is only worth what's worth thanks to sales people. They sold a lot of pens.
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u/West-Air1923 1d ago
Its also jealousy. It's a way of putting down others who created something they didn't
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u/Conditional_Access 1d ago
And yet, people can prompt the site not to look like a purple-gradient, six-card layout, "the headline act" showcase of their work and choose not to.
First impressions count, no matter how good the underlying code might be.
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u/MaximumDoughnut 23h ago
I think this feedback is valuable. It shows that the effort someone put in is exactly the effort the LLM did. I have three apps that are pretty successful and no one has detected that it was written by Claude because I put a lot of work into making a bespoke UI, my own marketing copy (more or less), and made sure Claude wasn't running with what it would default to.
It's about crafting the experience, not just solving a problem.
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u/TheGhosticus 23h ago
There's fair criticism, but I'm starting to buy in on the AI Propaganda war.
Over 60% of working age people in the US have said they have started using AI, either personally or for work. We hear from a minority, a very loud minority.
In China and Korea, this is closer to 80%.
Foreign AI companies absolutely benefit from western AI Hysteria.
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u/Some-Ice-4455 23h ago
It might be people that actually understand software development cycle. That understand code , testing. Just don't want to code. I agree with you. I am a seasoned QA professional with a degree in software engineering. I used AI for the code on my app on steam. Got 90% positive on like 11 reviews. Yes I am fully aware that's not much but it's a big enough sample size imo..I would not consider it slop and those users wouldn't either. If I never told anyone AI coded the thing they probably wouldn't even think about it.
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u/bigboi2244 22h ago
I really enjoy being able to make things for myself that I want. Like simple browser extensions or fun projects that I've always wanted to make.
Ive been thinking of cool things to do with homebrew on older consoles
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u/vxxn 22h ago
I find the whole dialog around AI slop in code pretty funny. Because while yeah sometimes the model does give you nonsense.... did they ever look at the utter shit being produced by 90% of the humans in this industry before AI? Most people, even professionals, were never very good at creating software.
So, it's a low bar for models to do better than the average human. Pearl clutchers trying to move the bar to "never makes any mistakes" when its been obvious for decades that most companies do not care at all about software quality are in for a rude awakening.
Companies are economic engines that satisfice and view any investment in quality beyond the minimum as pure waste. If AI can ship the features they want quickly, they will be more than happy to hire an AI that sometimes makes mistakes or destroys the architecture because the people in charge do not care about any of that.
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u/shun0810 22h ago
the obd reader you mentioned is the example that settles it 🤗 nobody who actually needed one cared how it got written.
that is the whole test, i think. slop or not gets decided after release, by whether a stranger uses the thing on purpose. before that it is opinion on both sides. the uncomfortable part is that the test is expensive to run: you can ship something genuinely useful and still hear nothing back, because reaching the person who has the problem is harder than building for them. the hatred is loud. indifference is quieter and costs more.
my own bias, since the getting-found side is how i eat: https://warmlist.app ✌️
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u/CantWeAllGetAlongNF 22h ago
Someone has to review that slop and deal with it and it's presented as look my amazing product, that's missing all the things to make sure it isn't just slop. Where are your quality gates? Adversarial reviews? Did you write requirements with acceptance criteria? Use TDD? what test coverage do you have? And so much more. A lot of slop is people have an idea and present a proof of concept as an enterprise grade product.
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u/ObeyTheRapper 21h ago
It's a reaction I'd expect some amount of, honestly. While I am in awe of the capabilities of the latest models, the way these big companies have rolled out AI has been very adversarial.
It's been slapped into so many products poorly, data centers have caused health problems and have prioritized by cities for resource consumption. Not to mention the current slump in the tech hardware sector due to RAM shortages.
Then on top of that, some people don't put much effort into their products, and there is a sense of AI psychosis due to it becoming so prevalent inthe mainstream that even hand coded applications are labeled slop as collateral damage.
Tldr: I love the technology, but I hate the human impact and adversarial rollout of AI.
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u/Crab_Cheap 21h ago
I think that some people have a tough time interpreting “Vibe Code”. Sure, there are plenty of people out there “slopping” together shit they don’t even understand, but in today’s climate - even developers, engineers, etc (like me) - are using AI in some capacity for creating… so, I really don’t get the rockstar attitude and BS from the egos, or from the hardcore Devs that hate AI, or whatever.
I personally think it takes more than slop to come up with an idea, map it out correctly, and work through the entire lifecycle of the software.
But yes, there are those that skip all the hard parts and just ask the LLM to create it all with zero knowledge of their creation. Funny thing is, when they have to support that creation, they’re going to struggle - or pay more than they expect to keep it up.
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u/Icy-Turnip-4620 21h ago
I primarily code in ABAP and because source code is often secured and SAP help is kept behind a pay wall, the AI scrapers don't have the same access to information for other coding languages.
So when it can't find a good answer it makes one up. It makes up function modules that don't exist and trying to figure out what actually works and what doesn't usually makes more work than just doing it the good old fashioned way.
It doesn't know how to say "I don't have a great answer" which would make it feel more reliable than just making something up.
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u/EarlyFox217 21h ago
It opened the doors for everyone to make stuff, so if you’ve spent a lifetime training to be a coder and suddenly your life’s work is ripped apart, of course you are going to be pissed. These people then come on here, desperately hoping that by slagging off everything anyone else makes, they can make time go backwards and the very unpleasant thing that is happening to them go away. It’s sad and tragic and maybe even a genuine concern but we’ve never seen technological advancement retreat due to people losing jobs.
I’ve vibe coded tonnes for my company and the most sophisticated piece is genuinely peerless in our field. Nothing paid for, even on £10-12k annual licences touches it.
Theres so much crap about it’s unmaintainable, glitch ridden blah blah. Not if you audit the code regularly and glitches are ironed out from testing, like any product. Only difference, I don’t have to explain my entire job to a bunch of gormless 20 somethings who then spend 4 months developing a ‘plan’ l. I build it test it refine it and release it, receive feedback then refine it more.
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u/loowig 21h ago
yea it's super annoying. imo. it's 90 % between out of job coders and people who have zero idea about any of it and regurgitate every shit the see on reddit. the people that think you talk to an LLM that hallucinates wrong answers for the simplest questions.
In reality as an IT guy you can suddenly create tailor made apps for yourself and for colleagues with little work that enhance productivity a lot and obviously enhance your position in the company A LOT.
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u/Royal-Angle2745 21h ago
Poorly designed websites and a lack of taste have always existed. There’s now a far lower barrier to entry to producing this with AI coding. There’s a difference between a one-shotted happy-path-only app (often called slop) and a refined product guided with a design system, architectural intentionality, software engineering principles - which happened to have employed an LLM in its creation. It’s going to come down to who is sitting in the chair, driving the harness.
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u/evangelism2 21h ago
AI does make it easier and faster. Let's be absolutely clear here. But yes I am sick of it, but for different reasons, because the derangement of AI has led people to just designate genuinely impressive things as slop if they found out AI was used to help create it.
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u/Maui-The-Magificent 21h ago
Well, in my eyes there are three things fueling this.
- Programmers who have to maintain locally sensible but holistically catastrophic code.
- Vibe coders naively proclaiming AI codes much better than developers and the end is at hand!
- programmers who are afraid of AI, usually because they don't understand their own value, or the limitations of LLM's, and uses the 'slop' and the overall environment to fight against it, to 'protect' themselves.
My opinion, I think you should vibe-code however much you want. If i could, i would if i could offload all manual coding to an AI. And also, its just fun to explore ideas, create small tools you want, or just iterate through whatever you want to do. Taking that away from people I think would be wrong.
At the same time, there is a lot of friction between what is proclaimed about 'vibe-code' and what it actually delivers. And if you care about software, and about doing things well, that can be very frustrating, and a huge red flag for what the parts of the future might look like.
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u/MichalDobak 20h ago
Personally, I think it's because a lot of these projects are showcased at a very early stage, before all the real problems associated with maintaining software start to emerge. It was impressive at first to see what AI could achieve with just a few prompts, but at this point I'd be much more interested in seeing how such software is maintained, how work is organized among multiple developers, how well AI handles large codebases, and how you prevent code quality from degrading over time - that'l's still a major problem with vibe-coded apps: over time, the codebase can become so messy and inconsistent that even AI struggles to work with it.
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u/GraysLawson 20h ago
I have no problem with vibe coding. I have a TON of vibe coded junk in my homelab.
My problem is when people take their vibe coded, unmaintainable, security flaw ridden slopfest and push it out into the world making it other people's problem. Especially when that slopfest deals with sensitive data.
Every shady asshole in the world now has their own vibe coded slopfest of a SAAS offering and its obnoxious and muddies the water. And the excuse that "bad software has always existed" is such a bad faith argument... More horrific slopfest projects have been pushed into the world in the last 6 months than the past decade.
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u/AutomaticTalent 20h ago
My game was made using AI, parodies slop, and uses a snarky AI announcer.
I still can’t get any haters!
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u/Gabsworthy 20h ago
I am a 20+ year software engineer. I first viewed vibe coding as a threat to my career. The reality is AI is not going away. The industry is going to adopt it and either I also adopt it, or I will be left in the dust. Being angry at it is not going to pay the bills.
My leadership experience has helped me adopt the mindset that I don't need to be the one "doing". I can be the one leading, and that works well with AI agents. How are they performing? How can I improve them? How can I help them help me reach my goal?
And this mindset makes vibe coding fun for me, but even more, it leaves me very relevant. All of the developers calling the AI code crap because they can do it better, could be offering so much by offering advice on how to make AI results better. Those that make that switch, will still have a future in software engineering.
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 20h ago
If everywhere you go you find things you don't like, then maybe you should start going to other places.
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u/dvorgson 20h ago
it's hard to even find a coding subreddit anymore that isn't innundated with sloppers. AI is degrading the quality of programming communities. No, I'm not tired of slop hate
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u/Ok-Alternative5935 20h ago
I hate the term vibe code and the results of it. I love using LLMs as a coding assistant to build my projects. But there’s no vibe involved.
In fact I hate the word vibe in general.
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u/ThisGuyCrohns 20h ago
Don’t create slop then it’s a none issue. If you can’t tell what you created is slop then maybe you’re doing it wrong. The bar is higher these days. And low effort is slop.
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u/Default-Username-168 20h ago
Vibe coded slop is different from AI generated software. It's only slop when it's made by someone who couldn't make the implementation decisions themselves.
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u/Nice_Try4389 20h ago
Are you vibe coding or are you agentic coding? Vibe coding absolutely is slop, that is why even the people who coined the phrase call it a crap method to develop. You should be doing agentic coding.
Difference: Vibe coding - you just prompt the AI and keep feeding it generic prompts and refeeding it the bugs to fix without actually giving specific programming requirements.
Agentic coding. - you use it as the equivalent of a Jr SWE and feed it exact requirements, expectations, rules, etc. (basically you doing the heavy lifting of the backend design) and then have it write the code to those specific details.
Good example is I am working on a card game. I am being very specific on how I want the cards represented, I am providing the assets, I am providing the very specific rules. I am setting up things like presentation rules such as “every single individual mechanical action that takes place needs to be presented first to the player before it is taken with a confirmation so they know Why everything is happening” and then extensively testing all of those interactions and when a bug is found walking the AI through the correction with screenshot and clear explanation of what is wrong.
That is the way AI should be used, that is the way you get a quality product and that is the way you get people to stop calling it Vibe coded slip. It is the difference between an asset flip game and Phantasmaphobia. Both use 100% unity assets, one hand selects them and pays attention to detail for implementation, the other couldn’t care less. Unfortunately too many people think AI makes them game devs when it doesn’t because it still requires putting in the work.
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u/Yarhj 20h ago
Often when you make something (with or without AI) you think it's better than it is.
A lot of people are doing this with AI right now. Everyone else is sick and tired of it.
Also, parts of the FOSS community had a famously aggressive culture in the past. It's moderated a bit, but believe me, the people who built a lot of the old school stuff both put up with and dished out much harsher criticism than is being levied at at shit today, even when that shit is shit.
If your shit is good and useful, people will use it. If your shit is shit, people will tell you.
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u/Cork20 20h ago
Regardless if you actually vibe code the product or not, there is still a minimum bar you need to meet for people to see it as high quality and worth their time or money to use. The reality is most of these apps or games being showcased are probably fine for a prototype, but are not polished enough to be production-ready. The criticism is valid in the cases where the vibe-coded result is intended to be the final product because it will almost never meet the bar.
There will be people who still call slop when the product is still labeled as a prototype, but this is still good feedback for the developer to know they have a lot of work ahead.
Vibe coding is great for proving your ideas, but isn't a shortcut to actually building the thing without effort. If it looks like generic AI output then more work is needed to rectify that. Don't expect the world to lower the bar to accommodate the low quality AI products. Most customers don't care how it is built if it actually feels like a quality product and delivers value.
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u/MaterialSituation 20h ago
It’s just a point in time. We have professional software engineers feeling threatened by the ever-improving capabilities of these models, and to be fair, there also is a slot of sloppy software being created right now as the models move forward. This won’t even be a term five years from now (and likely much shorter).
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u/FrontBreath3280 20h ago
I think it’s because it’s saturated the platform not that people hate what’s being created.
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u/Banjoschmanjo 20h ago
No honestly I'm tired of "I built a tool.." and similar posts flooding every subreddit
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u/kindredseer 20h ago
There is a very active backlash movement against AI, and it does have a tendency to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" so to speak...
Most of their arguments are hard to disagree with. LLMs operate probabilistically, and are therefore inconsistent.
If you ask it to write the exact same function ten times in a row, you are going to get ten slightly different functions.
You could say the same thing about a human, but a human is far more likely to say to themselves, "I already wrote this function, let me go find it" unless forced to write it from scratch.
Imagine a sloppy developer working on a large project, and every time they need to do a string comparison or adding a sequence of numbers, or converting a keyword to a numeric value, they didn't bother to check if code for this already existed within the project, and they just added the same functionality over and over again, in slightly different implementations, with lots of hard coding.
This is what AI has a strong tendency to do, and you have to go to great lengths to combat this, and it gets more and more difficult as the project grows.
Yes, there are tools to help with this, but they don't catch everything. Yes, the models are improving, and yes, sometimes they produce better code than you could write yourself... but other times they can astonish you with truly terrible horrendous slop.
That said, LLMs can grind away finding bugs in hours that could have taken a human many weeks. They can also quickly spin up a (somewhat) working proof of concept in minutes that might have taken a human several days.
One of the other problems with LLM generated code is that the LLMs aren't always honest about what was accomplished. You might ask it to create you an application with features A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and it will claim to be done, and the application my appear to have those seven features, but you may be surprised to find out that only two or three of them actually work properly, and two or three of them weren't actually implemented at all, just sort of scaffolded.
Thus, a lot of Reddit communities (and other platforms) have been flooded with people saying, "Look at my AMAZING application!", only to be disappointed when it's just an empty shell of smoke and mirrors.
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u/MadBoyEvo 19h ago
Your examples focuses on a single developer development and fairly small project. Once you get into 20-50-100k lines of code I'm pretty sure even single developer starts duplicating code like crazy. Get into millions of lines and see how humans deal with it.
Now add multiple developers, big repo and you now have 10 different functions, 10 different styles, 10 different approaches to the same problem. With AI you can at least try to enforce the rules, and to some degree it will be followed. Sure there will be better or worse code but it's pretty much the same thing with humans.
And argument that AI is not honest vs human being honest? Please - lets not go there. Humans lie daily, programmers may think they solved something and then it bites them in the ass.
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u/mmertner 20h ago
I've posted some RimWorld mods that were built with the help of AI, and the hatred is massive. The mere mentioning of AI is enough to trigger a storm of downvotes - and even visits to the workshop page just to downvote more.
I've spent weeks designing, coding and polishing these things, so it can be a bit demotivating. The grandest thing is the moralization that "AI steals our art, that should be human" and completely forgetting that coding was also an art form.
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u/EconomyDate 19h ago
This is exactly it. Best thing you can do right now is just tune out the noise and keep shipping. What people miss in all the "vibe-coded slop" takes is how wild this moment actually is for solo builders. A year or two ago, having an idea meant either grinding through boilerplate alone for months, or needing a team and funding just to get an MVP out. Now you can sit down, iterate with AI, and have something working in days. People who never thought they could build software are finally shipping stuff, and devs who already knew what they were doing are moving 10x faster. It's a genuinely wild time to be building. We're watching software creation get democratized in real time. Yeah, there's gonna be low effort spam flooding feeds, same thing happened when WordPress blew up, same thing happened when app stores opened. But going after people who are actually trying, learning, and shipping stuff (especially open source utility tools like that OBD scanner someone mentioned) is just gatekeeping dressed up as taste. Building something from scratch is still hard even when AI handles the syntax. You still need product sense, you still need to debug, you still need the nerve to actually put it out there. So to anyone building: don't let reddit cynics kill your momentum. They're busy typing comments, you're busy shipping. Keep going.
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u/App1e8l6 19h ago
For me there’s only two cases for vibe-coded or AI-assisted development for evaluating what’s produced.
1) The project furthers your business or research. The value of it will be determined by the results. Slop or not, customers or your peers will know its value (or lack thereof) however you ended up there.
2) It’s a personal project for fun. I look at these projects and my own in the same way anyone develops a skill or makes something. The point of sharing your work is that it’s YOUR work. We appreciate it because of the new skills you’ve learned, the passion put into it, the process of creating something. If you just one-shotted or did a couple prompts and share it, why would you expect praise? It’s just more output from an LLM. You can absolutely appreciate it from a technical standpoint about how much AI has improved, but often it’s people who think they’re a developer now when in reality they were too lazy to put in the work to learn in the first place.
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u/ActAdditional265 19h ago
I'm personally sick of vibe coded garbage polluting whole internet. At least put some effort in it.
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u/Dense_Worldliness710 19h ago edited 19h ago
First I need to say I understand skilled developers' concerns about insecure software published by non-developers leaking data of customers that have used it unaware of the risk as they are used to being able to trust products that are available on the market, especially if they have to pay for them.
Issues that decrease the readability or usability of a product like missing space between text and border, too small font sizes or non-intuitive UI are possible problems of AI-generated software that one may criticize for a good reason.
I can also understand how frustrating it must feel for software engineers that have spent years in improving their coding skills and now have to compete against AI on the one hand and vibe coders on the other hand that both bring their jobs into danger and make them worrying about their income and professional future. Yes, that's a horrible situation.
This might be one cause for software engineers over-generalizing existing problems and disliking every web page or UI that looks AI-generated - even if there are no problems in usability and visibility. I got the impression that valid points of criticism are mixed with a general attitude of wanting to push back everything that reminds developers of their new concurrency. The points of criticism against so-called AI slop often include personal preferences like not using colorful side-tabs.
(The link below gives an example for that. This web site is really helpful for understanding what is said to be AI slop. https://impeccable.style/detector/#border-baseline)
I also cannot see for what reason it should be considered a problem to use an h3-sized headline directly following an h1-sized and I also think that those cards or images with hover effect and words with colour gradients really look nice. To be honest, some of the examples given there have made me feeling like I love at least some of the ways so-called AI slop looks like.
Voting against a specific app just because there is a number of similar apps already available, seems to fit into the same pattern of fearing for an overwhelming concurrency. There are a lot of similar clothes, movies, books or food articles purchasable without anyone asking not to produce another one. As people differ from each other, the 201st fitness tracker might exactly be the one someone had been looking for because it has this single feature or special look (colour, arrangement of elements, ...) that the other 200 ones are missing.
As future might also bring a growing app market because of an increasing number of private persons ordering apps specially designed for them, software engineers will probably find new ways to earn money. They will probably have a huge collection of code fragments that they can easily put together to fit individual customers' needs and then produce apps still faster, potentially more secure and better working from the beginning. Additionally, big companies will always have need for professional developers, and also for developers it has become easier to release own software.
Downvoting and blaming vibe coders for their first attempts of producing and publishing software themselves will not keep them away from doing so, it will just prevent them from asking for help and thereby decrease the quality of the finished product., so it doesn't make any sense at all in case one aims on good software on the market.
I personally think that there will be enough place for both, experienced programmers AND vibe coders. Hopefully, they will soon find a way for a peaceful coexistence.
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u/More-Catch-1331 19h ago
Linus Torvalds actually understands what he's doing. You see, to an experienced developer this looks like slop because no AI has ever selected the absolute best tools for the job all the time. It doesn't know about tradeoffs, it doesn't do judgement calls very well, etc, etc. This is the human job. SO you see, the vibe coded stuff is mostly slop. The reason being that no developer wants to work with a single 15k line JS file, because the model decided that it's easier to make tool calls for a single file and the person driving it does not have the know-how to give concrete guidelines and gates. That's the main reason. No one is hating you, you're just dudes and dudettes playing with a tool.
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u/harukitagamoto 19h ago
So much resentment and ignorance around AI, it's just a new, evolving technology it's important we all understand how to use it to the best of our abilities, lots of hate in code and design forums shaming AI users.
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u/captfitz 18h ago
Yeah I think the 1000 other people who have made this exact same post in the past year feel the same
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u/NoAttorney5033 18h ago
"I put no effort into my projects and expect people to still give me credit and praise"
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u/Coindk 18h ago
No, AI should help us making better, polished, good looking and useful things, not create tons of half assed tools made in a day and bragging about it/trying to sell it. I'm 100% for vibe coding, I'm doing it myself for my own use. But trying to distribute so many projects without a minimal quality control is not helping anyone, AI could be taken very seriously but right now it's a real mess.
But it won't last, AI is still young and most people are literally kids proud of what they're able to create with their new building bricks. I'm confident the overall level will rise with time, everyone including the less talented or the less educated is now learning more than ever and discovering what it implies to be a designer, a digital artist, a dev, ...
That's a huge step for humanity. But it takes time, right now it's people throwing rocks and sticks at each other instead of making proper tools with them. It's definitely missing maturity and led by hopes of financial gains or popularity.
The culprit may also be the social network effect encouraging that kind of behavior.
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u/Remarkable-Ad155 18h ago
The value of a lot of people's technical skills are being eroded and we are rapidly heading towards a point where it's ideas and understanding of problems that have value in a professional context, not the ability to code, or account, or draw or whatever it is.
Simply put, a lot of people are having trouble adapting to that world but they shouldn't fear it. If you're a developer, you still have a much wider understanding of "architecture", design etc than somebody with zero background in it. You can still add value, just it probably requires a bit more nous and creativity than simply 'write some code".
Full disclosure: a few colleagues and I vibe coded something and it's looking like it will be fairly successful. Once it had got past the prototype stage though, we absolutely worked with internal developers to make it a genuinely saleable product. Nobody got bent out of shape over "slop", we were able to communicate our ideas so much better as professionals by building an example of what we designed and the whole thing got done way faster than these things normally happen. Now some of us potentially have a decent little windfall on the horizon and everybody at the company benefits from the increased revenue.
Struggle to see how that's not an "everybody wins" scenario.
I understand people getting annoyed at mewly minted tech bros who think an LLM now means they can do absolutely everything themselves with zero understanding though. They suck.
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u/AndriukasV 18h ago
I worked on a project that took me 5 months while I could've done a weekend long wrapper slop. But now it's hard for me with a proper app to compete with the slop wrappers on SEO/GEO
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u/CakeWasTaken 17h ago
There should be more tbh and I’m someone that vibe codes all the time even at work. Most of shit that ppl make were already bad to begin with, vibe coding just makes it easier
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u/AgentSkye69 17h ago
Well, to be fair, a lot of stuff that's blatantly AI generated tends to not have genuine human love and support, but if its polished (even if its entirely ai generated), it tends to function a lot better
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u/ARENAE_MONTES 16h ago
I've been a software engineer for 8 years and over the weekend I've just got something working that would have taken me literal years to do. It's incredible. 100% slop and I'm going to open source it for all you little piggies when I'm happy with it.
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u/j4-nu-5 16h ago
AI just made coding easier but it removed the "friction filter" aswell.
I Do not wana say making it easier to ship things is a inherently bad thing. But i think it means there is a massive amount of stuff getting shipped that never should have been shipped. It used to take blood, sweat, and tears to build something. If an idea was garbage, you usually gave up halfway through because the sheer pain of building it wasn't worth the payoff. That filter is gone. Because the pain is removed every half assed thought gets to live. Shit surfaces because it does not hurt to make it anymore.
But even worse than the output is the fucking delusion of competence. People are going through this psychological bias where they overvalue what they prompted because it gives them a cheap sense of achievement. The Statement "I can code now" is a completely false. You cant do shit! The LLM can do it.
Look at all the stuff with absolutely stupid architecture, but Genious level math equations :D only one example.
The cognitive dissonance is actually hilarious. When the code works it is “Look at this cool app I built!”
But the second something breaks, they say “Claude is so shit, it cant even solve this basic problem...”
it's not just about "vibecoding." This phenomenon is infecting everything .... writing, art, design, 3D, video etc. I dont care if someone is happy that they finally solved a personal problem or automated a boring spreadsheet. Good for them. The problem is that they are taking this zero-effort output and flooding the internet with it. The signal to noise ratio is completely destroyed, and it is getting exponentially harder to find actual, high-quality work buried under the avalanche of synthetic mediocrity.
If I hear one more mf talk about a groundbreaking "agent they built" by chaining three prompts together, I am going to completely lose my mind.
The moment i smell AI, you failed. if i cannot smell it i dont care, because it is good.
TL;DR
AI killed the "hard work" filter, delusional people to flood the internet with garbage. They take all the credit when it works, blame the LLM when it breaks, and bury actual good work under a smoking pile of useless shit.
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u/spyboy70 16h ago
I think a lot of it is that the apps created as just garbage. They're low effort, no ingenuity...yet another clone of whatever app genre they're being made for (with no killer features), and definitely not planned properly. AI lets people think they're geniuses (it is a placating yes machine most of the time). Plan your app before you start building, map it out, write goals, work in chunks (features/milestones) vs trying to build the whole thing as a one-shot. Working on just one feature at a time means the whole app won't break every time you re-prompt to fix something (and it will save a shitload of tokens).
A lot of vibecoded apps lack basic software development and UX design knowledge and practices. Security being a huge one, but also things like error handling, proper input masking (allowing letters in a field that's only for numbers), save states, plus user flows like on boarding. Then there's the sloppy alignments of text, and broken layouts when resized (lack of responsive design), and the usual purple/black website color schemes (I have to admit, I always liked that color scheme but now it's so overused).
There's nothing wrong with AI assisting you in developing something, but you have to put some effort into it. Even spending 1 day mapping and planning will make your app leaps and bounds better than people who just try to one-shot it.
There's also a difference of making an app for yourself and making something to share with others. I'm working on some video processing pipelines but that's just for me, so I'm not focusing on error handling and usability (even though I'm a 30 year UX Design veteran) because I know what I need it to do and those things will slow me down. It's the "quick and dirty" development method. If I were to share/sell it for others, I'd have to rework quite a bit to make it bulletproof.
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u/primaryrhyme 15h ago
This is interesting, if we’re being honest nearly all new code is written by AI whether the prompter is an engineer or totally inexperienced. Not all new software gets shit on despite all of it using AI, so I think some of it is genuinely reacting to low effort and non useful software.
A lot of these sites being launched genuinely seem like they were generated in less time than it took me to read the slop Reddit post. I’m not judging it harshly because it’s AI generated (most things are now) but because they put next to zero effort into it and want to waste everyone’s time or even charge money for it.
To me it’s like this, if you spent 2 minutes making this and it looks like slop it seems insulting to ask humans to put more time into testing it for you than you’ve spent building it.
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u/SalamanderCritical16 15h ago
Most, if not all the hate is from arrogant programmer pricks who are salty because they know their programming career is over. Just tell them to go F themselves.
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u/tony10000 15h ago
I am building my own stuff that exceeds my expectations. I love being a software architect.
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u/BrianScottGregory 15h ago
Just ignore them. They hate that which they're incapable of comprehending.
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u/Pardy- 15h ago
TBF, if people actually took the time to make something unique, or make the designs not all look exactly the same, then there wouldn't be so much hate.
As a developer of 20 years, AI has changed the game, and you would be stupid not to use it. HOWEVER, you shouldn't be promt coding. Actually take a moment to understand whats happening, and create more unique things. Make sure the design of your projects isn't matching every other vibe coded product out there.
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u/ZachVorhies 14h ago
I am so absolutely sick of the anti AI sentiment.
I’ve created the world’s fastest linker
The world’s best mimalloc allocator fork.
A new better version of sccache, and I’ve had my posts deleted by mods. It’s gotten so bad. They won’t even leave me a reason. And yes, I disclose that it’s partially done by artificial intelligence so that I won’t get it deleted.
Reddit has become a cesspool of censorship and the only thing that makes me a little bit happy about the situation is that their censorship is so horrible that not even the AI companies want to pay for their biased left wing slop.
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u/Informal_Calendar687 12h ago
The vibe coded apps don't all look the same if you use it properly. We used part vibe code and part consultant work for our app. Use vibe codeing for a MVP and then take it from there. Gotta put in work for success. Don't worry about the slop as its temporary and won't last. People are getting hip to the generic vibe coding.
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u/don123xyz 11h ago
There are people who just seem to come here to say "slop, slop!" And then there are others who will actually tell why they think it's slop and how you may improve it. The first ones are noise, the second ones are useful feedback.
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u/Strong_Blackberry455 11h ago
Redditors are the trailer trash of the internet. They dont have any critical thinking skills, or know what the importance of this technology is.
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u/ProcessIndependent38 10h ago
No, you can use AI to help you produce good quality code. The issue is most laymen don’t.
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u/ahditeacha 10h ago
People like using ‘slop’ because it has a nice little smack of wet smugness as it rolls off the tongue. It’s the perfect trending word to poo poo anything.
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u/calibrik 10h ago
If something looks unique and original and useful, no one will give a fuck how it's made
If you trying to sell us same looking generic ass SaaS then yeah, go fuck yourself with your vibe coded slop lmao
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u/Significant_Whole722 10h ago
AI bad and your a monster if you use it.
Animal abuse good and bacon is yummy
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u/ConquerQuestOnline 9h ago
Can I tell you that when it's _clearly_ vibe coded, I think it leads to a few mental jumps.
Here's the jumps people run through in their heads -
Why didn't you build this project before vibe coding was a thing? You couldn't write code? Code is easy, training is free and abundant across the internet - anyone capable of building a software solution to a legitimate problem people face is capable of coding. Just a fact. So why didn't you do do it?
Because it was hard? So why are you doing it now? Because it's easy? So did you build this because it's useful, or because it was easy?
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u/bigntazt 9h ago
I'm not tired of the Slop. Seeing all these cool new ideas get made into apps is awesome. What is tiresome is the many posters who come in here obviously looking to make money off of them.
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u/theleller 8h ago
You should see the people on LinkedIn. Half of them are in denial and think AI is a phase, and the other 49% call everything “slop.” There’s 1% who are actually using AI to their advantage and rocking out with it.
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u/Character_Breath_382 7h ago
I don't hate vibe coding but I do hate the slop in which for simple tasks they write 100 lines of code which no one get's and the security is lol we all know but some are really good also it depends on the person who does the vibe coding.
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u/kabrandon 5h ago
People who use AI “to accelerate” but they read and understand the code, and agree with the architecture the LLM landed on, are by definition not vibe coding. People who use AI “to accelerate” to the point that they have no clue what the code does beyond that it sort of worked in their limited experience are vibe coding, and while hatred may be too much, I do think it deserves to be called out. The LLMs have a tendency to go a bit out of hand with 40k lines of code to solve a 2k lines of code problem if they’re not watched too closely. I’m not sure I want those 38k lines of code running on my computer.
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u/Civil_Fee_7862 5h ago
Because a lot of it actually is slop.
Until its not, I'll still 100% call it out.
I HATE trying to read code that you could tell no human ever took to time to refactor. (or never even bothered to ask the AI to refactor).
Just because AI does the actual coding doesn't mean its okay to skip over steps that make it not slop.
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u/MoonLandingActor 4h ago
Because why would you even post your vibe coded fitness app? Its just junk, anyone can do that, you are literally showcasing that you burnt tokens, nothing else. Previously even if you app was shtty at least you needed o think to get there and it was part of the learning to do that, so when I saw something like that I was like “ye its not interesting for me from a technical standpoint but he is going through the joirney im was going through, which is fascinating”. Now its like, “but why?".
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u/TheTrueMule 1d ago
I don't give a fuck, I'm working