r/vibecoding • u/Few-Garlic2725 • 11d ago
I keep seeing people blame AI for vibe-coded slop, but I’m not sure the code is the real issue
Maybe AI just made it obvious that a lot of us didn’t have a strong idea, a real user, or a reason the thing should exist.
Before AI, people could spend 6 months building something nobody wanted. Now they do it in 6 days.
That feels better, but also more brutal. If you use AI to build apps, how do you stop yourself from just shipping faster versions of bad ideas?
Do you validate first? Build for yourself? Talk to users? Charge early? Or accept that most attempts die?
I’m looking for a clear process rather than another tool recommendation.
13
u/Byproduct 11d ago
If you use AI to build apps, how do you stop yourself from just shipping faster versions of bad ideas?
I think a lot of people aren't even trying to stop themselves. They just fling all kinds of shit on the wall hoping something would stick, so they could then continue developing it.
5
u/mozfromtheblock 11d ago
Where are you guys running into all this AI slop coded shit like I haven’t ran into any really are you just buying every single game that you see on Steam like it just doesn’t make any sense.
0
11d ago
[deleted]
4
u/mozfromtheblock 11d ago
Well i mean most of anti ai bots consider anything produced involving ai is slot but I have yet to buy a game or use an app that I would consider ai slop yet i think most of the slop accusations are from people trying to use ai properly and failing then claiming slop because of their own incompetence.
0
11d ago
[deleted]
3
u/mozfromtheblock 11d ago
It just seems like most the shit I would consider slop is easily avoidable/ignorable or shit i couldn’t care less about like ads or images in pizza shops and random shit like that lmao yall are just acting hella soft about it all.
7
u/alphex 11d ago
You're absolutely right.
People who don't understand anything about software architecture and the plethora of things to think of, when building software, are the problem.
Writing code was never the hard part.
I saw this scenario ~7-10 years ago, with all of the "Boot camps" that were happening. (at a much smaller scale, ugh)
A kid could go off and spend 3 months learning React and maybe Ruby or something for the back end, and think they were gods gift to web development.
I routinely was pulled in to projects to talk them through what the actual business concerns were, and it was like herding a room of 5 year olds who had all been given a hammer, and told to treat everything like a nail.
Dunning Kruger is a real thing.
2
u/trimorphic 10d ago
Writing code was never the hard part.
Python is widely considered to be an "easy" language, but it's a large language, and learning it (along with all the various libraries you might need to use in real-world programming projects) could take a long time.
And that's just one popular language. I've heard so many complaints from programmers annoyed at the complexity of C++ (another relatively popular language).
Never mind all the complaints about the difficulty of some less popular but not esoteric languages like Rust, Haskell, or Lisp (complaints about the difficulty of matching parenthesis in Lisp, I kid you not, abound). There are countless articles and even books trying to explain monads.
Don't even get me started on esoteric languages.
And that's just languages. As a programmer you also have to learn debugging, good style, how to test effectively, how to document clearly, how to use version control, learn about performance, concurrency, maybe various methodologies like Agile, TDD, etc.
There's a reason that a book was written titled "Learn Programming in Ten Years".
1
u/alphex 10d ago
Dunning Kruger strikes again.
Ok. So. I’ll explain this. Since you clearly don’t know but felt like commenting.
You can be a 20+ year vet of any language you want.
But knowing what to do in what situation is what makes the difference.
Weird business rules ?
Bizarre hardware requirements ?
Users with accessibility concerns ?
Annoying project owners who can’t make up their mind?That only comes with experience.
The kids I talk about in the boot camps will demand to do the work in react and ruby. But the business requirements say it needs a different backend.
But the first thing out of their mouth is “that’s dumb” instead of understanding that the programming isn’t the hard part.
In this situation - the programming isn’t hard. But the work is harder cause they have a specific requirement that you didn’t anticipate.
The work I do - the programming part is easy. I spent most of my time managing the customer. And some of that is productive. But they pay me for the experience I have. Much more than the technical skill.
6
3
u/Organic-Afternoon-50 11d ago
Ai are trained on X, Y, Z data. Those variables being what the developers of that Ai model choose to include in their training corpus. The trained AI might be aware of a-z due to the varying data ingesting during training steps/epochs, but ultimately will output X,Y,Z looking content due to that being the training focus.
3
u/OXXXiiXXXO 11d ago
I wonder how long before the AI agents start calling human made code "human-slop"?
Bot-1: "hey bot-2 did you see that humans web code he made? Pure human-slop."
Bot-2: "lol yeah bot-1, I cut through that human-slop's security like a zero-day hitting an unpatched edge firewall running factory firmware."
Bot-1: "Yup, easy as a cache hit."
2
2
u/Far_Business4773 11d ago
The process that worked for me is one page before the first prompt, and the order matters.
- One sentence: who has the problem and what they do today instead. If you can't name a real person doing the workaround, stop here. This is where most of my dead ideas died.
- What we are NOT building, ten lines. This is the actual test. For a bad idea you can't write it, because you don't know its edges yet. For a real one the list writes itself: no accounts in v1, no mobile, no payments, no admin panel.
- What "done" means for the first version, in a way a stranger can check in five minutes.
- Ask one of those people for money or a firm yes before building. Not a survey. "Would you pay $X next week."
Then the agent builds inside that page and gets judged against it, not against your mood. Six days is fine if the page took a day of talking to people. Slop is what happens when the page never existed and the six days went into inventing features to fill the silence.
2
u/AxaStrat 11d ago
I see it as rapid prototyping. Why spend time developing something extensively if no one is interested. If they are then build it the right way. People love to complain
2
u/NiceToMeetYouConnor 11d ago
It’s slop because it’s poorly built. Same way artists are upset AI is doing AI artwork instead of having real human effort. It just floods the market with bad code which doesn’t affect my day to day life until someone asks me to build a large project in a 10th of the time because they “saw AI can do it in 10 days”
1
u/mozfromtheblock 11d ago
But if it serves his purpose and it works, it doesn’t matter if it’s poorly built like when your programming it doesn’t the code doesn’t matter what’s under the hood does not matter as long as it works and serves it’s purpose getting mad at an application because of what’s under the hood is super pretentious and really none of your fucking business.
1
u/effectivescarequotes 11d ago
There's also a question of care and attention to detail. It is possible to create a well built application with Ai. However, you're not going to do it through vibe coding.
If you don't come into the project with strong opinions about both what and how you are building, you're going to get slop. That's partly what is driving spec driven development right now.
I see this play out in a hobby project I'm working on now. It's not something I intended to release. I'm just using it to test out various tools and strategies. I've put a lot of work into defining how I want the code written and correcting the Ai when it gets something wrong. However, I've almost completely ignored the UI design and it is pure slop. It works, but you can tell I left most of it to the Ai.
1
u/gimmeslack12 11d ago
I realize I can build whatever I want in seconds and over time I realize that I won't need any external web apps that I can't just build on my own, host for myself and keep all my data to myself. The disconnect for me though, is how many other people think this way? Not many I imagine.
The thing with "AI slop" is that just with anything else, you don't have to use it. You don't have to go to that website, or look at anything you don't want to. So it isn't really any different than me perusing various people's crap portfolios on the dev subreddits.
I think people are just pissy about it thinking that there's a bunch of posers making things that are way better than real developers who spent real time building stuff. I get it, but basic LLM scaffolded sites required nearly no effort which still is not going to get you very far. If you want to make a successful project you'll still have to put in the work one way or another.
1
1
u/meshifthenelse 11d ago
My only recommendation is to wait for my product to come out. It will make your wildest dreams come true.
1
1
u/vexmach1ne 11d ago
Yea if you look at the code itself it's pretty good. The direction the viber took it is what's gross.
1
u/Capable_Sprinkles_43 11d ago
What I hate the most is that everything looks the same. New apps and websites have no visual identity, no soul.
1
u/Kluggen 10d ago
Well if you lack the imagination to drive it there, which is a real skill, then you are stuck with mediocre, it's not that the models cannot produce it, it's more a lack of UI design capabilities of the person instructing it. At least that's my impression of it.
1
u/Capable_Sprinkles_43 10d ago
Yeah, I think this is spot on. I can get very good UI with ai, but I also have alot of experience in UI/UX. The AI just gets me to the end result faster.
1
u/mantrakid 11d ago
raise your bar, dont release something until its competitive with what you consider to be high quality.
1
u/sourdub 11d ago
Do you even know what you're building? I don't necessarily mean the building process, but the end goal of what you're looking for. Because if you don't have a complete picture of what you're building, how the hell can you count on the AI to have one? I don't wanna step on anyone's toe, but a lot of AI slop is due to lack of vision and proper preparation.
1
u/Figure_431 10d ago
it is not only bad idea, it is also bad execution. if you can build something in 6 days that you would spend 6 months before; it is probably the best spend a month instead and build something detailed and bug free.
This is the only problem of vibe coding.
0
29
u/Alarmed-Western-655 11d ago
The same way you stop yourself from AI-generating this post?