Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release (www.osnews.com)
from rimu@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 02:16
https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/2194586/most-slopcode-projects-are-abandoned-and-deleted-within-months-of-release

This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.

#selfhosted #slop

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rimu@piefed.social on 08 Jul 02:18 next collapse

I made the mistake of installing Starling recently, not realizing how it was made. I contributed a PR to it, wrote a few issues describing some showstopping bugs, and since then there’s been absolutely no activity from the creator.

That’s fine, they are under no obligation to work for free. But I wouldn’t have installed it if I knew it was abandonware.

HeyLow@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 08 Jul 02:44 next collapse

Seems like your PR was merged by the creator? If you are mad that the creator isn’t doing anything with THEIR OWN project, fork it and fix it yourself… No need to get pissy and make a full complaint post in here about it.

otter@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 03:18 next collapse

It doesn’t sound like OP is mad at the creator, but annoyed at the increased number of projects that are abandoned

It’s hard to judge the longevity of a project, and LLMs can make a project look more stable and professional than it is. It’s fair to feel annoyed if you mess up that call and move your workflow to something that gets abandoned.

artyom@piefed.social on 08 Jul 03:43 next collapse

No one got “mad” or “pissy” or filed a complaint. I feel they they were very explicit that it was not a complaint.

Phantaloons@piefed.zip on 08 Jul 06:15 collapse

Disagreed. You should blast and air everyone’s embarassing trash as loud as possible so no one misses it.

crater2150@feddit.org on 08 Jul 06:56 collapse

Are there any obvious signs of it being vibe coded that I’m missing?

In my experience, projects not being very active, especially small ones by a single person, isn’t anything new that has much to do with LLMs, it was always that way for hobby projects. And it was inactive for only about a month now, with the author replying within one day before that. I have a few hobby projects myself and don’t reserve time every month to work on them or check on their repos.

rimu@piefed.social on 08 Jul 08:40 next collapse

No obvious signs, nope. It wasn’t until I started using it in earnest that I got suspicious and then when trying to work on the code it became very clear.

Dojan@pawb.social on 08 Jul 13:07 collapse

This in my experience is the hallmark of a vibe coded project. Individual pieces of code can be perfectly fine, but when you zoom out into an overall structure things get weird. Design patterns changing, same/similar problems solved in different, sometimes conflicting ways.

Been working on a project like that at work. Initially I enjoyed the change of pace, but as I realised that there’s no coherence at all in the project structure my joy turned into frustration.

To me, the most frustrating thing is that you can’t ask someone why something is done in a particular way, because no decision was ever made because no one was there to make a decision. Things just happened.

irate944@piefed.social on 08 Jul 12:26 collapse

If you have access to their git, watch out for the commit history. Check how much code each commit is introducing and/or editing and how fast they are, and how many times these big commits happen.

If you see a project with big commits in very short interval of times, it’s a sign that it was vibe coded

Sanctus@anarchist.nexus on 08 Jul 02:20 next collapse

The only slop worth using is slop you make for yourself.

bagodogs@sh.itjust.works on 08 Jul 06:19 next collapse

That is so accurate. I have a couple of LLM-coded applications running, either because a solution wasn’t available, or existing solutions were beyond the scope of what I need, and would idle at up to 1 GB of RAM instead of 10 MB. In situations like these, being able to get a quick solution thrown together is such a boon.

ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 14:31 collapse

Can confirm, am running a lot of services on a VPS that make my life more convenient. I prompt from my phone and get useful stuff out. I am a software engineer, so I can course correct ir when necessary. I only use opencode for this, not Hermes or Openclaw

liquidlamp@hachyderm.io on 08 Jul 02:27 next collapse

@rimu this just seems like human nature in a nutshell. Easy come, easy go. If something had almost no impact on your life, didn't require you to commit and learn, then what value does it have to you?

Once you get past the gambling like hit of dopamine that is "wow it worked!?" from the code generator, there is no impact to you, no skin in the game. You at most want another hit, which each new part of the project will just give less and less as the scope gets smaller and the builds harder to reach.

rimu@piefed.social on 08 Jul 02:28 next collapse

Yes, I think that’s it.

Before LLMs, the effort required to get something into a releasable state was a filter that stopped people who aren’t serious.

FoxAlive@lemmy.zip on 08 Jul 05:04 collapse

Amazing that we trained kids to be addicted to slot machines in video games, which companies like facebooks zynga and other companies invested a lot of money in dark patterns and manipulating people into making purchased in games. The whole industry was going into that for a while. Raid shadow ledgends was made by some dude in Israel and has connections to a slot machine manufacturer, who is also on the American gaming commission which helped nudge regulators in the right direction.

That was years ago and now we have apps that are “ai prediction markets” that let you take bets on California wild fires.

Insanity is a world where the most vulnerable people are incentivised to commit arson so they can become a millionaire for 4 months before they blow it all on a home that’s too big for them, with a car and a truck thats too much for them, and no plan to keep up this life style other than more sports betting apps, or paying for “secret” insider knowledge for kalshi. Or these idiots think that because they’re listening to the right podcasts by some CEO loser that they’re going to make the right calls, not knowing they’re the ones getting scammed.

People are so ready to have all their jobs be just a slot machine that sometimes let’s you get a output you can get paid for. Then you send your vibe coded product to your client on some kind of gig job app and they’ll take their 30% cut. So after you had bad luck on your claude slot machine who kept making you reupt your token spins, and slopjobber app (all the recent fired Xbox and meta employees will work for apps like these) took its 30% cut you are left with 6 dollars for a hour and half of work. If its anything like uber eats they will use dark patterns where the harder you work the less money you make, and all the high paying jobs go exclusively to new drivers to hook them in. Yay ai progress. Oh yeah and because its ai this is all legal now, and the states aren’t allowed to regulate Ai so fuck you bud.

curbstickle@anarchist.nexus on 08 Jul 02:35 next collapse

A solid 40% of projects get abandoned, that its about double for purely vibecoded is unsurprising. Purely generated is completely unmaintainable. At least they realized it within 6 months I suppose.

eager_eagle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 03:01 next collapse

Hardly an issue with generated code. You could say the same about projects before LLMs were widely used for code generation: “most projects are abandoned within months of release”. The difference now is the scale and how some people feel about it.

turdas@suppo.fi on 08 Jul 03:34 next collapse

Most hand-coded projects are “abandoned” within months of release, but this often happens because the project is done, not because the project outgrew the capabilities of the LLM and the vibecoder is too incompetent to fix the accrued technical debt themselves.

r3plic@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 05:18 next collapse

Nah, most projects where just abandoned. Most projects never reached maturity and where abandoed in like weeks if not days. Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever. LLM’s just removed the hurdle to start something “simple” so now the problem just grew in size.

turdas@suppo.fi on 08 Jul 05:32 collapse

Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever.

Plenty, possibly most, of those do exactly what they were built to do and nothing more or less. I have a couple of dozen such repos myself.

r3plic@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 05:37 collapse

Hmm, I think we are running both on assumptions. This would need some data to be analyzed to actually have a clear picture.

eager_eagle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 13:17 collapse

Disagree. Most projects are never “done”. Whether that is defined by the user or by the users, there are nearly always things to work on. Maintainers just lose interest or don’t bother. This is as old as open source and it has nothing to do with LLMs, it’s only aggravated by it.

RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works on 08 Jul 06:45 collapse

There is a crucial difference though, vibe coding enables people who are neither interested nor capable of understanding what is involved in maintaining a piece of software. Before vibe coding it didn’t even come to this situation: if you can’t write software you don’t need to maintain it. While there were bad coders and bad maintainers before, the numbers have now increased dramatically because everyone can pretend to be a software dev these days.

eager_eagle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 13:28 collapse

Right, like I mentioned, it’s a scale problem and how people feel about generated code. Abandonware have always been the majority of repos, because people don’t have time or interest to maintain most things they create. We just have more things being created now (whether they’re any good/usable or not).

Melobol@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 03:12 next collapse

I would say that the free tiers of those coding tools got cut back so much, that some of those slop coded stuff wouldn’t keep doing it any more.
Claude is on a 5 hr timer, and you get very few responses. Qeen Code was free for a second, that was nice.
Speaking from my own slop coded project viewpoint.

turdas@suppo.fi on 08 Jul 03:37 collapse

I expect this gap will be filled by cheaper models like GLM as they catch up to frontier models in their capabilities.

Melobol@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 03:49 collapse

I believe they will catch up in no time.
But not every one will be able to pay anything for them.
I’m not paying because it is a hobby project (a huge one) and it is totally free with optional donations. That’s not much ROI.

pennomi@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 03:25 next collapse

Easy come, easy go

hperrin@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 03:35 next collapse

Even if they weren’t abandoned, you shouldn’t use them.

rimu@piefed.social on 08 Jul 04:10 collapse

Well, yeah. There are lots of reasons. But basic self-interest is something we can all agree on.

artyom@piefed.social on 08 Jul 03:42 next collapse

Easy come, easy go

MalReynolds@piefed.social on 08 Jul 03:51 next collapse

Vibe coding a simple project is easy, but a crapshoot, at the current state of LLM development. Vibe maintaining anything at all is basically impossibly currently, you need a competent developer for that.

Evotech@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 05:11 next collapse

Disagree. It’s perfectly viable. I’ve maintained several projects for over a year myself

moustachio@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 05:28 next collapse

Are these projects… in the room with us right now?

Evotech@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 06:20 collapse

I’m not the one throwing out baseless accusations

k0e3@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 09:03 collapse

Just baseless claims.

Evotech@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 09:04 collapse

I have nothing to prove

Ghoelian@piefed.social on 08 Jul 09:39 next collapse

Then why would anyone believe what you said?

Evotech@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 10:33 collapse

Why would they believe the other guy?

k0e3@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 12:44 collapse

It’s perfectly viable.

That is you making a claim.

I’ve maintained several projects for over a year myself

That is you trying to prove said claim with anecdotal evidence. If you had nothing to prove, you’d have made the right choice and stfu.

helix@feddit.org on 08 Jul 05:34 next collapse

Sounds interesting.

Can you link those projects please?

Phantaloons@piefed.zip on 08 Jul 06:13 next collapse

Oh here we go

helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz on 08 Jul 10:41 collapse

Are you maintaining them for your own use, or do they have other users who you are supporting?

Evotech@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 10:43 collapse

I have a few projects, some are just for me. And others are available for use. Mostly plugins for other projects, couple hundred people using them.

They all have good cocd pipelines with testing, code validation/ static code analysers. It’s trivial to maintain. Not big projects by any means but 20-50k loc

helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz on 08 Jul 10:49 collapse

Can you name the one with the largest user base? How do you distribute it? What’s the ecosystem?

Flames5123@sh.itjust.works on 08 Jul 06:11 collapse

I agree that people cannot vibe code well unless they are a developer. Knowing the difference between slop and using a tool to automate bulk writing code is crucial at the current state. And I don’t ever know if it’ll get better because you need to know why you want to build something someway.

dan@upvote.au on 08 Jul 08:32 collapse

And I don’t ever know if it’ll get better because you need to know why you want to build something someway.

The major issue I’m seeing with junior (and even intermediate) developers is that they trust that the AI will always do things the correct way and don’t question its approach, and they don’t develop proper debugging skills and just rely on the AI to attempt it.

To get decent quality output out of an AI model, you need to have critical thinking skills, at least basic knowledge of the overall architecture for whatever you’re trying to build, and enough knowledge to question the model when it does something wrong.

Blindly trusting AI is why so many old security issues are coming back - stored/reflected XSS, SQL injection, exposing databases directly to the internet with no password, things like that. Newer frameworks mostly got rid of them, and now AI is bringing them back. It’s a fun time for red teams at least.

MirrorGiraffe@piefed.social on 08 Jul 11:02 next collapse

I’m a developer since 20 years and been trying out vibing godot and I expected it to have troubles with Godot but at least getting basic programming paradigms right but it has been more the other way around. I’m constantly policing it for hardcoding or creating unmaintainable messes where the base classes have exceptions for each child instead of them owning their own logic.

searabbit@piefed.social on 08 Jul 14:33 collapse

As someone somewhere between junior and intermediate developer, I will say vibe coding on my personal projects has accelerated my learning so much on the proper way to code things so much more than constantly bugging my seniors who don’t have time to properly review and critique my code (because surprise surprise! We’re understaffed). At least now I can ask Claude to explain its approach and fact check it myself, and the times I’ve had it run too loose, I’ve gotten practice debugging code I’m unfamiliar with since Claude eventually hits a point where it fucked something up and has no idea how to fix it. But obviously the caveat is you have to approach it as a learning tool not an automation tool.

i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 04:09 next collapse

On the flip side, if you’re vibe coding an app you should seriously consider whether it’s something you want to open source or make available publicly. There’s a social contract that comes with that.

I have 2 self hosted slop apps I build and maintain myself. I think people would genuinely get great use out of them.

…but then I’m inviting critiques and feature requests and am roped into supporting them so it’s not just a big pile of shit that wastes everyone’s time. And I don’t want to spend my limited free time making common sense improvements to improve it for others. I want to write a lazy Claude prompt with insufficient context, get it barely doing what I need, and then spend the rest of my time eating crayons and similar pastimes.

ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Jul 06:00 collapse

On the flip side, if you’re vibe coding an app you should seriously consider whether it’s something you want to open source or make available publicly. There’s a social contract that comes with that.

This is the attitude of an existing programmer who is using these tools. What I’ve found on here is a specific pattern that keeps repeating:

  1. A post is sharing/advertising a project. The poster is two hours old.
  2. The poster is extremely coy about how their project was made despite obvious slop in the post body. They’re a bit clueless about anything that looks like a social contract that comes with that and think there’s something strange or accusatory/interrogatory when people ask questions they think are too difficult or technical
  3. Some Lemmy users have generally polite but fundamental critiques and questions the poster can’t answer or thinks must be gotchas
  4. The poster has a crash out about us all being mean/unappeasable/anti-AI/luddites/Linux users/godless commies and is usually the only one downvoting comments, even ones that read like genuinely interested, though cautious
  5. The post and account are deleted

There’s a clear disconnect. You’re talking about the homelab community which is a bit different but I specifically remember someone making an accessible Android UI and being extremely frustrated at people asking for the entire code to be released, and at people saying there’s not enough features there for that poster to be looping in advertisements on a fucking home page UI.

I get the impression that primarily-slop coders on some level think they’re doing programming, because of how you can get functional prototypes of code that is way above what a total beginner can write on their own. They think having code that compiles (whatever it’s usually Python there’s no compiling) means the hard part is over. They don’t seem to understand that the questions and concerns about vibe coding aren’t moral complaints but genuine concerns about liability, running code even the author doesn’t understand, and a complete cluelessness about what they should be doing to evaluate the code besides prompting it to be “good with no mistakes”.

That Android UI project seemed like a little thing a few people could install on their grandparents’ phones. It’s normal for the author not to understand every little thing. But being totally clueless and being offended at the suggestion, being entitled to put ads in it to get 0.0016 USD per year per grandma in exchange for taking up a quarter of her screen forever, not understanding why this looks scummy, why refusing to release 60% of the code looks scummy, why half the questions are being asked at all.

Again this would not be a problem if this wasn’t now expected for a significant portion of any projects you find online. A lot of projects are the first genuine effort of someone out there and they’re not perfect but they didn’t feel like the unceremonious implosion of the entire philosophical concept of personal computing.

And I’m fucking shit at writing good code and I’m pissed.

uuj8za@piefed.social on 08 Jul 04:27 next collapse

If someone isn’t motivated enough to actually think and create something, what makes you think they’ll be motivated enough to maintain that thing they didn’t create?

PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 04:50 next collapse

I’m generally anti-ai but this is kind of exactly what vibe coding is for.

Someone has a problem right now and there is no tool to fix their problem how they want it fixed, so they throw some shit together for personal use and maybe someone else can use it if they want idgaf.
Why would they maintain that? It does what they need it to, when they need it. Usually these tools are very basic.

pianoplant@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 05:08 next collapse

I don’t disagree necessarily, but they shouldn’t be uploading / sharing one-off projects they don’t intent to maintain.

JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net on 08 Jul 05:59 next collapse

That is a bit of an open source philosophy difference.

Is it better that everyone has open source everything so that anyone who finds the one-off useful can benefit from it?

Or is the software actually not provided “as-is” like the license states and on releasing open source software the community deserves regular updates?

I think that second option is a very entitled path. We are not entitled to the continued used free labor of a random person on the internet.

pianoplant@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 06:14 collapse

Yes, but there’s a difference between having your source and binaries available on github and submitting to an app store like flathub.

PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 10:39 collapse

That’s true to an extent, but I’d disagree wrt something like dockerhub.

PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 10:34 collapse

I don’t really agree. If you have a tool to do a thing, share it in case someone else could benefit, just be open about what it is.

helix@feddit.org on 08 Jul 05:08 collapse

Usually these tools are very basic.

If you read this community in the last weeks you’d know that slopcoders don’t stop at basic projects.

pyr0ball@reddthat.com on 08 Jul 04:53 next collapse

The pre-LLM-effort-was-a-filter argument holds up, but I think what effort was really filtering for was why someone built the thing. High effort filtered out “this seemed fun for a weekend” projects. LLMs just surfaced that those were always the majority.

The better filter is: does this project serve a specific audience that genuinely needs it, or is it a demo of what you can do with Claude?

What I look for now:

  • Specific problem for a specific group of people (not “general-purpose LLM wrapper”)

  • Open core (MIT or something that lets the community carry it if the author walks)

  • Revenue model or institutional backing (someone has to keep the lights on)

  • Evidence the author understands what they shipped, not just LLM output committed wholesale

We build CircuitForge, self-hosted tools for navigating opaque systems (job markets, government benefits, insurance). The architecture is deterministic-first: eligibility checks, validation, and data pipelines are rule-based and grounded in structured data, so the LLM is drafting from a clean, repeatable foundation rather than hallucinating into a void. That also means we can run smaller, specifically fine-tuned models instead of throwing a frontier model at everything and hoping for the best. Smaller models run on consumer hardware, which cuts hosting cost and shrinks the privacy risk surface significantly. Humans approve before anything acts. Pipeline layer is MIT and lives on Forgejo. There’s a full devops stack, a real business model, and I use these tools every day. We’re also actively collaborating with other devs and always looking for contributors.

The people using these tools actually need them. That’s the commitment signal that doesn’t evaporate when the novelty wears off.

rimu@piefed.social on 08 Jul 10:15 next collapse

Replying to this post with an AI slop comment takes some balls, mate

pyr0ball@reddthat.com on 08 Jul 15:03 collapse

Ha, the irony isn’t lost on me. But the comment was mine, not generated. The project does use LLMs as a tool (that’s the point of it), but “uses LLMs” and “is slop” aren’t the same thing. The repo is public if you want to check the commit history and structure rather than take my word for it.

Dojan@pawb.social on 08 Jul 13:15 collapse

This reads a little like a LinkedIn post.

pyr0ball@reddthat.com on 08 Jul 15:03 collapse

Fair point, I’ll own it. Dropping a project link in a thread about slopcode is going to read as a pitch, and I needed to promote or nothing will ever happen.

That said, I figured showing a concrete example was more useful than just adding another opinion to the pile. If you want to pull the repo (git.opensourcesolarpunk.com/…/peregrine), the structure is there to review. There’s a deterministic pipeline underneath the LLM layer (eligibility checks, form validation, deadline tracking all run without LLM involvement), CI with test coverage, and a fine-tuned model approach that keeps inference on local hardware where possible.

The hard part wasn’t the LLM layer, it was the plumbing around it that keeps the LLM in an advisory role instead of a decision-making one. That design constraint is what I wanted to show, not just “look, I made a thing.”

pyr0ball@reddthat.com on 08 Jul 15:04 collapse

Also, fair warning: my day job involves writing docs and reports for corporate clients, so the LinkedIn voice leaks in whether I want it to or not. Working on it.

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 08 Jul 05:24 next collapse

As always the social infrastructure (community, user base) is much more important for the success and use value of a piece of software than the exact technology used to make it (lang, framework, helper tools).

Phantaloons@piefed.zip on 08 Jul 06:17 next collapse

Just don’t install anything new after 2022. Easy way to get actual code audited by human beings.

BillyClark@piefed.social on 08 Jul 06:25 next collapse

It’s late and so maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see the part of the article that compares the abandon rate of slopcode with the overall abandon rate. Not saying that the premise is wrong or anything, but you can’t tell how bad something is unless you can compare it with the norm.

daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Jul 06:41 next collapse

Also it’s again the false sense of security pf “if you don’t use vibed apps you’ll be fine”, making people forget basic security procedures.

I, for instance, had a service vulnerable and discontinued without noticing for months. It was something 100% made before LLM was a thing. Still had unpatched vulnerabilities and the project was abandoned. It was my fault for not checking more often is the services I host are safe or not.

dgriffith@aussie.zone on 08 Jul 07:13 collapse

I’ve been working on updating all my old software projects lately, and as part of that process I feed the source code into a LLM for review.

The amount of simple security errors, logic flaws, and code smells that it reveals is quite embarrassing.

This was all “good functional code” that’s been used internally for years. Clearly it worked well enough, but a simple pass through a LLM reviewer made it a lot more robust and secure.

SirHaxalot@nord.pub on 08 Jul 08:09 collapse

I would guess that the key difference is that vibe coded apps can get to a more or less working state a lot quicker, while other apps are likely to be abandoned before it’s done.

Though in either case I’d always be careful with new projects. If it’s just a single guy that’s been working on something for less than a year and only have a handful of GitHub stars, I probably wouldn’t install it.

AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social on 08 Jul 06:26 next collapse

This is the main reason why vibe coding, even if it produces good code, is still a major problem. It encourages people with the goal of making software, but without the actual will and motivation to keep supporting that software to pump out software and publish it.

It’s like all the faceless AI-automated YouTube channels we have now. It’s not that these people had no way of doing it before, it’s just that it’s easy and might make them some money, or make them feel like they accomplished something until they get bored and move on.

There’s something to be said for convenient and easy to use things, but they’re a double edged sword, because they also directly target people with the least emotional investment to use them, as a side effect of that convenience.

brainwashed@feddit.org on 08 Jul 06:32 next collapse

but without the actual will and motivation to keep supporting that software to pump out software and publish it.

TBH, most software will never be used my many so needs no support. Also, I think lack of long-term support is not the same kind of problem. It used to be any more. Back in the day when the original author dropped support it was a major investment to get someone else up to speed. Now fixes and enhancements can be done by LLMs as well, given a somehwat competent software developer.

But in general: The newer the project and the more bells and whistles it has, the less I personally would want to make it an essential piece of my workflow.

GalacticRobot@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 13:03 collapse

Isn’t that no different than the millions of open source projects that have few authors, little interest and are abandoned for the next shiny thing? At least in my mind with the current state of LLMs, if there is an open source project that you want to update for yourself, you should be able to do that pretty easily.

HackThePlanet@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 06:35 next collapse

We went from “everyone will know how to code in the future” to “no one know will know how to code” pretty quickly

kevinsky@feddit.nl on 08 Jul 16:36 collapse

Everybody did think becoming a developer is where it was at, so a lot of people did, now these people looking at an ever tightening job market (even before AI) with LLM’s possibility annihilating the need for their expertise entirely at some point.

At least maybe people will stop telling other people what to do. It’s obvious we don’t know what is relevant next week, much less in 10 years.

All these people that are now told to school themselves for manual labour are being set up to run into the same thing. Especially when those chineese bots inevitably also escape the gadget level.

There are no “AI safe” jobs. Even if it can’t do your job (yet) all the people that are made redundant and need new work will be flooding remaining markets.

M0oP0o@mander.xyz on 08 Jul 07:05 next collapse

Vaporware is never not a thing.

NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net on 08 Jul 10:25 collapse

I thought vaporware was announced or promised code that never materializes, or shows up much later than claimed. Often used by big companies to squash competition, who typically have very real solutions available.

M0oP0o@mander.xyz on 08 Jul 15:02 collapse

That’s one example, yes. My point is we like to invent new ways to call out the same shit. Vibe coded projects that get abandoned within half a year are just another example of vaporware, just a new take on the concept.

Glitch@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Jul 07:33 next collapse

I make all my own slop apps now. Bespoke crappy solutions for bespoke crappy problems. Abandmont rates are up, I can attest

magnue@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 09:15 next collapse

Yeah same. I make loads of little things to bodge my own problems but would never be moronic enough to try and capitalise on something that took 60mins to make.

tburkhol@slrpnk.net on 08 Jul 09:44 next collapse

I like Cory Doctorow’s take: AI is good for single-use, personal code to solve an immediate problem, and terrible for long-term, production projects. I imagine there’s a bunch of neophytes out there who use AI to create their first project, find out that github exists, and thinks someone else must be having the same problem they just solved, so why not release it to the public?

GalacticRobot@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 13:01 collapse

Exactly. Oh I have this small problem, or solution I want to solve. Great I can put something together quickly and move on with life. I am not selling it, and it’s not even needed for ‘open source’ because its often incredibly niche problems that I am trying to solve for, that I wouldn’t be able to do elsewise.

jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works on 08 Jul 12:47 next collapse

I’ve found LLM’s to be pretty decent at writing one-off scripts for boring tasks. “Baby wipe scripts.” Use them to clean up the shit and throw them away.

ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Jul 14:37 collapse

I’ve rebuilt a few SaaS projects that I use so it’s under my control. Might not have all the bells and whistles, but it aligns with my needs better.

I rebuilt a simple Playstore task app into a multiuser fleet maintenance app for the farm. I’m not putting it in the wild, I don’t need that headache. I build it exactly for our needs and I don’t need to have to deal with users I can’t tell to fuck off to their faces when they get snotty about a bug.

But overall, this kneejerk “everything AI makes is broken” bullshit is starting to get to me. It’s pretty obvious these people either haven’t used it in the last year or so, or don’t know how to. Or they’re just performing for the internet, and actually use it all the time. I tend to think the latter.

whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 16:20 collapse

Another person already wrote this itt, but the cost in time and money of building something that “works” is very low. That cost increases every time you need to fix something. It’s why I’ve switched to deepseek flash instead of the bigger, better coding models. For the same price as a million tokens of Claude for example I can get a hundred million tokens on flash. It takes three times as long and needs a little prodding but it’s thirty times cheaper.

Even if you’re not dealing with ballooning costs when it comes to upkeep, the present environment around ai programming is filled with perverse incentives that reduce the chance something is open sourced. Why preserve the old work and try to carry it into the future when you can just rewrite it? Why create standardized libraries and approaches to specific problems when it’s only gonna be used once? Why make it open when you don’t have time to deal with requests and bug reports you don’t care about? Why use gpl when you don’t intend to make it public anyway?

Those were all arguments against gpl and open sourcing parts of the Unix codebase too, btw.

Harnesses or agents try to address some of this by sharing improvements but that’s three layers removed from directly turning fossil fuels into cpu cycles to make the same program a thousand times slightly different for a thousand different people.

I tend to see the ai programming defense in the same way you described yourself and the “ai is bullshit” crowd. People defending this stuff generally either aren’t looking where they’re walking or haven’t had to use it long.

As a decently prolific user of ai programming, it’s turned computer code into disposable plastic wrappers. Even if they don’t persist and make a giant garbage raft in the ocean or calcify our pineal glands we still wasted a bunch of energy on them.

abc@suppo.fi on 08 Jul 08:08 next collapse

So what? The important datapoint is the number of new successful projects, not the number of the abandoned ones.

mabeledo@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 11:19 collapse

You meant “the number of new projects that will soon be abandoned”.

[deleted] on 08 Jul 14:30 collapse

.

makeshift0546@lemmy.today on 08 Jul 08:16 next collapse

This isn’t the burn you think it is. Should we start listing actual high use hand coded abandoned foss projects?

tirateimas@lemmy.pt on 08 Jul 09:59 next collapse

I’m not surprised. If you didn’t have to will to properly build it yourself, you won’t’ have the will to properly maintain it.

Kirk@startrek.website on 08 Jul 11:49 next collapse

There was a Ted Talk a while back (I can’t remember who) where they said “I have always wanted to give a Ted Talk… but when I got selected to do this I realized that what I really wanted was to say I had given a Ted Talk”. Meaning they want to be known as someone who had given a Ted Talk, not actually go through the process of writing and delivering the Talk.

People who write open source code do it because they like the process of writing, just like an author enjoys writing books. LLMs are for people who just want to be able to say they have written a book. People who slop-code aren’t actually interested in learning how to code. Which is a fine toy for them to play with, but not sustainable (or reliable for others to use).

BrightCandle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 13:45 collapse

At some point the project also just gets hard to maintain with AI, you burn ever increasing tokens the bigger a project gets and AI produces awful code for the purpose of maintenance by hand. Once the bugs start rolling in they realise the AI can’t fix them, they certainly can’t afford to have it constantly load the entire project as context and they don’t know how to fix it themselves and the tech debt produced is immense. So the projects get shut down.

korendian64@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 10:16 next collapse

As Linus Torvalds said, give the compiler some credit.

auzy1@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 11:28 next collapse

Hiking groups are full of this crap at the moment. Even for things that a basic spreadsheet would suffice

The worst one I saw was on hacker News yesterday which was a ai avalanche prediction site, which is an absolutely shit idea and will kill someone

Croquette@sh.itjust.works on 08 Jul 11:43 collapse

This is 2015 all over again where IoT hit mainstream consumers and every project on Kickstarter was a simple thing that doesn’t need Bluetooth with added Bluetooth.

anon_8675309@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 11:42 next collapse

Some people want to be programmers. We enjoy the process.

These people just want attention. Or have been conned into the idea that with AI everything is easy.

GalacticRobot@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 12:59 next collapse

For me, it’s been super helpful to write personalized things quickly that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Are these things I plan on maintaining for decades? Hell no. But there is no current solution, this isn’t a commercial product, and I always have the code in case I want to make adjustments in the future.

GreenKnight23@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 15:41 next collapse

these are people who “have an idea for an app” that pester devs to build their dumbass ideas.

heartSagan5@lemmy.zip on 08 Jul 16:54 collapse

It’s more like they want a portfolio to sell at an interview, and since entry-level hires are getting pinched by AI, they’re screwed either way

SupremeDonut@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 12:49 next collapse

Easy come, easy go. Fuck me, a human wrote that.

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 14:06 next collapse

All things must pass. All things must pass away. ~ George Harrison

I look back over the years when I first discovered there was a thing labeled a computer as a yongster. I remember the curmudgeons, scoffers, and nay sayers talking about how this ‘fad’ called ‘the computer’ and subsequently ‘the internet’ was all just a waste of time, and that all of us nerds and geeks would soon see the stark error of our ways. I even had an employer tell me, ‘Buy something off the internet? <scoff> No one will ever buy anything off the internet!’ and then he launched into a ‘Why, back in my day we …yadda yadda yadda’ diatribe.

I look back and wonder how far along we’d be in solar power infrastructures had a lowly peanut farmer not been religiously and hatefully ridiculed for installing solar panels in the White House. Sure, they were inefficient but it was the concept, the idea, that yes this can work with some further tooling and technology. I look back even further in history and pick out Fulton’s Folly and how he was lambasted for his stupidity, thinking he could put a steam engine on a boat and make it a viable form of transportation. It became a huge boon to commerce and travel up and down the Mississippi, and subsequently spread to other areas. I think about our early steps into space travel and how there were massive amounts of vocal opponents to this waste of energy and tax dollars. Yet, even to this day, we still reap the rewards of that technology in our every day lives. So much so, that we never stop to think about it.

I’m not here to say that AI in any of it’s many forms is the golden goose or the egg. It is fraught with problems, some of which are glaring, and it needs some heavy governmental regulation. I, like many others, have concerns about AI coded projects and the safety and security thereof. However, this knee jerk reaction to anything AI reminds me of so much of history, in that, the once disdained has now become so common place, as to be taken for granted.

hneerqe@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 14:56 next collapse

Really, after all this years of computer technology and the internet, what good came out of it? That it can outweigh the bad.

People are dumber and misinformed. Social media is a cesspit of fakeness and product advertisements. Software improves profitability and takes away jobs. Unparalleled potential for mass surveillance.

HubertManne@piefed.social on 08 Jul 15:04 next collapse

I often wonder this. I love computers and the internet but when it comes to quality of life I don’t see much imporvement over when I was young and the world was still analog. I mean I would not want to live in a time before electricity and definately before plumbing and sewer. a nice metro line is great and well as geared bicycles. libraries to. can’t really say much from the computer age really is all that great.

KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz on 08 Jul 15:14 next collapse

Open access to information is one thing I love about the internet, I can find information (of varying quality) about anything I’m interested in without having to look through a library or get a massive encyclopedia

JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org on 08 Jul 16:35 collapse

Trying to remember how the world was before computers and the internet. It was really hard to look up information yet that you didn’t have in your own home. You had to hop on the bus and go to the library searching through several books. That’s one Google search today. You hadn’t had the access to music, films, and so on. You can listen to nearly every modern song on Spotify versus those few CDs you had on your home or the songs that were playing on the radio. If you want to watch a movie you can do that. You do not have to wait until it’s showing on TV with at breaks or go to some kind of rental store. You want to go somewhere, just fire up Google Maps, versus buy and paper map, figure out where you are, and still get lost. Global communication is free. Just remember how expensive long distant calls were and how you lost contact to people who moved away.

The internet and computers really have made everything easier.

hneerqe@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 17:06 collapse

No absolutely not everything is on spotify. And Google is not a search engine anyway. We gave them the privilege of their brand becoming a verb and now they’re a corporate surveillance monopoly. We absolutely botched it here. Same with facebook.

We can search to get a quick superficial view written by whoever and now AI vs reading through a book to get a comprehensive view by someone who studied and has a reputation to defend. One doesn’t substitute the other. The internet merely allowed for the lazy masses to pretend they could get away with not reading, which worked just as well because their boss needs his productivity/wages ratio in check.

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 15:20 collapse

I can think of hundreds of innovations and good. Take just the medical field. Huge advances in attending the sick, the diseased. Yes, all technology wields a double edged sword. When the first Ford rolled off the assembly line it was a huge boon to travel, tourism, commerce. What were the downsides? Well, it’s noisy, pollutive, the processes to extract it’s fuel is very volatile. Yet, you get in your car and go to the grocery store, work, or even vacation without thinking about such things for the most part. The efficiency, the decrease in pollution, emissions, etc. are somewhat a thing off the past. Yes, there are massive improvements we can make, especially in renewable resources and electric vehicles.

Those who pine for ‘the good ol’ days’, usually do so with thick rose colored glasses.

LilyVess@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 08 Jul 16:32 next collapse

“IA” have very few applications besides faking things. It fakes someone having read that mail, it fakes having wrote that mail, it fakes art, it fakes “helping you”, it instead do fake job for you.

It’s the “IA” spite can look too spiteful, but there’s a key difference I think between “IA” and actually useful technologies: A computer helps you do things, not only work, better and faster, “IA” do it for you. You don’t “learn” to use an “IA”, you do have to learn to use internet and a computer.

“IA” is less akin to something like a computer and more like NFT, Radium Watches, etc. “Innovation” for the sake of selling instead of progress. Has is uses? Of course, but it create far more problems that it tries or even cares to solve and it’s inclusion on everything just for the sake of selling just screams like plastic, radium, Teflon, lead on gasoline, etc. The promised miraculous new invention. Sooner or later we are going to pay for it. Again. All of us.

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 17:00 collapse

Since we are in a technology forum, a few quotes:

LinuxFoundation

“Frontier AI models have given defenders the ability to find and fix vulnerabilities in open source software at a speed and scale that were never possible before. That’s an enormous opportunity for defenders, and Akrites ensures we seize it together. Maintainers deserve a coordinated partnership, not a flood of reports. AWS is committed to securing the projects our customers depend on and building this shared infrastructure alongside the community.”

– Matt Wilson, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Amazon Web Services

“Open source projects collectively underpin much of the internet, and the existing model for coordinated disclosure has been outpaced by how quickly AI can now find vulnerabilities. Getting ahead of that requires the industry to coordinate on findings and get fixes upstream before they’re disclosed and exploited. Efforts like Akrites drive this level of coordination at the scale and speed this moment requires.”

– Jason Clinton, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, Anthropic

“The software supply chain is only as strong as the upstream it draws from, and we see how thin that layer really is. As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven’t touched a project in years. Akrites gives the industry one coordinated way to fix vulnerabilities upstream before they’re exploited, with maintainers still in control. Now the work is making sure there’s always someone on the other end to catch them.”

Sooner or later we are going to pay for it. Again. All of us.

Yes, we will pay for crawling out from the primordial ooze billions of years ago. Everything is finite.

dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Jul 17:15 collapse

Computers make money. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc all proved that. They can sell you products that people felt like did things for them. It didn’t make infinite money.

How much money does ChatGPT make? How much money does Grok make? How much money does Copilot make? How much money does Claude make? LLMs and generative AI don’t make money. If they did, AI CEOs would be boasting about the massive profits coming in from AI.

irmadlad@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 17:33 collapse

LLMs and generative AI don’t make money.

I would agree with you. At this juncture AI a loss leader, much like putting a man on the moon was a loss leader. How’s that technology benefiting you now? Significantly. I’m in no way glossing over the issues with AI. It has real world problems, and needs intervention, serious intervention.

Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz on 08 Jul 14:40 next collapse

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
IoT Internet of Things for device controllers
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

[Thread #47 for this comm, first seen 8th Jul 2026, 14:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Stern@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 14:42 next collapse

Who woulda thought people wouldn’t keep up with something they were never really invested in to begin with… except for pretty much everybody.

yggstyle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 16:21 next collapse

In a shock to absolutely not a single person who has had to “hand craft” and maintain code… Its hard enough maintaining shit you wrote last week let alone adapting or collaborating on stuff you didn’t.

… so people who shit out recycled code from other people passed through a randomization algo are totally lost from step one. And easy come… easy go.

Oh I need to maintain this? Oh the magic box can’t do it? Technical debt?! Oh, I’m bored now… guess I’ll go inject my brilliance somewhere else.

partofthevoice@lemmy.zip on 08 Jul 16:34 collapse

Discipline is part of the recipe for brilliance. So often, I find myself hearing of people’s problems and I realize that the problem is a manifestation of your poor discipline. It’s not necessarily that you did something wrong, misconstrued requirements or misconfigured procedures, no… it’s that you didn’t actually try to read the error message, look at the docs, catalog your technical debt, make a phased rollout plan, decide on what tests you’ll need, write a well bounded scope, … no. These “brilliant” people are fully capable of doing this, they just aren’t disciplined enough

You just stuck your balls to the wall and said “boss, I think it’s cold outside.” How about you go open the fucking door and check?

/s… I got a little carried away there.

yggstyle@lemmy.world on 08 Jul 17:21 collapse

I feel that. Theres a strict requirement of fortitude in this industry. Fighting against an unknown bug/challenge is draining and requires admitting you lack knowledge and being willing to persevere in the face of a fruitless result. Shits hard and will beat you down if you let it.

jerryq27@programming.dev on 08 Jul 16:43 collapse

My coworker said it best: “Anyone can build an app now, but nobody wants to maintain one.”