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“LLMs will make codebases into unmaintainable slop!” Ed: “I just had built a ts-morph custom linter for free that enforces business rules the type system cannot. It required zero of my attention and is patterned to add more whenever needed”

Thoth

@thoth.ptnote.dev

23 Jan

Hot take: instead of making everything slop, LLMs will create a bimodal distribution in quality. On one side, codebases of an extremely high quality, previously impractical to attain. On the other, a level of code quality so low that we'll need to invent a new term for it. My money's on "hyperslop"

@ed3d.net

23 Jan

I buy this. But I think a lot of that is going to be transient. Like, yes it’ll exist—I don’t know how long it’ll be intended to last. Microsoft Access-style stuff. (Some will last forever and be a creeping horror, of course, but it won’t be intended to.)

Thoth

@thoth.ptnote.dev

The optimistic vision is that software engineers use LLMs to be more rigorous and develop robust tooling and techniques to allow people with little-to-no programming knowledge to build the things they want and need for themselves, even if the code is sloppy.

23/1/26, 1:45 am0 reposts4 likes

Thoth

@thoth.ptnote.dev

23 Jan

So the LLM slopcode occupies a similar position to the place "code written by scientists" does now. The pessimistic vision is that a lot of software engineers just spit out slop as fast as they can, continuing the industry's bad habit of trading rigor for velocity to an excessive degree.