AI slop aside, lately I've been thinking about that term, it seems to fit what I do - artisanal coding. Just saw a comment here saying that it never mattered but at least for frontend it happens there are cases you can still be able to tell where it was made by an LLM agent or it was made by a human.
Take for example this thing I found on HN the other day:
There are lots of magic numbers in the CSS, extra and redundant elements in the HTML that shouldn't be needed if the author was aware of radial gradients, and unoptimized and redundant SVG elements that very well could have been CSS shapes or a single SVG symbol that can be easily cloned and rotated.
I just wish there are still people (and employers!) that actually care for this kind of stuff.
We need down-vote buttons for slop like this on HN. How can this reach the frontpage?
Since you are reading, here a story of mine. Both me and a friend build a SaaS product using ClaudeCode. We both have 15+ year experience in software (he more in dotNET me more in FLOSS).
He just accepted everything it came up with (pretty much vibe). I was suuuuuuper careful about what I accepted and spend the first weeks programming a lot myself.
His stack for JS was HUUUGE. Several different technologies were used. Mine JS stack was: only use Alpine.js (and avoid JS as much as possible).
His backend stack was equally huge: lots of native/binary OS dependencies bundled in Docker. Mine was 13MB of libs on top of the JVM.
Being one year in I run 3500 tests in 20secs. App boots under 3secs.
He considers rewriting it.
The art(isanal) is still important. Sure it's different now. But MY GOD what a difference a bit of oversight/leadership/tech-vision can make.
I'm glad frontend design skills have moved us away from the generic, inoffensive font families of yesteryear towards the likes of Space Grotesk and a smattering of IBM Plex Mono in places ill-suited to monospace families.
AI slop aside, lately I've been thinking about that term, it seems to fit what I do - artisanal coding. Just saw a comment here saying that it never mattered but at least for frontend it happens there are cases you can still be able to tell where it was made by an LLM agent or it was made by a human.
Take for example this thing I found on HN the other day:
https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93
There are lots of magic numbers in the CSS, extra and redundant elements in the HTML that shouldn't be needed if the author was aware of radial gradients, and unoptimized and redundant SVG elements that very well could have been CSS shapes or a single SVG symbol that can be easily cloned and rotated.
I just wish there are still people (and employers!) that actually care for this kind of stuff.
Apparently nobody wants artisanal writing either!
Nor artisanal web design.
Imagine getting the first draft of this back from Claude and saying “Great, now make it 3x longer.”
I bounced at the first load-bearing use of load-bearing.
It is very obviously AI ... assisted, to whatever degree. Still, makes valid points methinks.-
Honestly, no it’s not, it’s an echo from the echo chamber. There is no original thought here.
This is exhausting and would have been a lot easier to read in the more, how to put it, natural writing style the author had until early 2025.
What changed, I wonder? ;-/
Huge bloated article that unclearly expresses a simple thought.
It's like the author prompted, "write me a big article on what is and isn't a commodity with AI, and make it confusing"
"If I have a blog with long posts, I'll be a thought leader."
Such pre-LLM thinking, can't believe it's still a thing.
We need down-vote buttons for slop like this on HN. How can this reach the frontpage?
Since you are reading, here a story of mine. Both me and a friend build a SaaS product using ClaudeCode. We both have 15+ year experience in software (he more in dotNET me more in FLOSS).
He just accepted everything it came up with (pretty much vibe). I was suuuuuuper careful about what I accepted and spend the first weeks programming a lot myself.
His stack for JS was HUUUGE. Several different technologies were used. Mine JS stack was: only use Alpine.js (and avoid JS as much as possible).
His backend stack was equally huge: lots of native/binary OS dependencies bundled in Docker. Mine was 13MB of libs on top of the JVM.
Being one year in I run 3500 tests in 20secs. App boots under 3secs.
He considers rewriting it.
The art(isanal) is still important. Sure it's different now. But MY GOD what a difference a bit of oversight/leadership/tech-vision can make.
> We need down-vote buttons for slop like this on HN. How can this reach the frontpage?
LinkedIn introduced a "Seems like AI slop" reporting option, perhaps we should consider asking for one for HN too?
This is so stupid.
Can an accountant make a CRM in a weekend? Sure.
Will it be there next week? Maybe, probably not.
Building software was never, not even once, about writing code. That’s easy, literally anyone can do it.
It’s about building something that lasts beyond needing to be completely refactored.
I'm glad frontend design skills have moved us away from the generic, inoffensive font families of yesteryear towards the likes of Space Grotesk and a smattering of IBM Plex Mono in places ill-suited to monospace families.
First it was "The End of Programming" two hours ago.
Now this one. Lol
Nobody wants human written prose (or maybe even thoughts as well) any more apparently.
To be fair I'm not sure HN ever wanted prose in the first place, usually just a headline will do.
First it was that article about how 60℅ of HN posts were AI generated
I really, honestly think the writeup goes beyond the headline and is well worth the read and the time.-
Holy AI Batman
And I don't want your blog-slop vomit
If you're gonna slop-write your blog post at least put in the same effort you urge people to make when writing code...
Pot, kettle, something. Karma bot pointing to AI written article complaining about lack of artisanal code.