Why so every armchair reviewer can yell, "Slop!"?

Guidelines meditation for you.

I just met a guy from Amazon this past weekend who was bragging, "We've got unlimited access to LLMs and our developers have 10 agents going at a time.". I tried telling him it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows but I didn't get the impression he cared and just kept crapping out skittles.

Because he doesn’t.

The impression I get from SWEs I’ve met throughout my life is that most of them don’t actually care about their job. They got in because it paid well and demand was plentiful.

It's rare when I meet one who actually likes writing code nowadays. At my last company everyone was trying to be an architect.

I still like writing code. But not for others.

They should but they don't and that's the problem.

I really enjoy Patrick Boyle's reports. Really high information content with very little fluff. I love how he sneaks in the deadpan snarky comment every once in a while.

I replaced all the light switches in my house with smart dimmers and have the lights dim in the evening. It happens in steps so it's noticeable and it's like a clock ticking down. I don't know if there's anything scientific about it but it's pleasant, like the house is going to sleep so maybe I should too.

I like to use the yellow anti-insect lights for the external lighting around my house as they tend to attract way fewer flying insects and fewer spiders as a result.

I also like them in lamps inside for illumination during the evening, with the added benefit of not requiring more IoT devices.

This is especially nice if you use bulbs that get warmer as they dim. (See the Kruithof curve.)

What does verifying code by hand even mean? Do we now have artisanal testing, lovingly hand crafted? I get the current debate about LLM assisted coding but this is mudslinging and not constructive discussion.

Verifying the code means, does it actually do what you said it does?

When you vibe code things, the AI often thinks it built something that does X, but when you actually test it/verify it, in fact it doesn't do that at all.

I've seen it this week with both Codex and Claude Code. I built something for scraping financial data from various websites. Claude Code said, yes I built this and it works. I verified the data and it wasn't accurate, it was data for the previous quarter.

I.e. if you're trusting that the AI built your RAG perfectly without testing it, you're probably mistaken.

"I took a look" is the human version of vibe coding.

I suspect that we are going to see managers say, "Hey, this request is BS. I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" while employees say, "Hey, this response is BS, I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" and then we'll just have ChatGPT talking to itself. Eventually someone will notice and fire them both.

"What would you say you do here?" --Office Space

I think you'd enjoy reading about the Gervais Principle. It's pretty much what you're talking about.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".

My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.

Also there seems to be more of it about. Like facebook is crazy these days if you don't have things to block the junk. What used to be holiday pic from friend, post from mum is now holiday pic then three in your face hot / AI generated influencers doing in your face stuff then maybe your mum. It makes my head hurt.

Because it's such a great word! It names something we have all begun to see but didn't have a name for.

karl marx saw this in the 1800s; modern media just eliminated any discussion of these concepts

Its the current term-slop to label anything changing in a way they dislike without nuance. Yes many things are incredibly getting objectively worse, but it enables them to look at unsustainable practices in the eye and feign shock when it fails to keep steam.

Even enshitification suffers enshitification.

So much so it's losing letters!

Many technical directions in the past 15 years have been a thinly veiled attempt to actually get paid for doing work.