It is kind of funny to me that the author is complaining about software that's already "done" being tweaked with AI. If it's done, just use an old version!
Anti-AI people don't seem to really live in reality. All AI = Slop (which is an absurd viewpoint) and that's the end of it. They have their purity tests and real outcomes don't matter to them.
Complaining about open source projects (which you can fork!) using a tool you have some objection to is just the newest low they've sunk to. Might as well rail against using clang, it's make about as much sense.
I wish they had made this rant focusing on their ethical disagreements with AI-generated coding. Defining any software made/with as “slop” is silly to me. Say you hate AI and won’t use it on principle, don’t try to make it sound like AI can only be used to make low quality products, because that’s objectively wrong.
Would it matter? From the article "So I go and find the website and source repo so I can link them, but then I spot fucking "claude" has been used literally this week, for the first time."
There's no discussion about the quality of what Claude did, or even if that was investigated. It's "I see Claude, I call it slop". So look at the contributor list, notice there are ai agents in it, and it's therefore no good anymore.
The PDP-7 Forth that Mitch Bradley and Claude just wrote in one day is high quality, efficient, beautiful, well commented, and uniquely designed.
The PDP-7 is the 18-bit machine the first version of Unix was written on. It turns out that the PDP-7 instruction set is perfect for Forth, and the "next" inner interpreter is only three instructions, the first being the "xct" execute indirect instruction. It's one of the most elegant implementations of Forth I've ever seen, and has an efficient threading model unique to the PDP-7 that I've never encountered anywhere else.
" --- NEXT: the inner interpreter ---
" Only LAC/LAW-tag cells fall through to "dac i 012"; CAL/JMP-tag cells
" transfer control elsewhere and never reach it.
next: xct i 010 " pre-increment IP, execute the thread cell
dac i 012 " push AC (only reached by constant/variable cells)
jmp next
It is a hybrid that Wikipedia’s list of threading models doesn’t name explicitly: instruction-encoded threading, with the behavior of indirect threading but without its usual code-field lookup. The project’s design notes describe it as:
Essentially ITC, but the code field is implied by tag bits in each thread cell rather than stored in the body.
The PDP-7 emulator that Claude and I made runs PDP-7 Forth like a bat out of hell. And the point is that if it's this good with antique esoteric PDP-7 assembly, then it's so much more proficient with modern assembly and high level languages that are orders of magnitude more widely represented in the training data like StackOverflow and GitHub, including TypeScript and Python.
OK, I held up my end of the bargain, and gave you the links to high quality AI generated code that you demanded, and even a video demo that shows and explains why it's so elegant and efficient and high quality. As you can see, the PDP-7 emulator also runs the original version of Unix flawlessly.
PDP-7 Forth is a small enough example to inspect, and I've explained the specific design choices I admire. If you think it's low-quality code, what is wrong with it? Can you optimize the inner loop any better, reducing it from 3 instructions to 2?
Before you complain you don't know PDP-7 assembly language: Neither did Mitch or I, but now thanks to Claude's help, we're learning a lot about it with hands-on experience, enough to make CPU and device emulators, an assembler, a disassembler, data visualization tools, improve and extend the Forth system itself, implement device emulators and drivers and apis and testers, and integrate PDP-7 assembly language libraries written in the late 1960's into it and run them. Can you do that yourself without AI in a couple of weeks, while having as much fun as Mitch and I did?
So why don't you review and criticize that code you asked for without using AI, tell me how you would have implemented it differently, then link me to some code you have written yourself without using AI that's at least as elegant as Mitch's PDP-7 Forth, and explain why.
Good, because the slop era is over. LLMs can now deliver software of consistently better quality than humans can, much faster, and are more thorough in hunting down bugs and considering corner cases to boot.
I'd argue that the main thing producing slop is the human-with-ai cyborg. While the ai is maybe better at writing code, the range of humans prompting it has gotten stupider. So now we have projects like a bloodborne PC '''port''' which is absolutely slop and just packaging the emulator because someone told an ai to make native decompiled bloodborne.
This website hurts my eyes to read and the writing style is grating, not claude-level grating but I don't care for it.
> And the fucking disrespect from the developers overhwelms me.
The amount of entitlement in this typo'd sentence [0] is staggering. Developers who are spending their time/energy/money making software you get for _free_ are disrespecting you, the user, by developing the software however they see fit? Get off your high horse.
If you don't like it, fork it. Stop complaining about other people's free work.
These anti-LLM stances are so incredibly cringe and boring.
[0] PS: Not proof reading or spell checking just makes you look incompetent. Much like the rest of the author's stance, they seem to prefer to live in ignorance rather than utilize the technology available to them.
> This post has not been proof read or spell checked
If you want people to take the time to read what you write, then you take the time to proofread it and spell check it. I don't want to read low effort unedited human slop, especially human slop that hypocritically complains about low effort ai slop. Especially that's performatively artificially badly written (and don't even get me started about the css), just to make an ideological point.
Your own time you wasted by bragging about how you did not proofread your post, plus the thousands of people's time you wasted having to read that, while it was so painfully obvious you don't respect your audience enough to proofread, was totally unnecessary.
If you're just performatively making mistakes and neglecting to proofread on purpose, you don't need to announce it, just do it without talking about it, because it's so obvious and such a waste of everyone's time. You're worse than a comedian who thinks he has to explain all his jokes, when they're not even funny.
Don't try to prove you're not an AI by making mistakes on purpose and not bothering to edit, just prove you're not an AI by putting in the effort of writing well and proofreading carefully, not inserting artificial signals and making contrived mistakes on purpose instead.
That's as low effort and intentionally unreadable as it gets. I don't care if you're on mobile, you still have a spell checker and can still edit text. If you refuse to proofread your text on mobile, then wait until you get home to write blog posts you expect people to read, especially when they're so low effort and hypocritical.
If the "slop'd" versions are so horrible I'm sure you'll have no problem attracting people your fork.
Unless of course, no one actually cares, it's just the newest things people can rage about online. Enjoy your purity tests, I'm sure it will work out great for you.
Not sure why you think this guy has built his entire personality around software. He is arguing against slop in free software. Being political about it is pretty normal I would say
Not sure I follow - the great thing about open source is that you can just fork it and use an old version forever, if that's what you want.
Open source projects evolve the same way closed projects do - users come up with ideas and contribute, propose things they think are cool, etc.
It is kind of funny to me that the author is complaining about software that's already "done" being tweaked with AI. If it's done, just use an old version!
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Anti-AI people don't seem to really live in reality. All AI = Slop (which is an absurd viewpoint) and that's the end of it. They have their purity tests and real outcomes don't matter to them.
Complaining about open source projects (which you can fork!) using a tool you have some objection to is just the newest low they've sunk to. Might as well rail against using clang, it's make about as much sense.
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Did you read the article? That is exactly what the author does.
Goomba fallacy. The person I'm replying to is clearly trying to paint a whole swathe of people with the same brush.
This is not a goomba fallacy. Yes not all anti-ai people have the same stance. But a large portion hold this exact view.
I wish they had made this rant focusing on their ethical disagreements with AI-generated coding. Defining any software made/with as “slop” is silly to me. Say you hate AI and won’t use it on principle, don’t try to make it sound like AI can only be used to make low quality products, because that’s objectively wrong.
Fine. Link me the highest quality piece of code written with ai.
Here's two big ones to start. But I have a feeling that an arbitrarily large list won't change your mind.
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
I'm not going to scan all of llvm to find a ai commit sorry. and I find the linux kernel git stuff hard to read.
Well, let me google that for you.
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3...
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3...
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pulls?q=is%3Apr+state%3...
https://github.com/astral-sh/uv
What part?
Would it matter? From the article "So I go and find the website and source repo so I can link them, but then I spot fucking "claude" has been used literally this week, for the first time."
There's no discussion about the quality of what Claude did, or even if that was investigated. It's "I see Claude, I call it slop". So look at the contributor list, notice there are ai agents in it, and it's therefore no good anymore.
The PDP-7 Forth that Mitch Bradley and Claude just wrote in one day is high quality, efficient, beautiful, well commented, and uniquely designed.
The PDP-7 is the 18-bit machine the first version of Unix was written on. It turns out that the PDP-7 instruction set is perfect for Forth, and the "next" inner interpreter is only three instructions, the first being the "xct" execute indirect instruction. It's one of the most elegant implementations of Forth I've ever seen, and has an efficient threading model unique to the PDP-7 that I've never encountered anywhere else.
https://github.com/MitchBradley/pdp7forth
https://github.com/MitchBradley/pdp7forth/blob/main/src/kern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Threading_modelsIt is a hybrid that Wikipedia’s list of threading models doesn’t name explicitly: instruction-encoded threading, with the behavior of indirect threading but without its usual code-field lookup. The project’s design notes describe it as:
Essentially ITC, but the code field is implied by tag bits in each thread cell rather than stored in the body.
The PDP-7 emulator that Claude and I made runs PDP-7 Forth like a bat out of hell. And the point is that if it's this good with antique esoteric PDP-7 assembly, then it's so much more proficient with modern assembly and high level languages that are orders of magnitude more widely represented in the training data like StackOverflow and GitHub, including TypeScript and Python.
https://youtu.be/lo8kdY-5i6c?t=867
OK, I held up my end of the bargain, and gave you the links to high quality AI generated code that you demanded, and even a video demo that shows and explains why it's so elegant and efficient and high quality. As you can see, the PDP-7 emulator also runs the original version of Unix flawlessly.
PDP-7 Forth is a small enough example to inspect, and I've explained the specific design choices I admire. If you think it's low-quality code, what is wrong with it? Can you optimize the inner loop any better, reducing it from 3 instructions to 2?
Before you complain you don't know PDP-7 assembly language: Neither did Mitch or I, but now thanks to Claude's help, we're learning a lot about it with hands-on experience, enough to make CPU and device emulators, an assembler, a disassembler, data visualization tools, improve and extend the Forth system itself, implement device emulators and drivers and apis and testers, and integrate PDP-7 assembly language libraries written in the late 1960's into it and run them. Can you do that yourself without AI in a couple of weeks, while having as much fun as Mitch and I did?
So why don't you review and criticize that code you asked for without using AI, tell me how you would have implemented it differently, then link me to some code you have written yourself without using AI that's at least as elegant as Mitch's PDP-7 Forth, and explain why.
I can't read that.
Good, because the slop era is over. LLMs can now deliver software of consistently better quality than humans can, much faster, and are more thorough in hunting down bugs and considering corner cases to boot.
I'd argue that the main thing producing slop is the human-with-ai cyborg. While the ai is maybe better at writing code, the range of humans prompting it has gotten stupider. So now we have projects like a bloodborne PC '''port''' which is absolutely slop and just packaging the emulator because someone told an ai to make native decompiled bloodborne.
soooooo….the problem is the human then and not the AI part
Well yeah. Slop only enters the trough when a human pulls the lever.
This website hurts my eyes to read and the writing style is grating, not claude-level grating but I don't care for it.
> And the fucking disrespect from the developers overhwelms me.
The amount of entitlement in this typo'd sentence [0] is staggering. Developers who are spending their time/energy/money making software you get for _free_ are disrespecting you, the user, by developing the software however they see fit? Get off your high horse.
If you don't like it, fork it. Stop complaining about other people's free work.
These anti-LLM stances are so incredibly cringe and boring.
[0] PS: Not proof reading or spell checking just makes you look incompetent. Much like the rest of the author's stance, they seem to prefer to live in ignorance rather than utilize the technology available to them.
> This post has not been proof read or spell checked
If you want people to take the time to read what you write, then you take the time to proofread it and spell check it. I don't want to read low effort unedited human slop, especially human slop that hypocritically complains about low effort ai slop. Especially that's performatively artificially badly written (and don't even get me started about the css), just to make an ideological point.
Your own time you wasted by bragging about how you did not proofread your post, plus the thousands of people's time you wasted having to read that, while it was so painfully obvious you don't respect your audience enough to proofread, was totally unnecessary.
If you're just performatively making mistakes and neglecting to proofread on purpose, you don't need to announce it, just do it without talking about it, because it's so obvious and such a waste of everyone's time. You're worse than a comedian who thinks he has to explain all his jokes, when they're not even funny.
Don't try to prove you're not an AI by making mistakes on purpose and not bothering to edit, just prove you're not an AI by putting in the effort of writing well and proofreading carefully, not inserting artificial signals and making contrived mistakes on purpose instead.
That's as low effort and intentionally unreadable as it gets. I don't care if you're on mobile, you still have a spell checker and can still edit text. If you refuse to proofread your text on mobile, then wait until you get home to write blog posts you expect people to read, especially when they're so low effort and hypocritical.
okay yeah sure bro ill just maintain a pre slop fork of firefox and thunderbird and linux and libreoffice and
Sounds like a personal problem
If the "slop'd" versions are so horrible I'm sure you'll have no problem attracting people your fork.
Unless of course, no one actually cares, it's just the newest things people can rage about online. Enjoy your purity tests, I'm sure it will work out great for you.
Daily reminder not build your entire personality around software and other gimmicky hobbies/jobs
Not sure why you think this guy has built his entire personality around software. He is arguing against slop in free software. Being political about it is pretty normal I would say
Do you know where you are right now?
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