AI slop

We are currently living in the age of the so called AI slop - you can see a lot of blog posts and articles popping up everywhere, and they are clearly AI-generated and honestly, while LLMs are very useful and relevant, I do not enjoy reading any of those.

I mean, I could very much prompt the LLM myself, so what do you expect? Why do you do yourself such a disservice? Are you trying to impress me that you are paying a subscription? Or do you really think that this pile of text is interesting just because it looks like an article and because you never had time or courage to write it yourself?

It's also a reason why I have decided to start blogging again - it's a bit counter-intuitive, because the amount of text content is just sky-rocketing, but I think it will be increasingly more interesting to other people that what you are showing is something you have made yourself, and you've not just prompted some LLM. Because most of us can do the latter, but much fewer can do the former.

And this is not just about writing, it's also about programming, every day I check out Hacker News, and there's a new Show HN post, with some github project, which was clearly generated with an LLM and there was very little involvement besides the original idea.

Now, ideas are important, and can be interesting on their own but at least in the case of a github project, and software engineering in general, at least 50% of the time should (and will) be spent on testing, and figuring out all the various edge-cases.

And so it's ok if you use LLM, but you should definitely disclose it, and I am also expecting from you to be a bit more involved, throw-away projects are not worth any attention IMHO.

I am myself guilty of that, I just don't have the time to maintain all of my little hobby projects, but I was never trying to make a big thing of them in the first place, so...

OSS is hard by itself, and it takes a lot of energy, and time, and also money, and one of the most important things about OSS is to figure out some business model which works, because frankly, very few of us can afford to work in OSS full-time, without making any money to keep themselves (and their relatives) alive. And I hope it's now clear that by work I don't mean just writing the code but also all the other parts, responding to issues, etc.

So, while all that being said, I think we are living in some transitory dark age, and I am personally expecting that things will get better, and people will inevitably value genuine work and trusted names/brands even more than they did before.

BTW: I recently wrote a Zig parser in ~70 lines of hand-written JS. I hope to write about that one day but it is example of one such thing which I believe people might be interested in.

https://github.com/cztomsik/tokamak/blob/main/docs/zig-parser.js

I also expect a huge boom in the entertainment business, in all sorts of flavors, but also including some playful education. Because people were curious before, and they always will be, and given that the AI slop is everywhere, they will be even more interested in real things prepared (and presented) by real people.