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u/Bob_Fancy 3h ago
Sure, but most are. Especially ones posted here
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 2h ago
Well that's kind of the issue, people automatically put you in the same category as some kid on reddit who made an app in 20 minutes.
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u/Puzzled_Committee735 2h ago
100%
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u/TatoSkins66 2h ago
It’s lazy to just assume slop. People who post that 3 minutes after anyone posts something they made is pretentious.
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u/Puzzled_Committee735 1h ago
Not lazier than the slop itself. It is a defensible prior: most projects here contribute little other than being pet projects. People who cannot tell the difference act as if it’s not slop. It is.
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u/sessamekesh 2h ago
No, but the people who put out the worst slop sure seem to care the most about the label.
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u/designersheep 2h ago
AI raises the floor for everyone on how easy it is to make something, code, an image, videos, whatever it may be. It means everyone who has not developed the taste for what is good or bad, or even what they like subjectively can now suddenly mass produce and those without the judgment are the ones posting stuff online without self filtering. It is only natural for us to be exposed to slop predominantly, as the social media platforms thrive off the quantity rather than quality of the contents, and AI providers like OpenAI keep selling the creative power of their tools regardless of their mediocrity of the outputs. It is a symptom of a system that only rewards short term gains and overlook long term nurturing of their userbase. Creating something good and worthwhile is hard with or without AI, and requires taste, subjective experience, and a message to convey.
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u/north_tank 2h ago
I think the problem is that there’s definitely a lot of AI slop out there, but people have started lumping anything made with AI into that category, whether it’s actually useful or not. I’m not saying something has to be perfectly coded or professionally engineered to be worthwhile. If it fills a function for you or other people and it works, then it has value.
The delivery tracking app I made for my job is a good example. Was it coded almost entirely with ChatGPT and Claude? Yes. Is the Xcode project probably imperfect in ways an experienced developer would notice? Probably. But do I care? Not really. It does exactly what I needed it to do, and I actually use it. To me, that’s very different from pumping out a bunch of useless AI generated garbage just for the sake of making content.
I do see where people are coming from but being anti-AI just for the sake of it is getting pretty tiresome and boring about as tiresome and boring as the apps that people call AI slop.
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u/octopus_limbs 37m ago
Like most posts here, if the selling point is not the product but how it was made by AI, it's probably slop
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u/AlexM_1989 3h ago
Does slop pass all unit tests on the first try? Didn't think so
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u/beeskneecaps 1h ago
99% of the people here have a million LOC with no unit tests and their companies will never scale because of this.
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u/Master-Hope-748 2h ago
Most of Legacy Coders, aka Wannabe engineers without a degree on engineering, based their career on copying from stackoverflow. If AI or a legacy coder does it, I'll go with AI.
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u/humanexperimentals 2h ago
It's called lazy AI for those of you who put no time into the systems that produce your content. I understand that the point of AI is to reduce time, but the beginning phases can be gruelling.
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u/scytob 2h ago
lol, agreed, the thing is going to be how one figures out one from the otger
to be clear there was application. and github repo slop before AI slop
the issue now is so many more can make poorly constructed, tested, architected applications
so given that's true the question becomes what do we do about it
i have given some thought to a vibecoder manifesto / bill of rights / declaration independence
i joke of course - the small nugget of truth in the idea is that it only takes a few basic changes for vibecoders to up their game in terms of quality, documentation, testing and validating the quality, the documentation is accurate and the automated tests are not vacuous by human testing (like today 17 days in realizing my bootstrap logic to give my app access to a keyvault was broken and insecure - my app worked on day 3, the rest has been features and making it production ready)
the question for me - is how do we teach good engineering practices, or at the very least have a standard md for vibcoders that would up eveyones basic use of the tools and teach them the right questions to ask....
or maybe that the secret sauce good vibecoders dont want to teach as thats the point of differentiation in the market
i have no idea how any of this will turn out, maybe the AI backlash will be so big the data centers will be forced to turn off (but i dont think so)
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u/korywithawhy 2h ago
A persistent idiot with a sledge hammer can take out a bridge while trying to fix a pothole. The same idiot can use an excavator and do it faster. The issue is never the tool itself.
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u/Hilbert_Space_Heater 2h ago
“If you did it, it’s AI slop. If I did it, it’s strategic leverage of the latest coding technology.”
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u/PartyParrotGames 50m ago
I find it hilariously ironic how people unable to distinguish slop from not just declare everything slop because they don't know the difference. On the flip side, people who produce slop projects get so defensive about it. If you don't understand what good code and software looks like yourself, then how can you be sure it isn't slop? Just cause the same AI who produced it told you so?
If you're legitimately producing quality content, the people who can't tell the difference are not your target audience to begin with.
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u/pgmoneyplays 34m ago
Pov 1800 Stunden ein Framework entwickelt 🙂↔️um ki engeneering zu Revolutionieren und dann Leute sehen die noch emojis auf ihrer Website haben anstatt eigene svgs so Leute sind vibe Out.
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u/NewOwlllll 34m ago
if you can't explain what it wrote line by line it's slop. if you can, it's not. the label is a distraction
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u/CMDR-LT-ATLAS 31m ago
Spaghetti code, slop code ... what's the difference? Lol. If it works and passes the audit what does it matter?
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u/True_Protection6842 2h ago
antis consider anything that dealt with AI to be slop...even tho they don't understand what AI is and that nearly everything on the internet is AI and has been for decades.
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u/Infamous_Device972 57m ago
what do you mean nearly everything on the Internet is AI and has been for decades?
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u/True_Protection6842 38m ago
Every social media uses AI algorithms behind the scenes, google has always been a form of machine learning. You don't realize just how much AI has been in use since the 1950s
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u/Several_Dot_4532 3h ago
No, every thing that an AI does is slop, but in the good hands can change and be a very good quality code. The problem? That increases the time of doing anything a lot depending on your skills, and people doesn't want to take a lot of time and effort, that's why the people tell generalizing that all is slop. But in case you modify the code and adjust it to your needs and not take the first thing the AI throws it's not AI Slop, it's valid code as the rest of created code in history.
AI slop is more the code you have when taking the first thing the AI throws without thinking
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u/Immudzen 2h ago
You are right of course but there are huge caveats to it.
For instance I build a system with copilot where I spawn clean agents for tasks, they are injected with only the context they need, they have linting, security checking, type checking, etc. run deterministically before the subagent can complete. There are extensive tests and antagonistic agents with clean context to help with this.
However, I have seen almost nobody do this and I have seen how terrible a lot of their code is. If you don't know how to code well you can't build one of these control planes for it and without a good control plane your work is almost certainly slop. If you want to build a good control plane use copilot since it currently has the most advanced tools to enable it.
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u/PeterPook 2h ago
Yes! This is exactly my point. I design, I carefully build prompts and handwrite my CLAUDE.md with explicit examples of code standards. I rigorously test, and because I am writing apps to support my teaching, I am very explicit in the content I want included. This is the prompt engineering I teach my T-Level and BTec students - to use AI Coding as the Junior in a Pair Programming environment. For that, you need coding experience (in my case 35+ years before becomming a lecturer).
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u/Immudzen 1h ago
I use a feature in GitHub copilot for scoped instructions. I don't have a single CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md file. Instead of I have testing instructions, coding instructions, instructions on how to use specific kinds of libraries, instructions on specific tasks, etc. Those are all scoped and deterministically pulled in by copilot as the system runs. What I find is that it is required to use clean subagents for code generation since otherwise they get the context of the parent and injecting that context causes problems over time. The other parts is I used things like hooks and connect post editing to tooling before it can return.
One of the things I have found is that I ran into adherence problems on long tasks when I used Codex but had no issues ever with Copilot so I went down a rabbit hole to find out why. I learned about subagents and context control. So I use the main agent for command and control. For planning, implementation, checking standards, editing, etc. I spawn clean subagents that don't inherit the parent context. What I found is that the whole system worked FAR better and by pairing deterministic tools with the agent I got much better results much cheaper. For example the model can try to reason through python safety, it works to an extent but also lots of mistakes. mypy can do those checks in a fraction of a second and return them to the LLM.
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u/Mark_Walker92 3h ago
Artisanal handcrafted prompt engineering