Captain Beyond

This raises another question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while - at what point does a slop project stop being slop? Say I one shot a slop app and then continue to iterate on it with human-written commits. Or I find a vibe coded app I think has potential, fork it and then iterate on it. At what point does this become non-slop, or does it ever?

You raise a good point. “Build” in software engineering has a very specific meaning: typically binary artifacts are “built” from source code. Source code I think is typically “written” but of course if you’re using a generative program you can’t say you wrote it…

I’ve seen an LLM-user claim that “AI is the compiler of natural language” so I suppose if the prompt is source code then the generated code could be considered a build artifact. But, yeah, I don’t think people generally say they “build” code.

Proprietary is a deal breaker (and SaaSS is a subset of that), so if the only option is slop then I guess I have to use slop.

But, realistically, neither. I haven’t found a situation so far in which the only viable option is vibe coded.

Rewriting stuff in rust was kind of a meme long before LLM’s. Rust also is famously a powerful language with a steep learning curve, the latter being irrelevant if you don’t actually have to bother to learn it.

My tinfoil conspiracy theory is that artcraft is actually a 5d chess move from the “anti-ai” camp to draw bigtech attention and get them to turn against LLMs on principle, or at least get them to implement some sort of anti-app-cloning thing like anthropic recently did for games.

Not really but that’d be funny i suppose.

I wonder how the rustaceans feel about their language being associated with slop.

That is if you believe “intellectual property” to be an ethical concept in the first place. Many in the free software movement do not. Many of us also do not believe copying, sharing, or remixing is “theft.” That is a propaganda term from the copyright cartel.

(Note that I think so-called generative AI has many problems but this is not one that concerns the free software movement imho)