Most skilled engineers, and even mildly skilled engineers don't use slopgenerators to write code. Some of them use it sometimes to do some menial tasks, although I'm not convinced it actually saves them time. It sure doesn't every time we measure it.
There is however a plague of low skilled people who convinced themselves that they've found a shortcut to being an engineer. Those people are producing bad things at a fast pace, and the only reason we're not in an unsolvable crisis yet is that their slop isn't hitting prod very often on account of being bad.

There’s a massive difference between “using AI to write code” and refactoring almost 15k lines in a single push.

The “best” uses of AI in coding are for small blocks. You don’t just tell it “I need a program that does X, Y, and Z” because that will (at best) result in horrible code. Instead, it’s best practice to use it for small blocks of code, where you tell it something more akin to “I need a function that takes {a} as a variable, does {thing}, and outputs {x}.” That way you’re not using it to generate giant swaths of code all at once, you’re just using it to generate individual functions that you can then use as needed.

But it also means that the “most skilled” (as you put it) programmers are basically putting themselves in a permanent debugging seat instead of working as a developer. And in many cases, debugging code can be just as (or more) difficult than writing the initial code. It’s also why senior devs exist to audit code from junior devs, because it’s assumed that junior devs will inevitably make mistakes that need debugging, or will make code that clashes with code from other junior devs. And it’s the senior dev’s job to ensure that the code is both functional and integrated properly.

And this “adding 15k lines of code and ripping out 10k lines” push smells a lot like the former “write me a program to do {thing}” usage.

I have a few decades programming experience, as a professional software engineer, an open source developer, and a DevOps engineer. There is no way in hell I would do a code review where 15k lines were added and a similar amount of lines removed without having a long discussion with the person who made those changes. I’d want to ask a lot of detailed questions about the changes, questions that an LLM isn’t likely to answer, and most definitely not questions I’d be inclined to try to type into an LLM to try to get an answer.

Over the years I’ve dealt with all manner of bugs, from overflows & underflows, to bad assumptions about logic flow, and much much more. The whole purpose of pointed questioning of the author is to be comfortable with decisions made in the code and to minimize the chances of all sorts of potential bugs.

And yet there are cases like the Huntarr debacle, where the dev simply thought “and make sure your code complies with best security practices” to their vibe code prompts actually made it secure.

They added 14k lines of code in a week, and ripped out 10k lines of existing code. That’s not something that a skilled programmer can reasonably vet in that amount of time. This is showing all the signs of AI slop, and none of the signs of debugged or vetted code.

It's not. That's the problem. It actually sucks ass. It's super low quality for anything more complex they s very simple CRUD app or a simple function. I say this as someone who s a heavy LLM user. It's just bad code. It makes all kinds of simple mistakes. Just because code compiles doesn't mean it's good or does what you need it to do

You're absolutely right, and the vast majority of people on this platform seem to get offended by anything AI related. Software engineers have been reviewing code made by other people since the dawn of the craft. Guess what y'all, AI generated code looks exactly the same, if not better on the first pass at creating a thing.

Down vote me all you want homies. You're living in a fantasy if you think all AI is slop. Sure, I can see how it's ruining some content on the Internet, but for code related tasks, its going to dramatically change the world for the better.

Oh boy, do I have bad news about 90% of the internet for you...

Test in production is the best. We spent months warning from data bugs and nobody bat an eye (upstream bug, not our responsibility but we noticed) When it was d launched in prod we just pointed out the bug that nobody fixed was still there and immediately a war room was formed and the bug fixed within an hour.

It honestly seems more efficient to let shit hit the fan than to fight everybody to do their job.