It’s ironic that all negative comments on here are dismissive because “slop’s baaaaad”. Yes, slop is bad. Carelessness is bad. Lack of understanding is bad. It always has been. Code has been copied from stackoverflow. Built-in methods or std libraries have been used in a wrong way. Edge cases haven’t been covered. Rate-limiting and other hardening tasks haven’t been taken care of until the system broke. The code wasn’t DRY.
Now, people are building tools that not only hide the solutions to these problems in some obscure coding tool, markdown file, or agent harness, but they build gates that help developers to elevate themselves from the darkness of not knowing better. The number of developers roughly doubles every ~3 years, so at any given time, half of the people building software have less than 3 years of experience. Most of them didn’t even study CS before starting their careers. Tools like this will be the new warning voice that told people like us 5 to 10 years ago to never copy code from stackoverflow that you didn’t understand. It’s great.
I considered doing this with an open source app I have that let's you get a visual summary on a PR + get quizzed on it, but ultimately decided it's better to keep it an optional thing for people that want to understand AI PRs rather than force it as a gate, the volume is slowly becoming too high for even that. I agree with the sentiment behind this though as I felt this was needed as well.
I can kinda understand the motivation here: you push a bunch of slop (or is it deep, genius code?) but you have a kind of nagging suspicion that you should get to know it more familiarly, like back in the good old days a few months back when you sort of understood what was going on. I... don't... think this is going to work...? Remember Confirmation Fatigue? Soon we will have agents that interact with Sphinx for us.
People who care about the problem will definitely not be using this as a method to "understand" their code. People who don't care about this problem will continue to not care.
Have you ever heard the idiom "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff"?
It’s ironic that all negative comments on here are dismissive because “slop’s baaaaad”. Yes, slop is bad. Carelessness is bad. Lack of understanding is bad. It always has been. Code has been copied from stackoverflow. Built-in methods or std libraries have been used in a wrong way. Edge cases haven’t been covered. Rate-limiting and other hardening tasks haven’t been taken care of until the system broke. The code wasn’t DRY.
Now, people are building tools that not only hide the solutions to these problems in some obscure coding tool, markdown file, or agent harness, but they build gates that help developers to elevate themselves from the darkness of not knowing better. The number of developers roughly doubles every ~3 years, so at any given time, half of the people building software have less than 3 years of experience. Most of them didn’t even study CS before starting their careers. Tools like this will be the new warning voice that told people like us 5 to 10 years ago to never copy code from stackoverflow that you didn’t understand. It’s great.
So who is the master of whom?
I considered doing this with an open source app I have that let's you get a visual summary on a PR + get quizzed on it, but ultimately decided it's better to keep it an optional thing for people that want to understand AI PRs rather than force it as a gate, the volume is slowly becoming too high for even that. I agree with the sentiment behind this though as I felt this was needed as well.
I can kinda understand the motivation here: you push a bunch of slop (or is it deep, genius code?) but you have a kind of nagging suspicion that you should get to know it more familiarly, like back in the good old days a few months back when you sort of understood what was going on. I... don't... think this is going to work...? Remember Confirmation Fatigue? Soon we will have agents that interact with Sphinx for us.
We went from micromanaging code to micromanaging tools and markdowns.
I mean I see the idea, but at least I use LLMs for code generation in two distinct ways.
The first is when I care about the code. That's when I actually read what it produces and force it to use my mental model of how things should be.
The second is when I just need a solution that sorta fits the requirements provided. Then I don't read the code because I really do not care.
So this hook would either ask me things I know, or it would ask me things I do not care about.
But I guess this is very workflow-dependent.
"Outsource your thinking"
I'm sorry, what?
Yeah this is cooked
I am trying to outsource my depression but the market is rough
we're just leaning into it now
People who care about the problem will definitely not be using this as a method to "understand" their code. People who don't care about this problem will continue to not care.
So, who is this for?
https://www.sphinx-doc.org/
Your slop generator should check if a name exist before claiming it.
Just wait until you learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx