The whole thing’s worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:

Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think they’re maximising their own personal benefit.

Starting this Stubsack off by linking to Pavel Samsonov’s “You can’t “AI-proof your career” with a project mindset”, a follow-on to Iris Meredith’s “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer” which goes further into how best to safeguard one’s software career from the slop-bots.

The first issue filed is called “Hello world does not compile” so you can tell it’s off to a good start.

The comments are a hoot, at least.

Found a quality sneer aimed at a vibe-coder sysadmin: https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/

you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places

I don’t think the LWer even realised those themes were there. This whole review screams “failed high school English” to me.

Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.

It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.

Quick PSA: Not by AI is made by AI bros to help their slop machines violate the commons more effieicntly

In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.

New post from Iris Meredith: “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer”

New blogpost from Drew DeVault, titled “The cults of TDD and GenAI”. As the title suggests, its drawing comparisons between how people go all-in on TDD (test-driven development) and how people go all-in on slop machines.

Its another post in the genre of “why did tech fall for AI so hard” that I’ve seen cropping up, in the same vein as mhoye’s Mastodon thread and Iris Meredith’s “The problem is culture”.

New paper popped up in the arXiv about the slop machines’ impact on FOSS

It gets worse:

One of the great tragedies of AI and science is that the proliferation of garbage papers and journals is creating pressure to return to more closed systems based on interpersonal connections and established prestige hierarchies that had only recently been opened up somewhat to greater diversity.

Related toot:

insurers rely on the world being predictable in actuarial tables that allow them to ensure profiting from quantifiable risks. Non-deterministic AI is impossible to predict outcomes for. For an insurer, that is terrifying: they could potentially lose unlimited amounts of money. But I’m sure they’re thrilled about genAI proliferation giving them sweeping new ways to exclude most business activities with a single discreet sentence, while maintaining the same premiums as before. In the next couple of years, AI adopters are going to find out their liability coverage has become utterly worthless because their activities are so contaminated by non-determinism which no one wants to cover.

Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty’s obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.

Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.

oh your code is open source guess that resolves everything then

Yeah, its not like open-source can suffer from catastrophic bugs or anything, that’s purely in Proprietary Land

(As an aside, Tante did a write-up on Heartbleed back when it hit the news, and pointed to dysfunctional project management and lack of funds as the cause. Considering FOSS projects like Firefox and Bitwarden were hit with the LLM bug, both have definitely gotten worse in the ten years since.)

Found a small repository of mini-sneers aimed at mocking vibe-coding cock-ups: https://vibegraveyard.ai/

Meth LLMs: Not Even Once

Yegge’s an extremely experienced professional engineer. So he put care into Gas Town, right?

I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.

This is a lack of care I’ve only really seen with vibe coding, and I still struggle to wrap my head around how someone can have an utter death of shits to give about something they’re making (if you can even call vibe-coding “making”). Its particularly stark for me when I compare it to the many, many artists I know online, who care deeply about their craft, and whose artwork deeply reflects that.

Just…what the fuck?

Ran across a thread about tech culture’s vulnerabilty to slop machines recently. Dovetails nicely with Iris Meredith’s recent article about the same issue, I feel.

I’ve seen memes about eating people’s art, but never a literal case, lmaoooooooooooo