Summary
- 73% of Flathub apps labeled as “AI Slop” were abandoned within months.
- Many were deleted or received no updates after release.
- Analysis suggests the Flathub app AI ban helped spare reviewers and curb quick abandonware.
It’s unsurprising.
Normal development: Start work on new project, design it really well, start work, get bored after a week. Project 10% towards first release. Oh well.
Vibe coding: Have a buggy mess ready in a few hours, spend the next few days improving it somewhat, get bored after a week, app was already released by the time you quit.
It’s also being invested in and proud of the hard work one does. I don’t think these words mean anything to a vibe coder.
Well yes… If you get that far.
I literally can’t stay on a project long enough unless it’s work where money motivates me. I’ll think of a new cool project and start on that instead of the previous one.
I do also have ADHD to be fair.
Yeah I think that’s a fair point. And not really that far off for many of us too.
Have some self-respect. Don’t put vibe-coded software where other people might run it.
Why they didn’t measure a baseline of general apps and non-AI apps abandonment rate?
Without a contrast the information is useless?
For all we know the abandonment rate of general new apps might be 98% or maybe 2%, who knows they didn’t gave us that number.
As far as I know they didn’t even measure it. They only took 120 apps labeled as AI without trying to get any contrasts data. Incredibly poor methodology.
I agree with you, they should have done this (was suggesting this early in the comments too). I wouldn’t say the information is completely useless, but its true that without context its hard to make hard conclusions.
I’m not surprised, not in the slightest
Maintenance is always the hard part.
Especially if vibe coded…
especially than
The sloppiness of people relying on slop.
Of course they are. That slop is unmaintainable.
Behold, the future of software development: disposable slop!
Why maintain software for decades when you can just abandon it and make a completely new one 3 months later? Don’t need to maintain the code if you just throw it away and build a new one instead.
And all it will cost is a massive amount of AI tokens and environmental damage.
Google (the company) As A Service. Make new things and discard them, unsupported.
Hopefully we will see a lot less of it with the cost of AI going up. Eventually it will just be the big companies that can afford it.
That can afford it for now. Shit is gonna make their whole ecosystem a fragile jenga tower in no time, even the biggest ones.
cost of AI going up
The highly subsidized Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions will go away, but open weight models are getting much better over time - GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 are both very good.
The most expensive part by far is training the model. That’s why OpenAI and Anthropic are losing so much money (well, that and the subscriptions).
With an open weight model, someone has already trained it, and you just have to cover the cost of inference, making it a lot cheaper. Any company (or individual!) with powerful enough equipment can host the model, which means there’s competition in terms of price, compared to something like Claude Opus where the only four hosts (Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure AI Foundry) use Anthropic’s pricing.
Not really true though. They are loosing money on the subscriptions, because people use it way more then they thought. So using on Orem AI could still be insany expensive.
It’s not way more than they thought because it’s within the limits they set for the subscriptions. They wouldn’t have set the limits that high if they didn’t think people would use it.
At least it doesn’t come wrapped in plastic, though I guess big tech will figure out a way to do that too in the next few years
Probably people who thought they could make an app with AI, realised it’s not possible to make good software without actually learning how software is made, and never opened Cursor or whatever again.
Ah yes, the great filter.
It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.
Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.
If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.
There was a rash of people shoveling kanban “first project”-ware for a year or two a while ago. Everyone and their mother made a kanban app and advertised it on reddit and Lemmy. All also abandoned within a few months and were exceedingly mediocre to begin with.
Just because you made a project, doesn’t mean you have to advertise it as a maintained app, especially if it is one of 1k of the same projects.
I think the problem partially is people thinking they have to “get a following” and get “github stars” on everything they make in order for it to be a valuable experience.
I the clearest indication of this is that we have not seen any products to displace existing market leaders.
I agree that AI slop is bad, but I don’t really agree with their method of determining if an app is abandoned (no updates in 2-3 months).
Sometimes apps don’t need updates. Some Linux apps don’t receive major updates for years. I used backupninja (https://0xacab.org/liberate/backupninja) for long time even though sometimes there’s 2-3 years between releases, because it did what I needed. (I switched to Borgmatic at some point though).
I didn’t update one of my apps for over a year because it already did everything I needed, and I wasn’t receiving any major feature requests. There’s still some bugs I need to fix but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
These were new applications and so we can assume over time they need updates. Or at least it shows how much interested developers are working on it. It would also be nice to have a random sample size of similar applications without the Ai to have a comparison how often they get updated.
I update my whole complete Linux box like twice a year. Thrice when I’m bored.
