This. I am so demoralised as a SWE who was trying to get out of working for a morally objectionable company by working on passion projects and selling them as apps. Guess I need to find something else… again.
Depends. Hand-written apps will still be more valuable than slopped ones as they’re far more trustworthy and less generic (like, literally), not to mention people being environmentally conscious about their choices. A good, trustworthy app that respects the user (and therefore omits e.g. privacy invasion) is still worth a few bucks to many.
I don’t mean this to be snippy but people don’t give a shit how or who wrote the code.
Most people will never know either way. If you download an app from an app store you don’t know what the code looks like.
Also software devs like to think they are clever and valuable because big tech has been pumping them up for a couple decades but the business doesn’t actually give a shit how a feature gets implemented only that it was and the customers value it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code. The main issue with them is the pace of change which has been greatly accelerated and how it can eclipse the rate a dev can understand the change.
I know people like to claim that every thing they make is slop but that ignores that basically the entire industry is using it to varying amounts and are unlikely to stop going forward.
I do care, i want to get work done, not waste my time with slop applications. All this talk about the adobe suit being cloned and in practice it is less usable than gimp and other open source projects out there, so why waste my time, with another slop marketing stunt?
Techbros always pretend the public doesn’t value efficiency and integration, and are willing to pay for it. If it wasn’t this way open source apps would have crushed it’s competition decades ago simply for being free.
And don’t get me stsrted in how without proper support these slop apps will be dead faster than the grokopedia.
You are right no one cares how it is implemented, and on select contexts, right that LLMs can produce sufficient implementation.
However it isn’t generally the case that they can produce quality software. The bad news for a lot of developers is that by volume most software isn’t exactly great quality either, particularly in house enterprise software is already crap, so there is large area where differently crapi isn’t so bad.
I will say that people who want their software well supported are likely to be ill served by “vibed” solutions. It is really tricky to debug complex software that was vibed, whether human or GenAI. If it worked perfectly the first time around and/or the software in question is fairly disposable, well those may be fine.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code
My understanding is that this is only partly true.
The problem as I understand it is that an LLM can create a code base for a prompt like “create an android app where I can record my medications”, and it might be “correct” and surprisingly usable. However, as your app evolves and “develops” it will be a mess, and the cognitive load quickly becomes unbearable. Everything feature breaks a heap of stuff and every fix breaks more things.
It depends on how it’s built. Anyone vibecoding without a plan will run into this very quickly. However, if a project is planned out in advance, broken down into multiple milestones, with measurable goals and thorough testing at each milestone before moving forward, the LLM can create surprisingly well-structured and solid code which fits the overall structure.
Basically, the more thought, planning, and structure is worked out before anybody runs even a single prompt, the better your results will be. And continual testing with the goal of finding every single weak point will give even better results. But planning it out ahead of time and doing all that testing takes a lot of time and human effort, and nobody vibecoding slop apps is doing that.
Software is subject to copyright. Yes you can implement the same APIs, but when you get into the visual presentation, things can get copyright related even if the code isn’t being ripped off.
If you decompile rather than clone, well then the code is copyrighted even if transformed into plausible source code.
The way I unterstand it, at least in European practice, the code itself is copyrighted, as in, the actual text, not the concept behing it. Decompiled source is not the same as original source, it goes through rounds of compiler optimisations and the process of reversing that includes a lot of guesswork. So, in practice, decompiling and working on the decompiled source was at least tolerated, probably because it would have been a grey area at worst.
This. I am so demoralised as a SWE who was trying to get out of working for a morally objectionable company by working on passion projects and selling them as apps. Guess I need to find something else… again.
Why can’t passion projects be a thing anymore ? Because they can be decompiled ?
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
Depends. Hand-written apps will still be more valuable than slopped ones as they’re far more trustworthy and less generic (like, literally), not to mention people being environmentally conscious about their choices. A good, trustworthy app that respects the user (and therefore omits e.g. privacy invasion) is still worth a few bucks to many.
I don’t mean this to be snippy but people don’t give a shit how or who wrote the code.
Most people will never know either way. If you download an app from an app store you don’t know what the code looks like.
Also software devs like to think they are clever and valuable because big tech has been pumping them up for a couple decades but the business doesn’t actually give a shit how a feature gets implemented only that it was and the customers value it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code. The main issue with them is the pace of change which has been greatly accelerated and how it can eclipse the rate a dev can understand the change.
I know people like to claim that every thing they make is slop but that ignores that basically the entire industry is using it to varying amounts and are unlikely to stop going forward.
It’s a confirmation bias thing.
I do care, i want to get work done, not waste my time with slop applications. All this talk about the adobe suit being cloned and in practice it is less usable than gimp and other open source projects out there, so why waste my time, with another slop marketing stunt?
Techbros always pretend the public doesn’t value efficiency and integration, and are willing to pay for it. If it wasn’t this way open source apps would have crushed it’s competition decades ago simply for being free.
And don’t get me stsrted in how without proper support these slop apps will be dead faster than the grokopedia.
You are right no one cares how it is implemented, and on select contexts, right that LLMs can produce sufficient implementation.
However it isn’t generally the case that they can produce quality software. The bad news for a lot of developers is that by volume most software isn’t exactly great quality either, particularly in house enterprise software is already crap, so there is large area where differently crapi isn’t so bad.
I will say that people who want their software well supported are likely to be ill served by “vibed” solutions. It is really tricky to debug complex software that was vibed, whether human or GenAI. If it worked perfectly the first time around and/or the software in question is fairly disposable, well those may be fine.
My understanding is that this is only partly true.
The problem as I understand it is that an LLM can create a code base for a prompt like “create an android app where I can record my medications”, and it might be “correct” and surprisingly usable. However, as your app evolves and “develops” it will be a mess, and the cognitive load quickly becomes unbearable. Everything feature breaks a heap of stuff and every fix breaks more things.
It depends on how it’s built. Anyone vibecoding without a plan will run into this very quickly. However, if a project is planned out in advance, broken down into multiple milestones, with measurable goals and thorough testing at each milestone before moving forward, the LLM can create surprisingly well-structured and solid code which fits the overall structure.
Basically, the more thought, planning, and structure is worked out before anybody runs even a single prompt, the better your results will be. And continual testing with the goal of finding every single weak point will give even better results. But planning it out ahead of time and doing all that testing takes a lot of time and human effort, and nobody vibecoding slop apps is doing that.
That’s right. I think vibecoding generally refers to people who don’t understand code and don’t have the ability to plan around potential problems.
Keep in mind that all of these projects cost a fuckton of money. This cannot go on forever.
You only need to slay the giants…
If someone does that to an app you’re actively selling you’re well within your rights to C&D them.
Reverse engineering isn’t illegal. It’s how projects like Wine are possible.
Well, depends.
Software is subject to copyright. Yes you can implement the same APIs, but when you get into the visual presentation, things can get copyright related even if the code isn’t being ripped off.
If you decompile rather than clone, well then the code is copyrighted even if transformed into plausible source code.
Of course then there are patents…
The way I unterstand it, at least in European practice, the code itself is copyrighted, as in, the actual text, not the concept behing it. Decompiled source is not the same as original source, it goes through rounds of compiler optimisations and the process of reversing that includes a lot of guesswork. So, in practice, decompiling and working on the decompiled source was at least tolerated, probably because it would have been a grey area at worst.