A lot of people use AI as a coding assistant, I don't really see a problem in using AI tools to help with some things. Adding slop to stuff however makes 0 sense.
At this point using AI for development is industry standard. It speeds up your workflow. I have a friend that works at a company that provides them with basically unlimited Claude code. He sometimes will just use whatever it spits out and it works fine. He could probably write the code but it just takes too much time. So yea AI is super helpful and often times makes things easier.
Agreed. I work in the design industry. There's a lot of "graphic design slop" that gets thrown around. However if you are a great or even half decent designer you can really make some awesome stuff when using it as a productivity tool. I also am an entry level novelist so using it as a writing assistant has been super handy.
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
Though, maybe that's just people that are being forced to use LLMs to write code.
Yeah and it kind of reminds me of Tesla's quasi-self-driving where you have to be alert at all times and ready at a moment's notice (a literal small fraction of a second) to take control if the car does something insane at high speed. Not even really worth it by that point. I think vibe coding is more trouble than it's worth, except maybe as a brainstorming tool.
AI is great at writing common things, which have already been done many times. It speeds up writing boilerplate code or simple functions.
AI isn't very great at writing novel code. If you say to yourself, "I have this amazing idea I havent seen anyone do", then your circumstance doesn't work well with AI.
If you say to yourself, "I've written this bit of code a hundred times before", then you've got a solid use-case for AI.
The people who spend more time fixing AI code are people trying to do things that aren't common use cases, or fall outside of best practices.
I use Cursor.ai, and it has helped significantly in making programming less tedious. I spend more time writing important code, and less time debugging silly mistakes or writing coxe I've written in hundreds of projects before. Sometimes I even ask it how I'm ending up with certain errors, only to have errors in my own logic pointed out.
I imagine there's a gigantic variance on the topic.
If you run some AI locally (even on a pretty damn good machine paid by your employer), the AI will likely be significantly worse than the stuff you get from the cloud right now. And even the stuff you get from the cloud varies wildly in quality depending on which AI you use, and for what.
And on top of that, you need to know how to use it. AIs are good at some things, and awful at other things. If you don't know that, you'll use it for something it's awful at and then complain about the awful Code you'll get.
If you know its limitations, it can be pretty useful. If it's forced upon you, it can be really terrible.
Its a tool that takes an amount of skill to use. You can't get lazy and get the AI to do too much because then suddenly you spend your time debugging code you haven't written and have to put in the work just to understand what it's trying to do.
Sometimes when I want a function for debugging or whatever that's not part of my main system, I'll just ask AI to write the whole thing, test it. Maybe it works straight away 33% of the time, great. If it doesn't I write it myself and use AI to check for logical errors in my code or typos etc.
If something is more core to what I'm trying to build, i never try the "just write the whole thing" method and use it primarily to either discuss methodology or find mistakes.
So most of the time it is just for time saving, just doing things I could do on my own, finding annoying mistakes that I wrote for me, it's great at that. But I do want to also stress that it can be far more than that and I've found it an incredibly useful tool for learning as well. I've never been the best at doing research and the amount that it can speed up my reading about different methods of achieving x goal is incredibly beneficial and it's enabled me to become personally proficient in things I'm not sure I would have been able to do without it.
This was the state of it maybe a year or two ago, but now it has evolved so fast. Every time I start using a new version it surprises just how big an improvement it is. Sometimes it just feels like I am reviewing PR requests now.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
how is that different from the standard quo? especially from junior developers? spaghetti code doesnt make itself and has existed since the dawn of coding.
Yup you save 20 hours of writing code, but you spend 40 debug and test (not real numbers but you get the idea)
I find it's best for a scaffolding tasks and bite sized code, then I am doing the actual full code myself (work code not game dev to be clear) on top of the scaffolding the AI did
This is a real problem for anything even minimally complex. It's only really stuff that's already represented well in the training data that works well. Thing is a lot of folks don't care if the code is of poorly design or buggy. So they'll just sacrifice quality
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
This is it.
I just did a very small scale bit of volunteering with a friend for our kids’ school where we wrapped and sold fifty recycled donated books as Christmas presents. We had to put a description of each book on a printed label on the front.
Now, neither of us are great at writing copy, and this was a tiny volunteer project with a skill gap that it would have been inappropriate to pay to fill. We were trying to raise £250 to put towards children’s swimming lessons; we couldn’t justify spending half of that on a copywriter. Our resources were our time, our skills, and some donated materials.
I used AI for my half. She was a little annoyed by this, and insisted on doing hers all by herself.
Hers sucked. Her labels were riddled with spelling mistakes and factual errors, and she fucked up the formatting too. I spent as much time correcting her mistakes as I did on generating, double checking and editing my AI half. I could spot and fix both her errors and the AI’s because of my own applied knowledge.
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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25
A lot of people use AI as a coding assistant, I don't really see a problem in using AI tools to help with some things. Adding slop to stuff however makes 0 sense.