There's AI slop and anti-AI slop [LWN.net]

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 0:17 UTC (Sun) by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
In reply to: There's AI slop and anti-AI slop by dskoll
Parent article: Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

I don't feel that wranging cmake, keeping the related documentation up-to-date, adding general command-line options / gui fields and the like terribly creative.

If those aspects can be automated, then yes please. The automation will make choices more aligned to common practice than I likely will.

Overall industrialization was supposed to free people to perform the creative work. We saw how well it achieved those goals. "We" have an opportunity to do better.

(BTW, the AI field very, very, VERY much is into the "physical dexterity" area. Think of agricultural uses. The AI field always has been working on that aspect. It's just not necessarily a headline-making thing.)

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There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 0:57 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (13 responses)

Yes, I agree that wrangling cmake files, etc. is not terribly creative.

Neither are learning the rules of grammar, learning how to spell, and so on. But just as these mechanical parts of writing are prerequisites to being able to write a novel, being able to use tools is a prerequisite for being able to develop software. Every job (even with significant AI help) will have routine and boring bits that we just have to plow through to get on with the creative bits.

BTW, the AI field very, very, VERY much is into the "physical dexterity" area

Maybe in manufacturing or large-scale agriculture, but certainly not in retail, restaurants, food delivery, etc. Doing things in a factory or sorting out wheat from chaff in a field is a much more constrained problem than cooking a meal or taking care of an elderly person.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 2:34 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (12 responses)

> Neither are learning the rules of grammar, learning how to spell, and so on. But just as these mechanical parts of writing are prerequisites to being able to write a novel

This triggered a memory for me. I have a friend who won several awards for 3D design. She graduated high school in the 90-s but couldn't get admitted into an art university because her painting and sculpting skills sucked. But then she discovered Maya 3D and it turns out that she is a great 3D designer.

Do you think that AI might just help some people to do great stuff that was impossible before because they never had the technical skill or ability to master some of the "low level" prerequisites?

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 3:32 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (11 responses)

Do you think that AI might just help some people to do great stuff that was impossible before because they never had the technical skill or ability to master some of the "low level" prerequisites?

No, probably not. As a 3D designer, your friend still had to learn and master all the fiddly and annoying aspects of 3D design, and spend time getting good at it.

AI makes it far too tempting to skip the boring learning phase and you end up with people who can produce... something... but don't really understand how they made it, how to improve it, or how to reliably produce more and more good work.

When we invented machines to do our physical work for us, it was great... no more sweating in the fields. But we became more sedentary as we outsourced physical labor to machines.

When we invented calculators, it was great... no more tedious arithmetic. People's skills got weaker, but it didn't really matter because a calculator was close by.

When we invented phones with contact lists, it was great... no more memorizing phone numbers. I bet now most people outsource that to their machines.

AI is different. AI learns. If we outsource our learning to machines, then that's a problem. Because while we can get by doing less physical labor, less arithmetic, and less phone-number memorization, learning is an important part of what makes us human and what helps our brain to develop. There's already research showing that AI harms cognitive development and harms critical thinking.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 4:16 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> As a 3D designer, your friend still had to learn and master all the fiddly and annoying aspects of 3D design, and spend time getting good at it.

Note *of 3D design*. The art schools, however, require abilities that are adjacent to 3D design, like the ability to create that design from physical clay with your physical hands, but are NOT an actual prerequisite for good design work.

Likewise, yes the ability to write reasonable code must be learned, but telling Claude what to do (and recognizing its misteaks and design blunders; just remember the thing is trained on *all* code, not just good code) is different enough from the ability to write a working CMake recipe for your project by hand that requiring the latter before you're allowed to be proficient with the former is just plain dumb.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 4:42 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

> No, probably not. As a 3D designer, your friend still had to learn and master all the fiddly and annoying aspects of 3D design, and spend time getting good at it.

I disagree. I think we'll see good AI-based creations. Perhaps surpassing the traditional media.

E.g. it's not really feasible to make true immersive 3D videos where you can walk around the scene and observe the action from various angles. It might be possible now with AI.

> AI makes it far too tempting to skip the boring learning phase and you end up with people who can produce... something... but don't really understand how they made it, how to improve it, or how to reliably produce more and more good work.

But do you understand how the CPU does instruction decoding on the hardware level? Or how the silicon for the chips is made? And if it's that too removed from actual software development for you, most software developers don't understand how Internet works at the low level (autonomous systems, BGP, routing, etc.). Or how the kernel works on the low level: DMA, interrupts, memory mapping and so on.

Software development is a young field, just about 50 years old (software existed before, but it was more like special-case calculators rather than software systems). And so it was feasible to be familiar with _all_ the facets of software development, from the low-level bit-banging to high-level enterprise systems.

It's now just splintering into specialized fields. So what if the new graduates can't grow their own monocrystalline silicon crystals, etch chips, and build a compiler from scratch? I really don't worry about that. People will just use AI to build systems out of low-level components.

> There's already research showing that AI harms cognitive development and harms critical thinking.

Indeed. But this is hardly a new thing. Almost EVERY large-scale advancement brought its own problems that had to be solved or at least mitigated.

Look at Youtube videos of early electric devices. Like some of the first pluggable lamps that used open pools of mercury for contacts. Or maybe how people used carbon tetrachloride in fire extinguishers and PFAS in firefighting foam. I bet that people will be looking back into the current time period with the same emotions: "They were using naked uncoordinated non-normalized class-I memetic danger LLMs to do WHAT?!?"

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 13:44 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (8 responses)

I think we'll see good AI-based creations.

I'm sure we will. But that wasn't the question; the question was: "AI might just help some people to do great stuff..." AI is not going to help people at all. It will just do it for them and the human creativity aspect will be so small as to be nonexistent. And that is why the livelihoods of human creators will be destroyed.

But do you understand how the CPU does instruction decoding on the hardware level? Or how the silicon for the chips is made?

I do, actually, at least on a high level. I studied electrical engineering and took courses in both logic design and chip fabrication. I also spent three years working for a company that reverse-engineered integrated circuits.

AI is not simply moving things to a higher level of abstraction, in my opinion. It's a fundamental shift that will mostly eliminate the need for human creativity (at least, as far as AI-enamored managers are concerned.)

But this [AI harming cognitive development] is hardly a new thing

Uh... yes, it is. Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development, with the possible exception of social media which is pretty universally seen as harmful nowadays?

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 17:16 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development, with the possible exception of social media which is pretty universally seen as harmful nowadays?

Tetraethyl lead...

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 18:13 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Sure. And we banned tetraethyl lead (mostly... I believe it can still be used in aviation fuel, or at least it was allowed until recently.)

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted May 31, 2026 21:06 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> It will just do it for them and the human creativity aspect will be so small as to be nonexistent. And that is why the livelihoods of human creators will be
> AI is not simply moving things to a higher level of abstraction, in my opinion. It's a fundamental shift that will mostly eliminate the need for human creativity

Try AI. And give it a serious try with a sizeable project. You'll quickly find out that it's not going to replace developers. And that there is plenty of purely practical experience required to get value out of it.

You don't have to like it, but even if you're going to be anti-AI then it makes sense to know what exactly you're up against.

> (at least, as far as AI-enamored managers are concerned.)

Hah. I remember when VB/Delphi was all the rage and managers thought that you could just drag&drop things, connect them together, and have them do everything.

AI is the next level of that. But in its current stage it's not the end-goal.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 13:15 UTC (Thu) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (4 responses)

> Can you show me other technologies that have harmed cognitive development

Books.

What is the difference between the bible and the collected works of The Incredible Spider-Man?
One proves god exists, the other proves spiderman exists.

Or does it?

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 14:50 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

That is obviously tongue-in-cheek. There are fantasy books like The Bible and Spiderman, but I doubt they harm cognitive development, though those who take them too seriously can be harmful to others.

And there are plenty of books that impart useful information and help with cognitive development. Whereas it is my belief that generative AI, as a technology, harms cognitive development by letting people outsource a lot of the thinking they would have had to do themselves before.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 17:38 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Whereas it is my belief that generative AI, as a technology, harms cognitive development by letting people outsource a lot of the thinking they would have had to do themselves before.

In that case, I'd put it as "social media". While there have "always"[1] been folks who outsourced their thinking to their preferred 24-hour news channel, social media "let" everyone do it more often and it inevitably became a habit for more and more people over time.

[1] Modulo 24-hour news being a rather recent development in the grand scheme of things.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 17:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

When writing was relatively new, we have people on record as saying that reading and writing harmed thinking abilities because instead of memorising the information you need to know for your argument and being good at expressing yourself clearly first attempt (which is necessary when you're making a speech off-the-cuff), you could have your sources in writing and do a second pass at writing down your argument.

The open question about AI is whether it will end up being like written language, where yes, we lost skills, but the force-multiplier effect of writing meant that we benefited more from the new skills that appeared over the next 50 years than we lost by no longer developing the skills that writing made irrelevant.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 11, 2026 21:45 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> the force-multiplier effect of writing meant that we benefited more from the new skills that appeared over the next 50 years than we lost by no longer developing the skills that writing made irrelevant.

Not to mention the increase in the number of people able to participate in the activities. While being able to orate Homer's epics from memory is useful, I think it is far better that everyone has the ability for their parents to share the stories with them from a book than having to wait for the traveling orator to come around (never mind having to sync up with the flashbacks to make sure everyone is up to speed). We've seen it before too: stage theater to movies; concerts to vinyl; TV and movie theaters to VHS; physical medium to the Internet.

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 3, 2026 15:07 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> I don't feel that wranging cmake, keeping the related documentation up-to-date, adding general command-line options / gui fields and the like terribly creative.

This is simply because CMake is the "assembly" of build systems and no one has figured out a good, higher-level build system yet. (Probably because C/C++ were not designed to be built easily in the first place, so maybe these languages will never have a decent one. I digress)

In any case, asking AI to generate CMake code is a productive[*] but short-term solution. The longer term solution is to have a better, higher-level build system (with or without C/C++). People will still ask AI for help then, but the productivity impact will be much lower, closer to stackoverflow copy/paste.

Generally speaking, whenever coding gets tedious it's because the tools suck (and yes they do).

[*] assuming good quality training data, which looks like a serious challenge with CMake...

There's AI slop and anti-AI slop

Posted Jun 4, 2026 1:17 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You can try aiming higher: maybe C/C++ need to be replaced with a language that has a better build system story.