Good code will still win

13 hours ago

The term 'slop' refers to low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet, such as images, text, and spam.
The author argues that AI models will write good code due to economic incentives, as good code is cheaper to generate and maintain, and competition will favor models that help developers ship reliable features quickly.
Current trends show software development is changing rapidly, with AI tools leading to more code output, increased complexity, and potential brittleness, as noted by examples from Ryan Dahl and others.
Analysis indicates that developers are shipping more code with AI agents, resulting in larger PRs, increased outages, and issues like code bloat and poor aesthetics, as described by Andrej Karpathy.
Good code, as defined by simplicity and maintainability, reduces complexity and costs over time, making it economically advantageous in the long run compared to complex, sloppy code.
The AI coding adoption is still early, and as technology matures, economic forces will drive models toward generating good code to stay competitive, moving beyond the current messy phase of innovation.

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