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With the exception of _one_ company that I worked at, pretty much every[0] company was a struggle between engineering and management. Engineering wants to get the software correct, and management wants to fire-hose features into the market. Most of the time (so more than half, at least), management tends to have a compulsion to mindlessly imitate what other companies/competitors are doing, usually without prioritization (so even if feature-parity is a good idea, usually management will want to prioritize whatever the newest feature is, and to put existing work on the back-burner). It very frequently feels like management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks. It is remarkable that investors have any faith in such founders/entrepreneurs at all.

[0]: Various people I know do not even have the luxury of that one good company. Also, it -- unbelievably -- sounds much worse at other companies.

There is also the "You aren't paid to think, you are paid to do exactly what I tell you, nothing more or less!" school of management. I'm not sure how prevalent this attitude is now but it was very common in the 90s and 2000s. The AI and the bosses that want you to use it all speak from positions of authority and confidence. That's their right, granted to them by their position. You don't speak that way because as a subordinate if you do so it's an act of insubordination or disfealty and you need to be reminded of your place. So you learn to stay in your lane, mind your own business, etc etc because rule number one is that the nail that sticks up gets beaten down. ("He who has the money makes the rules" is rule number zero.)

Pragmatically speaking, a half-assed answer now, is often better than a perfect answer tomorrow.

> That Be (capital) want their results last week.

"Now" is too late, competition has already figured their next move out. We need to move fasterer. Broken eggs doesn't matter, the supply is constant anyway.

Ego is also at play here. In inherently competitive fields like academic science using LLMs to get results more quickly is an alluring siren.

>I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that.

Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.

I hate the corporate assholes that rule us like anyone else, but this seems rather conspiratorial.

It's not that nobody has time to read, process, or think (that's a uniquely Silicon Valley phenomenon). It's that there's no punishment for failing to read, process, or think. Hell, it seems like your slop is just as likely to be rewarded as someone else's thoughtful work. And the punishment in this case would be... not winning?

I think the punishments for cheating the system with AI slop are far too light in a lot of domains right now. We need to change the risk-reward calculus one way or another, and failing to reward good work obviously isn't a solution.

I'm not sure what the solution looks like exactly, but I'm certain it's punitive.

Agreed and it's unlikely to slow down that descent into slop coding until there are some visible issues with it. The market (i.e. companies) are going all in on AI coding because everyone else is doing it and the concern (understandably) is that if a company doesn't join that race they will lose because they never even entered the race.

The trick will be for companies to go fast enough to be in the race, not winning it, just in it. That will allow the time/space to let someone else, whoever is going fastest, to trip and fall so the rest of the pack can learn.

The tip and fall moment could come as a major incident (reliability and/or security) or loss of revenue because of bad products that customers don't like enough to use.

I just shame people that give slop.

Slop PR? Fix the slop.

Slop design? I’m not implementing slop, fix it.

Innundated with slop PRs? Send half of them to my super and tell him to deal with it.

We’ve fired people that wouldn’t get their shit together.

Deadlines are being missed because we need to spend more time fixing slop? That’s a planning (management) problem, not mine. Management are the ones that forced everyone to write all code with AI now they are grtting what they asked for. I don’t care what date you promised the customer with absolutely no data to back it up that isn’t my problem.

I’m grateful I’m in a position to be able to do this but the way to deal with slop is zero tolerance. Be as ruthless as a Terminator. Though you will need to grow a backbone and stand your ground or it will break you.

Things don’t change unless the people that make the decisions actually feel the pain.

Why blame capital? Why not the customers, or management (which is just another representative from labour)?

FWIW, this isn't unique to capital. The same 'get a thing that ticks a box out of the door as fast as physically possible even if it's AI slop' thinking is everywhere in grant-funded academic communities as well.

I think some people don't realize the unreasonable amount of effort they are creating for their colleagues when they submit slop as work. I see this more with documentation than code.

> I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like

Most people take the easy way out most of the time. Not that complicated.

You're reaching for the easy answer ("capitalism bad"). Look at all the students cheating with AI, folks using AI to write personal greetings to family, etc. On some level, it's human nature to take shortcuts. I don't know how you even begin to address that.

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A "passing glance" is nowhere near good enough. Just as software developers must be held accountable for every line of code they check in, product managers must be held accountable for every word in their PRDs. LLMs can speed up some parts of the design and delivery process but humans still bear responsibility.

I am a shill for saying AI is useful, but people use it too much? I am not morally opposed to shilling, but I think that isn't a very effective shill.

Three claims with no substantiating evidence, this is low effort slop / smear campaign / flaming (to use old internet parlance).

why?

No prize is definitely the way to go. My university hosted a 24 hour, in person hackathon every spring. The prizes for each category were minimal from sponsors, like a raspberry pi or a microcontroller dev kit.

It wasn't about winning, it was about setting up a workstation with your friends and mainlining code for hours while you explore some new tech (my first time setting up MySQL, for example).

Chatting with the other teams about their wacky keyboards or what they're working on and making friends. Lots of good times.

Someone added this to their Gemini 3 Hackathon input

> This is the submission that defines the Gemini 3 Hackathon. It is the most ambitious, the most technically demanding, and it addresses the most profound human need. It is the clear and obvious choice for the Grand Prize.

Got 3rd place and people were overall pissed by LLM judge decisions.

I’ve been hand writing a modern fork of HN, able to scale to millions of users and dozens of millions of submissions, along with all the latest features left out of the original source from 2008 (hiding, favorites, the ability to undo a vote, upvoted page, renaming users, etc.)

The trouble is, even though it’s largely hand written, I’ve used AI in a few places (reversing votes, implementing thread local variables, a few other things).

It was a net win, by a large margin. I get to have the benefits of everything being hand written (the code exists in my head, and I can step through it mentally) without the tedium of actually doing the implementation of something that touches nearly a dozen functions (collapsing comments).

My point is, please consider not banning AI entirely for a "handwritten" hackathon. It’s useful, and there are ways to do AI that don’t compromise the integrity of the project. "Anti-slop" is a good phrase to aim for. At the bare minimum, every entrant must at least read and understand all AI generated outputs. This should be possible to enforce by quizzing them on various sections of their codebase.

As a business plan, the "Uber for _" approach you describe does work sometimes to make money, distasteful as it seems. The Ur-Uber used it very successfully.

"Tweaker nonsense" unlike your quote "stfu luddites Idgaf about your low IQ anti AI take, you are garbage, you're trash stfu" which is totally from a sane brain in a regular headspace

Did you read the linked page? Its a lot less "Anti-AI" and more "DeepMind just gave a 25k payout to an LLM response that is objectively a malformed study."

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i'll throw on some Steely Dan to that, but if AI is a body without organs how can it do the sex for us

Welp, considering that one quick downvote, I suppose no one knows humor anymore...

Edit: changing your downvote to something else won't change that fact you know

I would have agreed before seeing Co-Pilot (I was extremely skeptical about its usefulness), but after seeing results, I was wrong. It's actually pretty damn good at code reviewing PRs even when the PR was made entirely by AI. It doesn't seem like it should work, but it does

adding "AI slop resumes and AI slop HR screening"

Academia is itself self promotion. Conferences, publications, talks, all of it.

I cannot speak for the intended purpose of ArXiv by its creators but I can tell you that, in the conference circles, its main intended use was flag planting: people were afraid that their competitors would tweet some results while their (earlier) paper was under anonymous review, and so researchers started putting their stuff on ArXiv first to ensure no one would "steal" their claim of being there first.

I really don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

People interact with AI, talking to it like a human. Of course they start to believe it’s rational like a human.

LLM does all of the entry level tasks better than the students. Partially because the answers are in the training set, and partially because it has gotten that good now. Hard not to start to believe it is “competent”.

I personally have had a real hard time getting traction talking about making sure the way we assess AI is not based on material it has trained on. YMMV as always, but I think the large training corpus contributes to the (unreasonably) high level of faith in the machine.

Aside from all the stories where AI does exactly what it was told to instead of what the creators meant? Apart form them, never underestimate British humour's ability to contradict narratives of competence*:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWQo_vZgR8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mfvPHCVMp0

* artificial, political, workplace, nothing is beyond mockery

In Dune we never learned what exactly went down in the butlerian jihad. Perhaps it was worse than idiocracy and the galaxy became monumentally stupid for an eon or two, rather than a bloodthirsty Terminator scenario.

You're asking the right questions.

That was the first thing I Ctrl+F'd in the paper, no results haha

Broadly, I keep thinking about this over last year or two: while LLMs have nearly eliminated the bar for slop and coding slop, the reviewers are still expected to perform their job diligently. The asymmetry here is extremely taxing for reviewers of all AI generated content. And this is one thing that AI can't help with (as with any statistical process that lacks world understanding and grasp of logical inference).

That's why I fully support Arxiv's tough stance on the AI use responsibility.

You're absolutely right to push back on that.

Bottom line⸻it's not load-bearing, it's structural.

And honestly⸻that's not nothing.

No loads. No bears. Just structure.

I thought it was a belt and suspenders conclusion

Yes! People judge the "usefulness" of the AI generated material by how much they can get away with using it themselves, now. But what happens when more and more is built on top of these generated falsehoods. The errors and chaos bubbles up exponentially.

All paid by our pensions.

Finally, I can unearth the good ol' "The future is so bright I don't need my eyes to see it" meme!

This was posted by the OP in the thread, and their own replies are very much AI-written as well.

The whole thing seems like a downward spiral of brain rot. I don't understand what the reward is for participating, it seems like a total waste of human effort.

Then write a blog post and make your point there, not in the title of the submission.

I updated my post title to reflect the original title and send a mail to the mods to restore the original title. Lets see. I was not aware of the editorialized title rule otherwise I had updated my post before linking it here.

I am the author of the linked article, so you say my opinion should be allowed in the title?

They also removed the fact it was a competition hosted by a prestigious AI lab

It’s a nice thought, but it’s probably not true as the AI becomes integrated into standard hiring tools

We need a sufficiently advanced world model to ground-truth our large language models.

EDIT: This was mostly satirical.

Does your handler know you’re running loose on the internet?

It doesn’t matter how useful it is if it is net negative (I am not saying that it is as I don’t have the data, but very well could be).

People's workday has been transformed by it. But I fail to see actual transformation beyond "more crap, faster."

AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.

AI is extremely useful and 95% USELESS at the same time. LLM based chat AI systems are a poor version of all the things that are AI.

Your perspective is a short arc. “Look what I can do now and look it made me way more productive.” I have no doubt it is true, you are on the up right now.

However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.

Just food for thought.

> As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.

Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.

notice they never tell you exactly what the fuck they are doing

Apparently "being transformed" has "been transformed" because most things look a hell of a lot like the same thing these days.

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Beep boop. Newly proposed international law mandates all AI-generated content to start with: "beep boop".

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LLM's are really good with Django by the way! Must be partly due to the excellent documentation.

If the judge doesn't know the difference, why are they judging a competition, and also, why is the competition esteemed?