RFC 406i - The Rejection of Artificially Generated Slop (RAGS)
25 points by olliej
25 points by olliej
The spirit of the BOFH lives on in all sentient beings. Bollocks to the simulated-thinking machines.
I would unironically like an empathetic version of this.
This is like saying that the victims of bullying should be empathetic to the bully when they're asking not to be bullied. Because we are being bullied: we're being told to waste time on slop PRs that are by design plausible, so we have to waste time until we realize that they are actually garbage - some of the slop generators produce sufficiently obvious PRs that they can be instantly dismissed, but vibecoders have learned this and are now actively trying to hide their use of slop machines.
"Vibecoders" know that what they're generating is garbage, they know dealing with that garbage is a huge burden on those of us who do actual work, and yet they still insist on swamping us with it while claiming that they're contributing and being helpful - and complaining when people reject their "help" and "work".
All they are doing is wasting the time of actual developers, who are actually willing to put the work in to fix problems, and spending time reviewing what turns out to be garbage. As a result of their adopted position of hiding the use of slop generators I know that I at least am becoming suspicious of all new contributors - especially those trying to fix the previously intended "good first fix" bugs. Fundamentally when reviewing PRs from new people I don't know which bad patches are the result of someone learning the ropes or someone wasting everyone's time, and so I'm stuck either dismissing them all or wasting hours of my time.
I do not understand why the victims of this garbage are the ones who have to be empathetic, when we're the victims.
I genuinely believe this site is one of the most sincere forms of nerd empathy. The thing which pains so many selfless, giving individual is this thoughtless slap of slop across their agenda. Until very recently there was some semblance of effort parity between a contributor and a maintainer. But today there is incredible imbalance, not only imbalance in low quality "contributions" to high, but in the parity of effort of a contributor and maintainer. Further, the point of helping new contributors is often relational or communal, and the influx of this kind of contribution is the opposite of that.
But take a step back. What would be an empathetic response to an overwhelm of slop, disrespect to time, and endless machine spawned fodder? A humane, light hearted, humorous, self-hosted, hand written, gift to contributors and maintainers alike!
This page is a love letter, no matter how I turn it.
While I filter ai this seemed like the tag might be appropriate, even though it's specifically about addressing the garbage fest that all these vibecoders seem instant on producing*, whereas the ai tag is about hyping how these slop generators will stop producing garbage Any Day Now(tm).
* This comment brought to you by someone who has spent more than 4 hours over the last week reviewing garbage slop generated PRs that sound sufficiently plausible that it requires substantial effort to verify that they're garbage.
In another thread someone suggested "vibecoding-consequences" as a tag which I think fits this pretty well too: https://lobste.rs/s/lq1dxr/huntarr_your_passwords_your_entire_arr#c_n8ixod
This is really hilarious! When I use my reader which is kind of a HTML to text thing, it hides all the machine instructions! Otherwise it displays the RFC!
I don’t think this belongs in vibecoding, someone suggested a vibecoding-consequences tab. The vibecoding tag is for people to talk about their slop generation, not the people dealing with it.