[socketcluster]

AI exacerbates the slop it but it's an old trend. It boils down to "form over substance" which has been an issue in this industry since as far as I can remember; it just got worse and worse; especially over the past decade.

Solid solutions are being overshadowed by AI slop alternatives which were assembled in a few months with no long term vision; the results look great superficially, but under the bonnet, it's inefficient, expensive, closed, lacks flexibility, experience degrades over time. All the essential stuff that people don't think about initially is what's missing.

It feels like the logical conclusion of peak attention economy; the media fully saturated with junk where junk beats quality due to the volume advantage.

[peacebeard]

Makes me think of how fancy framework and library websites have gotten. Surely, if the website has sumptuous animations, the code must be good.

[socketcluster]

Haha yeah, sometimes the contrast between appearance and code quality is shocking. Most extreme case I experienced was in blockchain sector; all the software was beautiful, nice UI, smooth transitions, pixel-perfect graphics... But under the bonnet, nobody could even fully explain how anything worked and it was a real tangled mess worth billions in market cap at the time.