Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jt2190 21 days ago
I don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever.

A common way to market to these firms is to be very easy to find when their software starts to have serious issues.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/
2 comments
zie1ony 21 days ago
Our outcome is also AI-generated (or AI-assisted) code. It is not possible to rewrite 100k loc in a week. Where our stills are is refactoring at scale with help of agents. Basically, software engineer knows better what prompt to put, and when to redo the process or go different path.
link
TacticalCoder 21 days ago
> I don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever.

Well but something really is something totally new. Github went from x commits per year in 2025 (when AI-slop was already being pushed to Github) to the same number of commits in four weeks in 2026. 2025 compared to 2024 was already something like 15x.

It's never happened in the history of computing that so much new code was produced so quickly.

My bet is we'll see much more of this. And these aren't going to be 100% AI-pilled companies solving these issues but companies like the one in TFA: experienced devs using the help of LLMs to fix slop.

My other bet: slop shall outlive COBOL and dwarf COBOL's legacy big times.

link
evilduck 21 days ago
Most of the new Github bloat will just be thrown away. Vibe coding scratches an immediate itch and it's easy to do. Once the problem changes nobody is going to update the first project because that's hard, they'll just vibe code an entirely new solution leaving the first to rot until they delete their dead repo clutter or move on from the company and the account and all of its repos are deleted in one fell swoop.
link
j_w 21 days ago
How do you "throw away" the bloat when it becomes embedded through the code base? Is GitHub just going to rollback to some commit from 3 years ago?
link
coderenegade 21 days ago
And those of us working in the slopfields will probably be employed until the day we die. Love it.
link
zie1ony 21 days ago
I bet on the loc growing exponentially. I wrote this at the end of 2024: https://codegen.substack.com/p/future-of-software-is-growing...

Hope you like it.

link