- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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“… an AI slop version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t fucking work” also known as Microsoft Office 365
It feels disengenuous to say people vibe code things.
I know it’s correct English, I just think it’s kind of a bullshit statement.
When dumbasses talk to AI’s and the AI’s do things for them, it’s wild to think the credit goes to the dumbasses.
This is like your boss saying he did all your dev work and calling it “boss coding”.
My experience of using AI is it can save you a LOT of work, but you need to supervise it REALLY closely and give it sufficient code context for it to work properly. It only knows what it knows and if it doesn’t know it will make shit up. But if you do use it within its limits it will identify bugs, generate tests, generate a lot of boiler plate and help you be more productive.
Being open source is not a reason to avoid it. However AI does produce slop and unattended it can produce execrable patches which are practically incoherent to anyone used to human coding patterns. So there should be rules about coding style, patch / merge / pull requests that diffs are self evident, concise and obvious. Most AIs will read a guidance file so this stuff can be defined. And if a person uses AI to generate a patch they should review this patch first before daring anyone else to look at it.
Yes, personally I don’t have a huge problem if someone uses an LLM, that’s been trained only on opensource code, on a project, but that someone has to put their name to the code, documentation, tests or anything elsr produced, and take full responsibility for it. As in, they suffer the same consequences if it causes an issue as if they’d hand coded it, with particular attention paid to whether the result is maintainable, and whether it breaches any licences.
Of course, most LLMs have, by now, injested a lot of proprietary code that people have mindlessly sent in queries, rendering all of their output tainted.
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
Jesus fuck did the LLM slop bots come out?
Why the fuck is everyone in favor of slop apps now?
The comments here are insane
“In favor” is a strong phrase. “Understanding the inevitable” might be more apt.
What barely works right now will get better. What was slop will surpass the best humans can code soon. I am old enough to remember when “Made in Taiwan” and “Made in Japan” were racist pejoratives for bad quality.
It’s great to love your horse and your ferrier business, but when you’re watching Model T’s roll off the assembly line, even with initial build quality issues, you can see the world is changing.
I don’t think it’s a apt description, this so the first time human knowledge has in anyway been “automated”.
It’s either “doesn’t work” or “does work”.
And once it truly does work it’ll be a different store. These sloperators thing that they have AGI like if they use the correct magic words a real enterprise app will come out. But it’s not true, they are riddles with technical debt, drag, security vulnerabilities and bugs. No matter how many times you sift through them with the LLM.
Once AGI has arrived its a different story. Once coding is “solved” via a AI it’s pretty much the singularity. software development requires critical thinking skills that once acquired will allow them to pretty much do any knowledge job on the planet and actually self improve.
LLMs aren’t it, and when something real comes along I’ll be ok board. LLMs have their use cases but anything outside of automating a call center or a voice assistant is pretty much a anti-pattern.
These aren’t model Ts these are horse drawn wagons with 500 horses so they say they can have as much horse power as a real car does.
This is nowhere near the first time in human history knowledge has been automated: writing, the printing press, mechanization, hard disks, databases, algorithms, the internet, all have done the same.
It isn’t boolean. Programs can be buggy but improve. They aren’t either perfect or nonfunctional.
I don’t know if AGI is achievable. I do know AI will be capable of programming of increasing complexity.
Decompilation projects are getting attention right now because AI models being able to do it is a new thing. Essentially the end of closed source is a huge deal and people haven’t realized the implications…
They claim it’s “clean room”, so no decompilation involved. I’m just waiting for the lawsuits to arrive, so we may learn how much of that is true. The big ones probably are already checking the code.
Companies were just dropping the entirety of their proprietary code base into chatbots to save money after firing their best developers. I bet that’s where they’re getting most of it.
I think that could only be really claimed if you know what training data the LLM was trained on. That will only matter if it ends up in court though and no one seems willing to fight that fight at the moment.
This. I am so demoralised as a SWE who was trying to get out of working for a morally objectionable company by working on passion projects and selling them as apps. Guess I need to find something else… again.
Depends. Hand-written apps will still be more valuable than slopped ones as they’re far more trustworthy and less generic (like, literally), not to mention people being environmentally conscious about their choices. A good, trustworthy app that respects the user (and therefore omits e.g. privacy invasion) is still worth a few bucks to many.
I don’t mean this to be snippy but people don’t give a shit how or who wrote the code.
Most people will never know either way. If you download an app from an app store you don’t know what the code looks like.
Also software devs like to think they are clever and valuable because big tech has been pumping them up for a couple decades but the business doesn’t actually give a shit how a feature gets implemented only that it was and the customers value it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code. The main issue with them is the pace of change which has been greatly accelerated and how it can eclipse the rate a dev can understand the change.
I know people like to claim that every thing they make is slop but that ignores that basically the entire industry is using it to varying amounts and are unlikely to stop going forward.
It’s a confirmation bias thing.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code
My understanding is that this is only partly true.
The problem as I understand it is that an LLM can create a code base for a prompt like “create an android app where I can record my medications”, and it might be “correct” and surprisingly usable. However, as your app evolves and “develops” it will be a mess, and the cognitive load quickly becomes unbearable. Everything feature breaks a heap of stuff and every fix breaks more things.
It depends on how it’s built. Anyone vibecoding without a plan will run into this very quickly. However, if a project is planned out in advance, broken down into multiple milestones, with measurable goals and thorough testing at each milestone before moving forward, the LLM can create surprisingly well-structured and solid code which fits the overall structure.
Basically, the more thought, planning, and structure is worked out before anybody runs even a single prompt, the better your results will be. And continual testing with the goal of finding every single weak point will give even better results. But planning it out ahead of time and doing all that testing takes a lot of time and human effort, and nobody vibecoding slop apps is doing that.
That’s right. I think vibecoding generally refers to people who don’t understand code and don’t have the ability to plan around potential problems.
If someone does that to an app you’re actively selling you’re well within your rights to C&D them.
Reverse engineering isn’t illegal. It’s how projects like Wine are possible.
Well, depends.
Software is subject to copyright. Yes you can implement the same APIs, but when you get into the visual presentation, things can get copyright related even if the code isn’t being ripped off.
If you decompile rather than clone, well then the code is copyrighted even if transformed into plausible source code.
Of course then there are patents…
The way I unterstand it, at least in European practice, the code itself is copyrighted, as in, the actual text, not the concept behing it. Decompiled source is not the same as original source, it goes through rounds of compiler optimisations and the process of reversing that includes a lot of guesswork. So, in practice, decompiling and working on the decompiled source was at least tolerated, probably because it would have been a grey area at worst.
In terms of whether the ‘clean room’ approach is as critical in Europe or not, I can’t be sure. It might be more permissable for someone to use a decompile as a reference and also directly work on a replacement. However I’m pretty sure starting with a decompile of proprietary software as a direct codebase would run afoul of issues.
Otherwise, imagine you have an HEVC encoded rip of a 4K blu ray. You transcode it to AV1. The bytes are totally different, and even the resultant frames are likely not even pixel for pixel identical. I don’t think copyright law would deem that not a violation, regardless of jurisdiction.
Transcoding would not be a violation, but in order to rip it in the first place, you had to bypass technological restrictions built into the disc and the drive. Under section 1201 of the DMCA, the creation or sharing of software that can do thatis a felony punishable by half a million dollars and six months in prison for a first offense.
That is explicitly prohibited by virtually all proprietary software license agreements.
Which makes it a breach of contract, but not illegal.
Guess I need to find something else… again.
Keep in mind that all of these projects cost a fuckton of money. This cannot go on forever.
You only need to slay the giants…
Why can’t passion projects be a thing anymore ? Because they can be decompiled ?
Not inherently (you can still do things because you want to), but I mentioned wanting to make a living out of selling them. Trivial decompilation makes this completely unviable.
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
Can’t decompile an app that does all the real work in the cloud.
Nope but AI can perfectly re-create the API by observing the payloads being sent and received, and make an app with the same functionality.
@LastYearsIrritant @chunes then use cloud as a black box, replicating it behaviour
To be fair, neither does the real MS office
There’s a hobby project I’ve been working on for over a year, but now I’m not sure I’m even going to bother to release it because everyone will just assume I vibe coded it in a weekend.
Please do release it! The loudest voices on social media shouldn’t make your decisions for you.
Good point.
If it’s open source, won’t the commits be enough to prove you didn’t do it over a weekend?
Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?
LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can’t handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don’t import, formulas in sheets break, etc.
Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like ONLYOFFICE have overcome them so it’s doable.
I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.
This. As much as I want LibreOffice to succeed (AND I WANT LIBREOFFICE TO SUCCEED SO SIT DOWN YOU IN THE BACK), having converted actual work projects over to LibO and maintain them has been hell, to say the least.
2026 and tables and text boxes still explode the document into confetti if you look at it funny. Hours of frustratingly reconstructing documents, or reloading progress saves because moving a text box one pixel over makes things explode.
LibO needs QA and maintenance fixes, badly. If you don’t want LibO to use AI models to bug hunt, then enlist and help fix it. Development in turning LibO from a messy desk project to something actually useable efficiently has taken literal decades already.
OpenOffice hasn’t released a major version since 2013.
My team uses LibreOffice exclusively, and extensively. It’s fine.
Ah my bad, I meant ONLYOFFICE*
So many offices 😅
Oh sure.
OnlyOffice compatability with MS is much, much better than LO.
However, I think LO is focused on compatibility with the spec rather than MS - so its an ideological thing. Not much comfort if you want comments in documents I guess.
compatibility with a standard does not mean much if nobody implements the standard
I disagree.
LibreOffice is a flagship FOSS project - they have delivered genuine benefits to users over a long period of time with no shady financing arrangements or other encumberances - few projects can claim this outstanding status.
They could not have achieved that status if they were dancing along to Microsoft’s merry jig. With very limited resources LO can’t implement microsoft’s proprietary features.
OnlyOffice by comparisson is opensource but has a paid tier intended for corporate clients. That being the case they really need to offer better compatibility.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day it’s a work tool.
I had a situation a few weeks ago where a Microsoft user sent us a PowerPoint of screenshots full of comments from the client about what to change. People on MacOS couldn’t see the comments in their software and I couldn’t see it on Ubuntu Studio using LibreOffice either. ONLYOFFICE had them but they were still hard to find in the UI.
The desktop scaling one just does my head in too. Feel like on Linux I should have more options and utility and I probably could figure something out if I tinker with it. But who has the time ey
collabora for me. Libreoffice-based but adjusted for “normies” (user interface from this century)
The 1995 user interface soothes my nerves but I will give collabora a try
what is this referring to?
The ArtCraft suite.
Someone has been creating open source clones of the most popular industry standard programs that have been enshitified to oblivion like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. They’re free and open source. I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as what the meme suggest. They do work from what I can tell although some features appear to be missing. And since they’re open source if anything needs fixed it will be fixed in the future.
Except Claude shat them out in record time which means they’re likely virtually unmaintainable.
And probably burned half of the Amazon forrest to do so. What the hell.
I mean, I’m kind of for it not as a surface level practical solution, but as a symbolic fighting back against the big guys.
Like, if AI is going to make the worker valueless why not use it to make the products of rent-seeking software giants useless as well?
It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.
Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.
Probably this: https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft
claude, make everything on my website a pointless animation. No i don’t care about readability.
i feel like everytime this is my old man yells at cloud moment but i really hope we don’t get a web where every single element has to slide in.
At least it’s viewable without javascript.
Well that’s pretty much this age’s version of animated gifs everywhere
In the cloud era of the internet we‘ll all be shouting at clouds.
Oh my god my framerate! How the hell do you make a WEBSITE lag?!
By vibecoding it
This is actually one of the best things of this year. First they shit on adobe and now Microsoft, the two most hated and worst hurdles in the way of people switching to Linux. I’m actually predicting that there will be regulations now by the government over this stuff (it won’t work or do anything of course because it’s not even touching their code base) since our government loves money and corporations more than humans.
Did libre office go strictly non AI? That’d be stupid because it wont go away. What i understand is not accepting 100 file PRs the author doesnt understand.
But the deeds AI can do during testing, planning, refactorings are invaluable.
You guys keep repeating the same arguments but I‘m not sure you actually know what they mean. AI won‘t go away? You don‘t know the future and even if so I doubt you would have any idea in what shape or form AI will exist in the future. It‘s an empty phrase.
It’s also like… libreoffice has done fine so far being developed without AI. You can just keep doing that.
Disagree that it’s an empty phrase though-- it’s a prediction, like any other prediction.
That’d be stupid because it wont go away.
It doesn’t need to go away. Just continue to ignore it.
It’s just an office suite, one that’s already fully functional and works great. It doesn’t need AI. Rejecting AI won’t hurt them at all, even in the very long term.
It doesnt need AI features, i agree. Albeit a MCP for agents will be inevitable unless this project wants to fall way behind commercial projects. Also the meme is about developing w/o the help of AI which is like going to work by horse.
which is like going to work by horse
Much cheaper and more environmentally sustainable?
A horse is cheaper? If you include working hours to care for it plus more commute time, it is not. But i do agree i’d prefer roads full of horses instead of cars.
Long live Libre devs!! Been with yall for over a decade
