- 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
The only reason Microsoft exists today is because of Exchange and an old market share on consumer/prosumer OS.
They’re a glorified email hosting company and an embarrassment to software development. Idc what AI does to their shitty software. Fucking hate Outlook.
That’s not really accurate, Azure is massive.
Long live Libre devs!! Been with yall for over a decade
a couple of months ago i asked about this one of local Forbes editors and they explained this phenomenon as “because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”. i decided not to continue this conversation because that’s fucking stupid
“because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”.
I don’t think it’s wise to stake the future of computing on “It’s not that the bear dances well, it’s that the bear dances at all.”
It’s not really stupid. Things that are unusual are more noticeable, and garner more comment. We’ve grown used to devs tirelessly doing what they do, to the point most people don’t think about where their software comes from, but a machine sort of doing it (poorly, so very poorly) is novel, so people talk about it.
Currently, software mostly working as it should is the norm, so people don’t talk about it much. When the wave of slopcoded disasters starts to grow, people will talk about it, because software is suddenly not working as it should.
and yet no one is celebrating a piece of software well done
Id be done for a “it just works” day to celebrate all of invisable labour that makes the world work
they’re desperate for ai to be profitable.
you’re right
Tinfoil hat time:
A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.
I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn’t exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.
At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I’d give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn’t act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn’t be that much larger.
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.
I specifically asked our CEO about this just to cover my ass. It seems insane to trust these guys at all. Here in the USA, small businesses have de facto no legal protection from large businesses.
Absolutely. Especially if you have company info / IP that someone else would pay a lot for. This is a question for lawyers and managers to negotiate with the lawyers at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, not for us little people to decide. I’m not throwing company data in an online service that is not cleared for us to use, and I don’t even work with spicy stuff. Back in my IT days we would have called that a data breach, which would have lead to something from an unpleasant hour in the boss’ office to a promotion to customer.
Makes me wonder how much of the frontier models hacking is just “our devs uploaded the codebase to Claude and suddenly it knows where all the backdoors are”?
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too.
An enormous amount of people use this technology for privat company data without batting an eye; not just software developers, but business people for reports, etc.
They all throw their confidential data in there without even considering the implications, just “trusting” Anthropic. claude code bots are running on tens of thousands of proprietary code bases that used to be private, and of course they are using all this data to train their model.
It’s standard operating practice to steal everything. The world’s full of dumb fucks.
Then people are surprised that claude code gets better at coding
Better at replicating closed source software.
It surely gets better at coding in general, after all there are smart people at anthropic with near limitless budgets, but my conspiracy thesis is that it gets a lot better at replicating stuff it has seen before, but really shouldn’t have.
Meta had an explicit higher price for using their model without retention of prompts for training. This all but confirms your theory.
Wait… wait… you believe Facebook?
Oh, facebook will steal the data even if they say they won’t. What’s interesting is they put a price on blatant prompt copying.
We steal your data: $5 We steal your data and tell you we don’t: $10
I’m sure it’s all but officially confirmed, that all the people upload to it goes to training data unsanitised. And Microslop for sure uploaded entirety of their codebase to all the bots. This is at least part of the reason why claude is so surprisingly OK at reverse-engineering all the big stuff.
I don’t like LibreOffice but any actual Open Source dev deserves infinite more respect than those prompstitutes.
I disagree, their efforts don’t go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.
To be fair, neither does the real MS office
Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?
How it looks, not how it works. Very buggy iir.
I think that was the joke, because MS Office sucks. lol
Tells you something about Microsoft Office
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.
that doesn’t work
You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.
Excel is the 7th ring of hell
What level is Teams?
Satan just asked god to add new layers of hell.
But they got stuck in infinity meetings
He also asked to remove all the fun emojis because fun is banned in hell.
they made Teams 2, Satan might not get the note because he uses teams.
If you think using it is bad, try deploying/maintaining it
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should’ve pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their “OOXML” format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office’s behavior, bugs and all.
There is another twist to this in that the OOXML format didn’t actually define the bugs in the format and MS Office itself didn’t actually follow the officially defined specification they pushed through. This inevitably led to every product that tried to make use of the official spec (e.g. Open Office) failing to be compatible with MS Office. It took the open source devs many years to properly duplicate the buggy mess that is the real MS Office formats.
Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of ‘no AI’ as a feature made me respect them so much more.
Based, x2
I wonder how long this will hold. Remind me 3 years?
It’s only tragic for a month, after which the other project gets abandoned because its unmaintainable or the vibecoder got bored and moved on to another viral idea
I’m not going to switch to something unless I know its going to be around when I need it
The person behind all these *craft projects has (or claims to have) made millions from his AI image / video creation services and scam-enabling deepfake voice cloner. The projects are linked to and funded by his commercial endeavors. He’s also extremely exuberant about real developers and creators losing their jobs, and suffers from massive AI psychosis. Unfortunately I don’t think he or this project is going anywhere.
I don’t think any of it will ever actually work, but he’s very good at making outlandish comments and drumming up hype, so we’re going to keep hearing about it anyway.
abandoned because its unmaintainable
Exactly this. It’s hard enough maintaining my own code. It can take a good 15 mins or so to familiarise myself with something I haven’t worked on in a short while. Seeing code that isn’t mine is very challenging. Not the code itself, but the methods and structures used by the other person. All that has to be done before hunting bugs and adjusting features. Then of course there’s the things you don’t know about that can be easily missed.
An AI would need to thoroughly know the code and detailed context on the decisions behind it all, every session, in order to be able to maintain it with vibe, because the vibe coder won’t know any of this.
To me, its tragic for exactly that reason; the vibiot, is lavished and rewarded with attention, when they don’t even understand the outputs from their prompt slot machine. So when they get bored or confused by their projects and chase the next craze…The person that should’ve gotten the accolades for understanding and maintaining their work, is forgotten still. I don’t like this timeline, its a stupid time to be alive.
That rule where something is expected to last in the future as long as it already has in the past probably applies here
Damn; looks like grandma is going to outlive us all
The wikipedia article on the effect covers this with an awfully blunt aside lol
The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, like books, those that do not have an “unavoidable expiration date”.[2] For example, human beings are perishable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Neat, I haven’t heard of this one before. I’ll likely use it in the future
Yeah, I love little rules of thumb like that
That’s why I code in Fortran
‘prompt slot machine’ <- I’m borrowing that
Or just slop-machine in short
Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!
It’s good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
Same. My 60+ mother got a new computer recently, saw the prices of MS Office and told me “install that free thing”. So far no complaints, first remark was “well, looks like it has all the same buttons, works for me”
I wish the people at my company were like your mother. Instead, they freak out about the smallest of changes in the UI of the same application. God forbid they have to move to another application entirely. Had a user freak out their application wasn’t licensed and they couldn’t use all functions anymore. Turns out they just managed to somehow hide the toolbar with all the options… These are people anywhere from 20 to 60 years old, btw.
Yeah, it is not an age thing. I’m very happy that my mother has always been pretty good at programming solving. Although she never did any real tech related job, I believe this is a question of attitude more than anything else.
When she proudly tells me she used my dad’s phone to google for a fix for her phone acting up, my inner first year support monkey is proud :)
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.
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.
Calling decompilation the “end of closed-source” is way too hyperbolic.
Sir, there’s a reason nobody likes to see the sausage being made.
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.
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.
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.
I do care, i want to get work done, not waste my time with slop applications. All this talk about the adobe suit being cloned and in practice it is less usable than gimp and other open source projects out there, so why waste my time, with another slop marketing stunt?
Techbros always pretend the public doesn’t value efficiency and integration, and are willing to pay for it. If it wasn’t this way open source apps would have crushed it’s competition decades ago simply for being free.
And don’t get me stsrted in how without proper support these slop apps will be dead faster than the grokopedia.
You are right no one cares how it is implemented, and on select contexts, right that LLMs can produce sufficient implementation.
However it isn’t generally the case that they can produce quality software. The bad news for a lot of developers is that by volume most software isn’t exactly great quality either, particularly in house enterprise software is already crap, so there is large area where differently crapi isn’t so bad.
I will say that people who want their software well supported are likely to be ill served by “vibed” solutions. It is really tricky to debug complex software that was vibed, whether human or GenAI. If it worked perfectly the first time around and/or the software in question is fairly disposable, well those may be fine.
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.
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
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…
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.
