Stumbled across a stray blogpost that piqued my interest: A programmer’s loss of identity

Rat-adjacent coder Scott Shambaugh has continued blogging on the PR disaster turned AI-generated pissy blog post.

TL;DR: Ars Technica AI-generated an article with fabricated quotes (which got taken down after backlash), and Scott has reported a quarter of the comments he read taking the clanker’s side in the entire debacle.

Personally, I’m willing to take Scott at his word on that last part - between being a programmer and being a rat/rat-adjacent, chances are his circles are (were?) highly vulnerable to being hit by the LLM rot.

So AI is a parasite that takes from Wikipedia, contributes nothing in return, and in fact actively chokes it out? And you think the solution is for Wikipedia to just surrender and implement AI features?

Given how thoroughly tech bought into the AI hype, that is probably the exact “solution” he’s thinking of.

(Exactly why tech fell for the slop machines so hard, I’ll probably never know.)

some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs

I expected a willingness from HN users to backstab the working class, but I didn’t expect something this blatantly half-baked.

10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.

“As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts”

Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you

The whole thing’s worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:

Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think they’re maximising their own personal benefit.

Starting this Stubsack off by linking to Pavel Samsonov’s “You can’t “AI-proof your career” with a project mindset”, a follow-on to Iris Meredith’s “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer” which goes further into how best to safeguard one’s software career from the slop-bots.

The first issue filed is called “Hello world does not compile” so you can tell it’s off to a good start.

The comments are a hoot, at least.

Found a quality sneer aimed at a vibe-coder sysadmin: https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/

you completely skipped past one if not the most important theme in the novel which is language and the way people talk and write and the various ways they conduct themselves in different times and places

I don’t think the LWer even realised those themes were there. This whole review screams “failed high school English” to me.

Found another website doing a good job keeping eye on the slop machines and their promoters: The AI Dirty List.

It also lists those who have fought against the bullshit fountains as well.

Quick PSA: Not by AI is made by AI bros to help their slop machines violate the commons more effieicntly

In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.

New post from Iris Meredith: “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer”

New blogpost from Drew DeVault, titled “The cults of TDD and GenAI”. As the title suggests, its drawing comparisons between how people go all-in on TDD (test-driven development) and how people go all-in on slop machines.

Its another post in the genre of “why did tech fall for AI so hard” that I’ve seen cropping up, in the same vein as mhoye’s Mastodon thread and Iris Meredith’s “The problem is culture”.

New paper popped up in the arXiv about the slop machines’ impact on FOSS

It gets worse:

One of the great tragedies of AI and science is that the proliferation of garbage papers and journals is creating pressure to return to more closed systems based on interpersonal connections and established prestige hierarchies that had only recently been opened up somewhat to greater diversity.

Related toot:

insurers rely on the world being predictable in actuarial tables that allow them to ensure profiting from quantifiable risks. Non-deterministic AI is impossible to predict outcomes for. For an insurer, that is terrifying: they could potentially lose unlimited amounts of money. But I’m sure they’re thrilled about genAI proliferation giving them sweeping new ways to exclude most business activities with a single discreet sentence, while maintaining the same premiums as before. In the next couple of years, AI adopters are going to find out their liability coverage has become utterly worthless because their activities are so contaminated by non-determinism which no one wants to cover.

Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty’s obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.

Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.