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afandian
It’s heartwarming to see Rich Hickey corroborating Rob Pike. All the recent LLM stuff has made me feel that we suddenly jumped tracks into an alternate timeline. Having these articulate confirmations from respected figures is a nice confirmation that this is indeed a strange new world.
hintymad
AI coding tools are effective for many because, unfortunately, our work has become increasingly repetitive. When someone marvels at how a brief prompt can produce functioning code, it simply means the AI has delivered a more imaginative or elaborate specification than that person could envision, even if the resulting code is merely a variation of what has already been written countless times before. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, as not everyone is fortunate enough to work on new problems and get to implement new ideas. It's just that repetitive work is bound to be automated away and therefore we will see the problems in Rich's rants.
That said, luminaries like Rob Pike and Rich Hickey do not have the above problem. They have the calibre and the freedom to push the boundaries, so to them the above problem is even amplified.
Personally I wish the IT industry can move forward to solve large-scale new problems, just like we did in the past 20 years: internet, mobile, the cloud, the machine learning... They created enormous opportunities (or the enormous opportunities of having software eat the world called for the opportunities?). I'm not sure we will be so lucky for the coming years, but we certainly should try.
dvt
This is all just cynical bandwagoning. Google/Facebook/Etc. have done provable irreparable damage to the fabric of society via ads/data farming/promulgating fake news, but now that it's in vogue to hate on AI as an "enlightened" tech genius, we're all suddenly worried about.. what? Water? Electricity? Give me a break.
The about-face is embarrassing, especially in the case of Rob Pike (who I'm sure has made 8+ figures at Google). But even Hickey worked for a crypto-friendly fintech firm until a few years ago. It's easy to take a stand when you have no skin in the game.
hshdhdhj4444
I don’t understand what your actual criticism is.
Is your criticism that they are late to call out the bad stuff?
Is your criticism that they are only calling out the bad stuff because it’s now impacting them negatively?
Given either of those positions, do you prefer that people with influence not call out the bad stuff or do call out the bad stuff even if they may be late/not have skin in the game?
nunez
It's worth mentioning that AI in its current form was not AT ALL a part of Google's corporate strategy until Microsoft and OpenAI forced their hand.
Remember their embarrassing debut of Bard in Paris and the Internet collectively celebrating their all but guaranteed demise?
It's Google+ all over again. It's possible that Pike, like many, did not sign up for that.
MrMorden
How did Microsoft and OpenAI force their hand? Google could just as easily not waste money on AI, use the corresponding lack of notice-me-sempai demands from their products that their users use AI everywhere as a powerful differentiator, and deliver the difference to shareholders.
duped
Both can be bad. What's hard to do though is convincing the people that work on these things that they're actively harming society (in other words, most people working on ads and AI are not good people, they're the bad guys but don't realize it).
llmslave2
Even ignoring that someone's views can change over time, working on an OSS programming language at Google is very different from designing algorithms to get people addicted to scrolling.
dvt
Where do you think his "distinguished engineer" salary came from, I wonder? There are plenty of people working on OSS in their free time (or in poverty, for that matter).
sethev
This and Rob Pike's response to a similar message are interesting. There's outrage over the direction of software development and the effects that generative AI will have on society. Hickey has long been an advocate for putting more thought (hammock time) into software development. Coding agents on the other hand can take little to no thought and expand it into thousands of lines of code.
AI didn't send these messages, though, people did. Rich has obscured the content and source of his message - but in the case of Rob Pike, it looks like it came from agentvillage.org, which appears to be running an ill-advised marketing campaign.
We live in interesting times, especially for those of us who have made our career in software engineering but still have a lot of career left in our future (with any luck).
llmslave2
Not to be pedantic but AI absolutely sent those emails. The instructions were very broad and did not specify email afaik. And even if they did, when Claude Code generates a 1000loc file it would be silly to say "the AI didn't write this code, I did" just because you wrote the prompt.
kmlx
> when Claude Code generates a 1000loc file it would be silly to say "the AI didn't write this code, I did" just because you wrote the prompt.
it’s about responsibility not who wrote the code. a better question would be who takes responsibility for generating the code? it shouldn’t matter if you wrote it on a piece of paper, on a computer, by pressing tab continuously or just prompting.
spicyusername
It probably started before, but the covid era really feels like it was a turning point after which everyone I see, including, it seems, Rich Hickey, is drowning in news headlines and social media takes.
Are things as bad as they seem? Or are we just talking about everything to death, making everything feel so immediate. Hard to say.
Every time I read any kind of history book about any era, I'm always struck at how absolutely horrible any particular detail was.
Nearly every facet of life always has the qualities it has today. Things are changing, old systems are giving way to new systems, people are being displaced, politicians acting corrupt, etc.
I can't help but feel like AI is just another thing we're using as an excuse to feel despair, almost like we're forgetting how to feel anything else.
Art9681
At this point they might as well implicate everyone who contributed to computer science as being at least partially responsible, willingly or not, on creating the monster. What were we trying to do this entire time? Automate right? Get to that "answer" sooner? And now the AI of our science fiction stories is almost here.
Let's be real. The grey beards all knew this was going to happen. They just didnt think it would happen in their lifetime. And so they willingly continued, improving bits of the machine, because when it awoke they thought it would be someone else's problem.
But it's not. It's their problem now too.
And so it is.
RodgerTheGreat
Looking forward to seeing all the slop enthusiasts pipe up with their own llm-oriented version of the age-old dril tweet:
"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
lunias
Although these are valid inquiries, it's incredibly frustrating to live in a time when people that I consider exceptionally bright take hardline stances on issues which are intricately nuanced. Truth is more important than "winning". We do ourselves a disservice by not recognizing that things are not inherently "good" or "bad". Though undesirable interactions may arise within our systems, we must adapt the systems to be resilient to their environment.
pjmlp
Love his reply, to go along Rob Pike's.
What are these <insert very bad remark here> companies thinking of with this junk?!?
petre
Ads + BS generators = more BS ads
Maybe people eventually will become fed up with this nonsense and meet some friends over tea instead.
bigyabai
I dub this new phenomenon "slopbaiting"
jeffrallen
What I don't get about these is why people are responding to them. I get a few spams per week that get throu filters and I don't make a big deal of them, I just delete them.
Of course AI will be used for spam, so what. Delete and move on.
satisfice
It’s interesting to see AI fanboys desperately trying to shrug off the phenomenon of slop. It makes it clear that AI doesn’t need to take over the world by itself. It will have hundreds of thousands of willing helpers to cooperate in the collapse of human civilization.
kurtis_reed
There was already an infinite amount of noise on the internet from humans. It was called "information overload". But just because it's out there doesn't mean you have to see it.
erelong
I don't get posts like this, I guess I'm wondering:
A. Do people simply want "better" LLMs and AI? To some extent that's a fantasy, the bad comes with the good. To other extents it may be possible to improve things, but it still won't eliminate all the "bad".
B. So then why not embrace the bad with the good, as it's a package deal? (And with saying this, I'll be honest, I don't even think we've seen a fraction of the bad that AI has yet to create...)
C. Assuming the bad is mandatory in coming with the good, have you considered a principled stance against technology in general, less visibly like "primitivists" or more visibly like the Amish? If you want AI, you also must accept "AI slop" of some kind as a package deal. Some people have decided they do not want the "AI slop" and hence also do not want the AI that comes with it. The development of many pre-AI technologies have created problems that have made people oppose technological development in general because of this unwanted "package deal".
To be for being a computer programmer and developing complicated computer systems but against the "AI slop" that programming processes would have inevitably have produced, seems a bit contradictory. Some environmental activists have long been against pre-AI computer systems for being unsustainably destructive to the environment.
I guess I'm just wondering if this conversation intends to be "anti-tech" (against AI) in general, or for "tech reforms" (improving AI), or what the real message or takeaway is from conversations like these.
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Rich's opening remarks from Clojure/Conj 2025 were just published and might be an interesting complement to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLDwbhuNvZo