Maybe it will just pass? Eventually maybe people will get bored of this consumerist mode of creation, of projects born with no vision or craft, made with the tastefulness of a kid smashing together their favorite toys. And when the majority finally agrees these stunts are a corrosive influence on the community, we can just approach it as a moderation problem, figure out some system of vouches and reports, or downsize and our communities until trust again becomes tractable, maybe even coming to appreciate some tactical slop as a stepping stone or a proof of concept to be eventually reverse-engineered into a maintainable human project.

Every day we are bombarded with a fresh dose of doom, on this site especially, telling us it's invalid to value programming for its own sake more than doing data-labeling for Anthropic at your own expanse. These posts are the natural counter-reaction.

The other sad thing is many people have indeed got so tangled up in the hype and superficial productivity, they have indeed temporarily forgotten they can just opt out of using a clanker, at least for their personal work and be happier, or at least find some mid-point where they aren't just burnt out meat proxies. I don't think these endless blog posts would necessarily help with that though. Like quitting an addiction, this is a very personal decision...

Or in other words, people actually have agency. They have real opinions, emotions, unique perspectives, and what not, and a robot programmer is an intellectual sex doll, ready to confirm all your previously held beliefs were always /absolutely right/.

I believe your use is what they're trying to discourage.

example.com is meant to be legally allowed to be used in text such as "You visit a website (example.com) to browse the internet"

It is not meant to be queried by automated tests or used as a service.

I never queried it _automatically_, but many projects do. They might not have set out to provide that use, but what happened has happened, and breaking this implicit contract for a silly redesign is an odd choice.

> It's meant to be small [...], even if [...] it's not meant to be used that way

It is not, in fact, _meant_ to be used that way.

> and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.

It's 4.5x the size of the original. Which sounds bad, until you notice this means it's 2540 bytes and serves the explanatory text in 6x the number of languages. And it's now served with brotli compression, for a total of 1713 bytes. Or 334 bytes if you only request the HTML (which still has a usable page with the full English version of the explanatory text), like a basic scraper or a health check would. So for the vast majority of traffic, it's now half the size of the old version.

I notice it's been through several revisions, the pre-2025 version of the site most people are familiar with is 1270 bytes because it didn't make use of any minification, and it also triggered an unnecessary `/favicon.ico` request because it didn't use the trick to cancel the request.

It's not even an outlandish ask. We know from say cars that physical interfaces are in some ways more efficient than LCD UIs. It's such a weird thing we don't actually have 24/7 physically staffed control rooms with such indicators and actuators alongside normal displays at large companies

Our "AI" isn't a superhuman code synthesis tool generating perfectly correct code by construction. It's an LLM wrapped in a loop, with all the context degradation it implies. Unless you also say an LLM can write a more coherent / complex story than a person, you have a much better memory of the codebase.

Despite this being a very old man take, as a young person, I think there's been a progressive deterioration of collectivist social norms. Everyone feels entitled to do as they please and become offended at the idea they, or someone else they can place their sympathy with, has to temporarily put aside their self-interest and do something for the public interest, be it some arbitrary decorum, regulation, or academic integrity. In a perverse sense of fairness, everybody will cheat their way through life, and find offense in anybody finally being prosecuted for it.

But we shouldn't use one evil to justify another, or your argument regresses to whataboutism.

I don't think it's a matter of justifying any evil, so long as the argument is made in good faith. Pushing the idea of bad code emerging from AI isn't a good faith argument.

Dealing with the situation would mean actually acting in your self interest instead of deferring to a cookie-cutter narrative to justify yourself as an essential meat proxy. Maybe stop feeding your data into the job destroying machine while paying for the privilege? Maybe come up with a better story for management than prompt wispersing, like at least writing your integration code yourself...

If my department ever reached a point of such disrespect for their students, I'd quit my degree on the spot. I understand what a university degree is, and wouldn't pay full tuition for this sad pantomime of one.