I agree with the reasons the OP stated, but what bothers me even more is how the discussion on lobsters has degraded.
So often, the top voted comments on a post are low-effort, anti-intellectual labeling of things as vibecoding or slop. I’ve used the word “slop” in the past to describe low effort work, I think it could be a useful word. But when we have a heckler’s chorus insisting that anything that uses agents is slop getting consistently upvoted, that’s anti-intellectual (https://lobste.rs/c/rqmtmc).
Lobsters has gotten much more content free, and I don’t think the problem is people posting coding projects built with AI, it is people grandstanding about how much they hate slop, over and over again.
I blocked lobsters on my work laptop with /etc/hosts, and I wonder if I should block it on my home machine as well.
Lobsters has gotten much more content free, and I don’t think the problem is people posting coding projects built with AI,
From the topicality guidelines:
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
I find the “project I made with LLMs” posts to fall short of these topicality guidelines. Specifically I find it annoying that half of the LLM fans here will tell me that everything current will mean nothing in 5-10 years while the other half just post LLM output of the day projects. I find it hard to see how both can be relevant to my software development.
Most of the LLM output of the day projects fit much better into these off-topic examples:
… entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, … personal productivity systems, …
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
I find the “project I made with LLMs” posts to fall short of these topicality guidelines.
These are rules of thumb, not a closed list of authoritative tests that summarily determine topicality.
If someone posts a project made with LLM usage, it might still nudge me to learn some things or ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of before, even if the specific LLM-generated code will not be of interest to me. If someone posts an article that happened to touch LLMs in some way (and thus earn the vibecoding brand), that has absolutely no bearing on whether I’d find the actual content interesting (and often, I do, as is with the titular case of this thread).
It is absolutely baseless to claim that any kind of content associated with LLMs (to the extent that is required for a Lobsters submission to gain a vibecoding tag, i.e. not much at all) necessarily or likely fails the topicality check.
It is absolutely baseless to claim that any kind of content associated with LLMs (to the extent that is required for a Lobsters submission to gain a vibecoding tag, i.e. not much at all) necessarily or likely fails the topicality check.
Nothing I said could possibly be construed as making this argument. You get zero credit for building up a strawman just to tear it down.
I agree with the reasons the OP stated, but what bothers me even more is how the discussion on lobsters has degraded.
So often, the top voted comments on a post are low-effort, anti-intellectual labeling of things as vibecoding or slop. I’ve used the word “slop” in the past to describe low effort work, I think it could be a useful word. But when we have a heckler’s chorus insisting that anything that uses agents is slop getting consistently upvoted, that’s anti-intellectual (https://lobste.rs/c/rqmtmc).
Lobsters has gotten much more content free, and I don’t think the problem is people posting coding projects built with AI, it is people grandstanding about how much they hate slop, over and over again.
I blocked lobsters on my work laptop with /etc/hosts, and I wonder if I should block it on my home machine as well.
score 42 · canonical
From the topicality guidelines:
I find the “project I made with LLMs” posts to fall short of these topicality guidelines. Specifically I find it annoying that half of the LLM fans here will tell me that everything current will mean nothing in 5-10 years while the other half just post LLM output of the day projects. I find it hard to see how both can be relevant to my software development.
Most of the LLM output of the day projects fit much better into these off-topic examples:
score 5 · canonical
These are rules of thumb, not a closed list of authoritative tests that summarily determine topicality.
If someone posts a project made with LLM usage, it might still nudge me to learn some things or ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of before, even if the specific LLM-generated code will not be of interest to me. If someone posts an article that happened to touch LLMs in some way (and thus earn the
vibecodingbrand), that has absolutely no bearing on whether I’d find the actual content interesting (and often, I do, as is with the titular case of this thread).It is absolutely baseless to claim that any kind of content associated with LLMs (to the extent that is required for a Lobsters submission to gain a
vibecodingtag, i.e. not much at all) necessarily or likely fails the topicality check.score 3 · canonical
Nothing I said could possibly be construed as making this argument. You get zero credit for building up a strawman just to tear it down.
score 1 · canonical
Yes. I flag half the homepage as off topic many days
score 2 · canonical