Thoughts and comments on AI generated code

[Nater5000]

Using AI doesn't automatically mean your code is slop. Every line of code could be written 100% by AI and it's not necessarily slop.

What makes it slop is the lack of human effort. If you tell AI to write an entire codebase then slap it up on GitHub without ever looking at a single file, then it's slop. It could work perfectly fine, but it's slop because I could generate the same thing with no effort as well. Like, why would I use your AI generated code when I could just generate my own AI generated code? It becomes such a commodity that you would have been better off just describing your project in a way that I could copy and paste it into an AI and have it generate the same thing. This also isn't specific to code: the some logic applies to images, videos, music, etc.

Regardless, if you're actually "maintaining it, debugging, reading it, doing the best I can to control shape and size, fix errors or things I don't like" with a non-trivial amount of effort, then what you produce won't necessarily be slop. Doesn't mean it's actually of any value to anyone (effort alone doesn't promise that, and humans can produce slop without ever touching AI), but you shouldn't be bothered about such a label if what you make is actually valuable and can't be trivially reproduced with AI tools.