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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting so exhausted of the "slop" accusation on new project launches. There are legit criticisms of EmDash in the parent comment that are overshadowed by the implication it was AI coded and, thus, unusable quality.

The problem is there's no beating the slop allegation. There's no "proof of work" that can be demonstrated in this comment section that satisfies, which you can see if you just keep following the entire chain. I'd rather read slop comments than this.

The main engineer of this project is in the comments and all he's being engaged with on is the definition of vibes.

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They called the project EmDash and launched it on April 1st with a blog which brags about how little effort it took to write because of agents before even saying what it is.

If the product launch involves dressing the engineering team up in duck suits and releasing to a soundtrack of quacking, it's really not surprising people are asking the guy they hid behind the Daffy mask on why he's dressed as a duck rather than what he learned about headless CMS architecture from being on the Astro core team...

There's plenty of other comments saying this. It isn't that I don't understand, and need a clever metaphor.

But to run with your metaphor, can we, maybe, just ignore the quacking since we all know that's just how you get attention these days and instead focus on that other stuff? Because it seems like asking about the duck mask will never produce a satisfactory answer and instead turn into a debate on the merits of ducks.

Dare I suggest that this debate has become boring and beside the point. Unless someone on HN has been living under a rock they've already made up their mind about ducks.

Obtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for. :)

But in this case it feels less like somebody has launched a revolutionary new product and HN is debating the MIT licence and landing page weight, and more like somebody has announced they've a plug-in replacement for a popular repository with a troll post and HN chooses not to spend enough time on Github to discover the all-star team and excellent architectural decisions the blog didn't bother mentioning.

Plus Cloudflare deliberately signalling that at best they're not very invested in its success and it might well just be low-effort slop probably is more pertinent to whether a purported WordPress replacement actually gains any traction than its technical merit, and headless CMS with vendor lockin vs managing WordPress security isn't likely to be a more productive debate than one on "slop". The target audience for this product is much more 'HN crowd' than 'read about agentic solutions to workforce automation on Gartner crowd' too, so the quacking alienating HN is actually relevant.

> Obtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for. :)

Fair

I know that it's discourteous to write-off a potentially valuable project because the release post showed a lack of self-awareness, but I think it's indicative of the larger struggle taking place: that trust is decaying.

It's decaying for a lot of the reasons displayed in the post, like you described, but the post also:

  - is overlong (probably LLM assisted)
  - is self-congratulatory
  - boosts AI
  - rewrites an existing project (vs contributing to the original)
  - conjures long-term maintenance doubt/suspicions
  - is functionally an advertisement (for CloudFlare)

So yeah, maybe EmDash is revolutionary with respect to Wordpress, but it hasn't signaled trust, and that's a difficult hurdle to get past.

This is a great point. I wish we started from this.

wait, this was not an april 1st joke?

how is anyone supposed to believe cloudflare to build a reliable cms after its reputation with the outages and mass layoffs

I am not implying unusuablilty due to AI involvement.

I am implying that Cloudflare is publishing unusable one-off software without care because they have done it before and the blog post indicates that they are doing it again („look how CHEAP it is to pump out code now“).

I don’t need a proof of work, I need a proof of quality, and the blog post is the opposite of that.

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