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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

Is it premature to blame AI Slop?

Yes. We need statistics before that, not a single anecdote.

And even then we won't be able to tell if it's because of the AI or because they fired everybody that knows what they are doing.

> And even then we won't be able to tell if it's because of the AI or because they fired everybody that knows what they are doing.

This is an important distinction worth teasing apart when these events happen

No. As a Shopify User and app maintainer, I’ve started seeing more bugs and although Shopify is still much more reliable than Github, it’s the second time in 6 months I see it going down, something that would never happen 5 years ago.

Last month I found a critical bug in the forum where you could edit anyone’s post title.

Nah, they used to go down like this before AI too.

The error message on some site was "Store not found", this is definitely a serious outage that we had not seen before.

> Is it premature to blame AI Slop?

You will never know. Lots of pretty important people publicly laid down the law that AI must be used; any indication that it produces crap will be hidden.

If you're asking the question, most likely yes. If you have evidence of the problem being AI slop, no.

The scientific method is generally to ask a question, and test it, before randomly collected evidence makes the obvious undeniable.

And even if it _was_ related to AI, they would not admit it. First course of action is to blame user/programmer error and then QA process error. You shall not blame the golden calf. I am half serious and half not. But I do recommend reading the book "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" in conjunction with my hyperbole.

Remember: when AI succeeds, it's because AI is great. When AI fails, you're prompting it wrong.

Slopify

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