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No Sloptober

no-sloptober.com

58 pointsjeremiahlee37 comments

A few months ago I had an idea of doing a no LLM hackathon for fun. The idea was to keep the coding skills sharp and have an excuse to not use Claude.

The responses here, and discussions on hn more broadly, make me feel like ai use is something that people are uniquely insecure about.

This author would've also presumably been the creator of No-Stackoverflow-September and No-Manual-March?

Either way this person has a wildly different take on how they think decent engineers are utilising LLMs in a professional capacity.

Can you please expound on the different ways "decent engineers are utilising LLMs in a professional capacity"? A case study would be great to read to understand better the value of LLMs and how developers use it effectively. Thanks in advance!!

Hate to break it to you, but no one is important enough that they'll get a case study in response to a HN comment.

Maybe it’s you who thinks most “decent” engineers aren’t meat proxies?

And of course already flagged with no way to unflag it....

I would love to, but hardly I could do that. I am desperately looking for a job, and AI is the only way I can be “fast enough” while applying to jobs as soon as possible.

I really don’t like 90% of stuff “AI” bring today, but employers today are literally forcing you to use them.

I and my friend started 2years ago something similar but during December.

noaidecember.com

It's fun :)

Unfortunately we have entered Eternal Sloptember

I don't understand why is this flagged though, sounds like something one might want to try?

did I miss something?

There is no author attribution to this webpage?

I feel strongly that I can't take a community challenge seriously if the author can't bother with an author attribution.

instantly headshot by HN. says a lot

In case you feel like branching out beyond the digital completely, I'll leave this here (no affiliation): https://inktober.com/rules

Feel like "No Slop November" would be a better name (and easier to succeed in the US since we've got a holiday break.

I believe it's more of a counter Hacktoberfest thing.

https://hacktoberfest.com

    Hacktoberfest 2026: AI belongs to everyone.

    2026
    A new chapter.
    Under the stewardship of long-time partners Major League Hacking (MLH) and DEV, Hacktoberfest refocuses on high-value, meaningful learning. Online and local events (Fests) everywhere, all about building with open source AI.

"Understand where your own gaps are in your own knowledge and capabality, and are you okay delegating those?"

yes. yes I am.

Can you go deeper here? What do you mean you are okay delegating your own gaps? Specifically I am interested in what happens when you can't afford to delegate anymore.

Afford monetarily?

AI use ≠ Slop

"Slop" primarily means low-quality, mass-produced digital content generated by artificial intelligence.

Use AI ??= Slop

I'm getting tired of the constant stream of low-effort anti AI posts. ("Metaslop" if you will.)

Same feeling about low effort pro-AI posts. Low effort comments too. Low-effort comments being just reactionary one-liners. What do you mean by "low-effort anti AI posts"? HN front page used to be more diverse topics that were generally interesting. Now it seems like it's "Hey Anthropic just released a new model" "Hey OpenAI just did X with model that is questionable" Or "X did AI X with X-y thing". Low-effort is for real a problem.

Obviously I was referring to the post I was commenting on as a low effort anti AI post.

But not as obvious is why you consider it low-effort. Indeed, one must be able to articulate their dissatisfaction in order to propagate consensus and thereby action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Not sure why you are referencing this Wikipedia article and I would hate to infer your meaning. Please tell me more.

This sounds like that bitter old engineer that is unable to learn and adapt as things change, the kind that gives all of us more senior folks a bad stigma. Times are changing, adapt and grow.

That's not growth, it's doing a completely different job, one that many developers loathe.

If you have to change job why not turning to something more pleasant and useful, like plowing fields?

I'd much rather do that then being an AI babysitter.

> something more pleasant and useful, like plowing fields

That's definitely not something I find pleasant, though it's useful. I personally find using LLMs to be both pleasant and useful though, compared to the alternatives. Maybe I'll vibe something to help with plowing. You know, like people harnessed animals, and then made machines, as apparently they too didn't find plowing a pleasant activity. The harnessed animals probably didn't either.

Abstaining from something you use for 11 months out of the year doesn't strike me as "bitter old engineer that is unable to learn and adapt as things change".

  > "Agents can only maintain or INCREASE entropy in a system. Humans are uniquely capable of decreasing it"

This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read.

Can you expound on why "This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read."? I think a deeper discussion into the capability of agents to decrease entropy would be very valuable.

A program/repository is a big chunk of text

Any text edits (insertions, deletions) that a human is capable of doing, so is an agent/LLM

To think that reducing entropy/complexity in a system is some inherently human capability is both anthropo-centric and full of hubris.

I disagree. A program/repository is not a big chunk of text. It's more like logic to perform a particular function represented in text which is a symbol of language.

"To think that reducing entropy/complexity in a system is some inherently human capability is both anthropo-centric and full of hubris."

Humans invented LLMs and Agents etc, designed, programmed, etc. etc. Seems they are more an extension of humans -- tools that rely on humans.

An LLM/Agent left to it's self on a code base does cause entropy. I've only ever seen them not cause entropy on the first prompt.

Are we still going to do the cutesy puritanical celebrations every time we have a differing opinion?

The more you bang any drum, the more noise you are responsible for. If you really care about not using AI, just don't use it. It makes no difference when your sprint still ends next week anyway.

I don't necessarily refuse to use AI, but I am fully aware it's basically a search engine with a modernized "I'm feeling lucky" button (or a decision tree of such buttons when me or my scripts are interacting with it). I don't think that's always the correct choice, but sometimes it is.

It's that simple.

I just got back from a 2 week trip to China. I was in some of the more remote parts and my cell wasn't able to connect to their towers in that area, resulting in me not having the tourist VPN.

The side effect was I was fully cut off from my AI tools for those two weeks. I was coding "manually" during that time, and I think I accompished in two weeks what I previously had been able to do in a day. I'm not gonna lie, it was very, very stressful as a solo founder.

The industry moves so fast these days, that the only way to keep up with the speed is to leverage them. While I can appreciate the push of this to help your brain think independently/critically, the opportunity cost of a month of development without LLMs is too high a price to pay.

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