AI slop in web development
Generative AI is all the rage these days, not just for coding, but especially for web development in general. It seems that every other week you hear a new story of how security flaws in vibe coded apps are exploited, leading to severe data breaches and leaks. Despite this, pepole will constantly claim that soon web development will be a undeeded skill, something that can be simply outsourced to AI tools and agents. Just look at Vercel’s very own V0 agent, touted to replace frontend work (just glance past the extorbitant pricing plans they constantly revise)
Yet, what pisses me off the most is how arrogant it makes some people. Some people truly believe that with the power of generative AI tools like Base44 and V0, they are experts of their craft, profficient and professional web developers, just as good as anyone in the industry with years of experience.
It’s all fine and dandy for them to have these delusions, but these people will inevitably end up on teams you work in. They will then introduce absolute AI slop to your project, code that doesn’t follow the style of the rest of the project, messy, band aid solutions, useless commit messages, and more. And of course, they will inevitably end up into a wall where their LLM of choice (well really they’re all the same) can no longer solve their problem, or the bill becomes too high and they run out of credits. When that happens, they will come to YOU for help, expectng you to look through their poorly commented pile of garbage to sift out the issue and fix it.
That’s not even mentioning how bland all these “vibe-coded” websites look like. At the end of the day, they mostly just boil down to a mishmash of shadcn components, the general few warm color gradients, rounded shadowed buttons, etc. I had someone come up to me today, showing off their cool vibe-coded website and telling me about the strength of AI, telling me that this was the future and that software developers wouldn’t have jobs in the future. The best part was that this person was a second year student in my major!
I’ve spent my fair share of time around people like this, and i’m sure i’ll meet more in the future doing software development. Unfortunately, it seems like this mindset is here to stay, and all I can do is bear with it as it happens.