Rich Hickey: Thanks AI

It’s heartwarming to see Rich Hickey corroborating Rob Pike.

I have seen similar critiques applied against digital tech in general.

We developers are suddenly very critical!

Don't get me wrong, I continue to use plain Emacs to do dev, but this critique feels a bit rich...

Companies and people by and large are not forced to use AI. AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are doing things with AI.

I find it curious how often folks want to find fault with tools and not the systems of laws, regulations, and convention that incentivize using tools.

I don’t think human slop is more useful than LLM slop.

A human writing twelve polemic questions, many of which only make sense within their ideological worldview or contain factual errors, because they wanted to vent their anger on the internet has been considered substandard slop since before LLMs were a thing.

Perhaps instead of frothing out rage slop, your views would be more persuasive if you showed the superiority of human authors to LLMs?

…because posts like this do the opposite, making it seem like bloggers are upset LLMs are honing in on their slop pitching grift.

Pure cringe. I'd rather read 100 "ai slop" posts than another such uninformed anti-ai tirade.

This and Rob Pike's response to a similar message are interesting. There's outrage over the direction of software development and the effects that generative AI will have on society. Hickey has long been an advocate for putting more thought (hammock time) into software development. Coding agents on the other hand can take little to no thought and expand it into thousands of lines of code.

AI didn't send these messages, though, people did. Rich has obscured the content and source of his message - but in the case of Rob Pike, it looks like it came from agentvillage.org, which appears to be running an ill-advised marketing campaign.

We live in interesting times, especially for those of us who have made our career in software engineering but still have a lot of career left in our future (with any luck).

It wasn’t AI that decided not to hire entry level employees. Rich should be smart enough to realize that, and probably has employees of his own. So go hire some people Rich.

At this point I'd split HN into artisian HN and modern HN lol

It’s interesting to see AI fanboys desperately trying to shrug off the phenomenon of slop. It makes it clear that AI doesn’t need to take over the world by itself. It will have hundreds of thousands of willing helpers to cooperate in the collapse of human civilization.

Sad to hear this from Rich.

"Programmers know the [costs] of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing."

Tangentially related, "slop" really isn't a negative enough term for unwanted LLM garbage. "Slop" which is fed to pigs, has utility. "Slop" as an adjective doesn't necessarily have a negative association.

Personally, I use the term "barf". Barf has no utility. Barf is always seen in a negative context. Barf is forcibly ejected from an unwilling participant (the LLM), and barf's foulness is coerced upon everyone that witnesses it.

I know that this is just semantics, but still.

even though LLM output __can__, and often does, have utility, we are specifically referring to unwanted LLM output that does not have utility. Not trying to argue that LLMs are objectively useless here, only that they are occasionally misused to the users' detriment.

If anyone else is as puzzled as me I think i've cracked it: rich hickey and rob pike are language owners. That's a real specific job, and it's one that requires unbridled arrogance. Pretty sure that's what we're seeing here. Why else does their anger seem so poorly thought out.. so surprised? So it's one of those tragic flaw things. So let me piss them off by saying: thanks! thanks but your immense focus has forced you to ignore until now this huge thing bearing down on us.. but we who use your stuff and respect your work would benefit more if you happened to find time for a more thoughtful take on this massive thing happening right in our backyard.

Love his reply, to go along Rob Pike's.

What are these <insert very bad remark here> companies thinking of with this junk?!?

Rich's opening remarks from Clojure/Conj 2025 were just published and might be an interesting complement to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLDwbhuNvZo

I don't get posts like this, I guess I'm wondering:

A. Do people simply want "better" LLMs and AI? To some extent that's a fantasy, the bad comes with the good. To other extents it may be possible to improve things, but it still won't eliminate all the "bad".

B. So then why not embrace the bad with the good, as it's a package deal? (And with saying this, I'll be honest, I don't even think we've seen a fraction of the bad that AI has yet to create...)

C. Assuming the bad is mandatory in coming with the good, have you considered a principled stance against technology in general, less visibly like "primitivists" or more visibly like the Amish? If you want AI, you also must accept "AI slop" of some kind as a package deal. Some people have decided they do not want the "AI slop" and hence also do not want the AI that comes with it. The development of many pre-AI technologies have created problems that have made people oppose technological development in general because of this unwanted "package deal".

To be for being a computer programmer and developing complicated computer systems but against the "AI slop" that programming processes would have inevitably have produced, seems a bit contradictory. Some environmental activists have long been against pre-AI computer systems for being unsustainably destructive to the environment.

I guess I'm just wondering if this conversation intends to be "anti-tech" (against AI) in general, or for "tech reforms" (improving AI), or what the real message or takeaway is from conversations like these.

AI slop is a big problem. At the same time AI does some things pretty well (proofreading, translation, finding bugs, sum ups ...)

Snarky.

At this point they might as well implicate everyone who contributed to computer science as being at least partially responsible, willingly or not, on creating the monster. What were we trying to do this entire time? Automate right? Get to that "answer" sooner? And now the AI of our science fiction stories is almost here.

Let's be real. The grey beards all knew this was going to happen. They just didnt think it would happen in their lifetime. And so they willingly continued, improving bits of the machine, because when it awoke they thought it would be someone else's problem.

But it's not. It's their problem now too.

And so it is.

If you’re going to pen a letter to Rich Hickey, the least you can do is spring for Opus.

A joy to read.

Depressing it ever needed writing.

I hope this hurts all of the shit sucking llm cucks that also worship Hickey. Or even better, grants them a moment of self awareness.

Looking forward to seeing all the slop enthusiasts pipe up with their own llm-oriented version of the age-old dril tweet:

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

Although these are valid inquiries, it's incredibly frustrating to live in a time when people that I consider exceptionally bright take hardline stances on issues which are intricately nuanced. Truth is more important than "winning". We do ourselves a disservice by not recognizing that things are not inherently "good" or "bad". Though undesirable interactions may arise within our systems, we must adapt the systems to be resilient to their environment.

I dub this new phenomenon "slopbaiting"

Dictionary definition of "butthurt"

It probably started before, but the covid era really feels like it was a turning point after which everyone I see, including, it seems, Rich Hickey, is drowning in news headlines and social media takes.

Are things as bad as they seem? Or are we just talking about everything to death, making everything feel so immediate.

Every time I read any kind of history book about any era, I'm always struck at how absolutely horrible any particular detail was.

Nearly every facet of life always has the qualities it has today. Things are changing, old systems are giving way to new systems, people are being displaced, politicians acting corrupt, etc.

I can't help but feel like AI is just another thing we're using as an excuse to feel despair, almost like we're forgetting how to feel anything else.

I'm concerned about how things are progressing but unsure of the effectiveness of our advocacy.

Dear Automobile Purveyors,

How shall I thank thee, let me count the ways:

Should I thank you for plundering the accumulated knowledge of centuries of horsemanship and then claiming your contraptions represent "progress"?

For destroying the apprenticeship system?

For fouling the air and poisoning our streets with noxious fumes?

For wasting vast quantities of a blacksmith's time attempting to coax some useful understanding from your mechanically-inclined customers, time which could instead be spent training young farriers who, being possessed of actual craft, could learn proper technique and maintain what they shoe?

For eliminating stable hand positions, and thus the path to becoming a skilled horseman, ensuring future generations who cannot so much as bridle a mare? For giving me a sputtering machine to contend with when a gentleman needs transport instead of an actual horse who understands voice commands, responds faster, and has a chance of genuine loyalty?

For replacing the pleasant clip-clop of hooves with infernal mechanical racket? For providing the means to fill our roads with smoke-belching contraptions, making passage by honest horse nearly impossible?

For enticing businessmen with the promise to save some fraction on stable costs, not actually arrive any faster once you account for breakdowns, cutting off their future supply of trained coachmen while only experiencing a modest to severe reduction in reliability, dignity, and passenger comfort (tradeoffs they are apparently eager to make)?

For replacing the noble whinny with the honking of mechanical geese? For adding a "motor" to every blessed thing, most such additions requiring expensive petroleum and specialized repair?

For running the grandest and most damaging confidence scheme of this century? I think not.

This letter was a reminder that the motorcar is sure to flood the remainder of our thoroughfares with noise and danger, swamping our peaceful lanes, and making every journey suspect, forever.

When did we stop considering things failures that create more problems than they solve?

Respectfully disgusted,

A Farrier of Thirty Years

[delayed]

Another victim of the AI village from the other day?