Summary
- 73% of Flathub apps labeled as “AI Slop” were abandoned within months.
- Many were deleted or received no updates after release.
- Analysis suggests the Flathub app AI ban helped spare reviewers and curb quick abandonware.
It’s unsurprising.
Normal development: Start work on new project, design it really well, start work, get bored after a week. Project 10% towards first release. Oh well.
Vibe coding: Have a buggy mess ready in a few hours, spend the next few days improving it somewhat, get bored after a week, app was already released by the time you quit.
Of course they are. That slop is unmaintainable.
Behold, the future of software development: disposable slop!
Why maintain software for decades when you can just abandon it and make a completely new one 3 months later? Don’t need to maintain the code if you just throw it away and build a new one instead.
And all it will cost is a massive amount of AI tokens and environmental damage.
Google (the company) As A Service. Make new things and discard them, unsupported.
Hopefully we will see a lot less of it with the cost of AI going up. Eventually it will just be the big companies that can afford it.
That can afford it for now. Shit is gonna make their whole ecosystem a fragile jenga tower in no time, even the biggest ones.
Have some self-respect. Don’t put vibe-coded software where other people might run it.
Why they didn’t measure a baseline of general apps and non-AI apps abandonment rate?
Without a contrast the information is useless?
For all we know the abandonment rate of general new apps might be 98% or maybe 2%, who knows they didn’t gave us that number.
As far as I know they didn’t even measure it. They only took 120 apps labeled as AI without trying to get any contrasts data. Incredibly poor methodology.
Maintenance is always the hard part.
Especially if vibe coded…
especially than
The sloppiness of people relying on slop.
Probably people who thought they could make an app with AI, realised it’s not possible to make good software without actually learning how software is made, and never opened Cursor or whatever again.
It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.
Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.
If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.
There was a rash of people shoveling kanban “first project”-ware for a year or two a while ago. Everyone and their mother made a kanban app and advertised it on reddit and Lemmy. All also abandoned within a few months and were exceedingly mediocre to begin with.
Just because you made a project, doesn’t mean you have to advertise it as a maintained app, especially if it is one of 1k of the same projects.
I think the problem partially is people thinking they have to “get a following” and get “github stars” on everything they make in order for it to be a valuable experience.
