The fate of "small" open source

Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

> or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased.

Slight pushback on this. The web has been spammed with subpar tutorials for ages now. The kind of medium "articles" that are nothing more than "getting started" steps + slop that got popular circa 2017-2019 is imo worse than the listy-boldy-emojy-filled articles that the LLMs come up with. So nothing gained, nothing lost imo. You still have to learn how to skim and get signals quickly.

I'd actually argue that now it's easier to winnow the slop. I can point my cc running in a devcontainer to a "tutorial" or lib / git repo and say something like "implement this as an example covering x and y, success condition is this and that, I want it to work like this, etc.", and come back and see if it works. It's like a litmus test of a tutorial/approach/repo. Can my cc understand it? Then it'll be worth my time looking into it. If it can't, well, find a different one.

I think we're seeing the "low hanging fruit" of slop right now, and there's an overcorrection of attitude against "AI". But I also see that I get more and more workflows working for me, more or less tailored, more or less adapted for me and my uses. That's cool. And it's powered by the same underlying tech.

The difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?

One instance of definite benefit of AI is AI summary web search. Searching for answers to simple questions and not having to cut though SEO slop is such an improvement

Hard disagree. AI summaries are useless for the same reason AI summaries from Google and DDG are useless: it's almost always missing the context. The AI page summaries typically take the form of "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" instead of "here's what the page actually says". Just give me the fucking contents. If I wanted AI slop I'd ask my fucking doorknob.

I think you have some of your wires crossed, asking Google for "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question (also asking Google to reprint copyrighted material us also a non starter). Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait

   "here's the type of message that the author of this page is trying to convey" is not what most people think is a simple question

It's also not the question I asked. I'm literally trying to parse out what question was asked. That's what makes AI slop so infuriating: it's entirely orthogonal to the information I'm after.

  Asking Google "what is the flag for persevering Metadata using scp" and getting the flag
  name instead of a SEO article with the a misleading title go on about so third party program
  that you can download that does exactly that and never actually tell you the answer is
  ridiculous and I am happy AI has help reduce the click bait

Except that the AI slop Google and Microsoft and DDG use for summaries masks whether or not a result is SEO nonsense. Instead of using excerpts of the page the AI summary simply suggests that the SEO garbage is answering the question you asked. These bullshit AI summaries make it infinitely harder to parse out what's actually useful. I suppose that's the goal though. Hide that most of the results are low quality and force you to click through to more pages (ad views) to find something relevant. AI slop changes the summaries from "garbage in, garbage out" to simply "garbage out".

At least with Google, it quotes the pages where it gets the information from. Also, I think you are definitely underplaying the fact that it answers the question in one sentence,as wellas the whole ask a question get a compact answer. I am going to need a concrete example, because in my experience, the AI summary has never even required me to verify the source except out of curiosity, much less click on any search results.