> Is everyone just creating giant piles of throwaway slop?

yes, like the crypto or productivity 'industry', where every project exists to manage your other crypto and productivity projects, the dynamic of 'AI programming' seems to be to make software to manage your other two dozen AI things

mysteriously enough, big open source projects that people actually use in the real world aren't seeing their issues closed at any higher rates, almost as if that requires actual maintenance and programming (which Fred Brooks told us this half a century ago)