Where’s the baseline? Most projects I’ve ever started since I was a teenager have been abandoned within months of release.

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lschueller 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree. This is nothing new. And I would even state, that this applies to every sort of idea. Not only coding projects. AI makes an idea life cycle only a bit faster in some cases.

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rufasterisco 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

separate topic, separate comment

i agree with your point: "we" always wrote code and abandoned it

the claim here is made against flatpak submissions, which involve pr reviews

i think a point being missed is that open source has always written code that was going to be reused by corps, but PRs in it were likely to help humans join open source, and develop coding skills

now they likely just provide RLFH to corps

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hotdog1492 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Heck, most projects I've ever worked on professionally, with budgets in the millions, have been abandoned far earlier than any of the initial sponsors hoped.

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Isamu 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Well if AI can accelerate the slopware -> abandonware lifecycle then maybe net gain? We can move on more quickly after setting fire to a zillion tokens.

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saltcured 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ideally the single-use slop should just go straight into the self-satisfied user's system and never appear in the public "release" arena.

But we have to suffer through this awkward phase where people want to have it both ways. They don't want to run a successful collaborative development project, but the want the imagined accolades.

It's hard to really comprehend. It's a bit like people wanting to have fame as musicians for successfully pressing the buttons on a jukebox?

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browski 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where all the bits we slang in 2009 and MacBooks we breezed through in the 2010s?

Yeah, same place the tokens and MacBooks today end up

This shits a boulevard of broken dreams in a lot of ways

	▲	cindyllm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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ShinyLeftPad 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You were releasing projects teenage years? How many did you release?

	▲	InvertedRhodium 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I worked on Half-Life mods with friends I met in IRC in the late 90's - so about 13 onwards. We "released" stuff to forums all the time, though very few updates ever got released. Less interesting stuff like basic save game editors too.

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rufasterisco 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

let's be clear

op doesn't provide code, so my effort stays at throwing in a claude session and providing code without ANY review

trust my numbers as much as you usually trust claude code

trust the original numbers as you usually trust no code

yes unfortunately there is no baseline

once you get past the article reporting, original study lives at https://geopjr.dev/blog/democratizing-abandonware

author provides no repo/code, but describes methodology

i run a 95% autonomous claude code session to re-run the experiment

after all, since he pulls pr/repo data for ai slop, I can just pull all data (not just ai slop) in the same time period and compare

https://github.com/rufasterisco/slopware

"ai slop prs/repos" starting numbers mostly match (120 to 199)

i only tested prs from github repos, bringing it down from 119 to 116

still, based on those numbers, looks like we are off by a neat 25%

could be different methodology or claude making mistakes

author mentions doing some manual cleanup

│ │ Original │ Ours │

│ Unique repos │ 120 │ 116 │

│ Maintained │ 32 (27%) │ 58 (50%) │

│ Abandoned │ 88 (73%) │ 58 (50%) │

2 given the above, this is what comparison to "baseline" looks like

as said, "baseline" here means PRs in the same period

│ │ AI Slop │ Baseline │

│ GitHub repos │ 116 │ 332 │

│ deleted / 404 │ 11.2% │ 4.8% │

│ ≥3mo stale (surviving)│ 43.7% │ 39.2% │

│ abandoned (total) │ 50.0% │ 42.2% │ │ alive │ 50.0% │ 57.8% │

post "github fetch" data lives in repo

if you want to run from zero, the repo has the scripts

it will download 600+ MB from github