Quality in the Age of Slop

垃圾时代的质量

Jun 01, 2026 2026年6月1日

This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also about AI—there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear—but those familiar with ZAMM should consider themselves warned. 这篇博文篇幅很长，且几乎完全围绕罗伯特·M·波西格（Robert M. Pirsig）1974年的畅销书《禅与摩托车维修艺术》（Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance，简称ZAMM）展开。它也涉及人工智能——我保证会有一些精彩的观点——但熟悉ZAMM的读者请做好心理准备。

Those unfamiliar with ZAMM are owed some context. Many see ZAMM as a pretentious book, the kind of book your freshman-year roommate (the one who wrote haikus at 2am by moonlight) would have gushed about. It has a middling 3.78 rating on GoodReads, but it’s the reviews that capture how the people who don’t like ZAMM feel about ZAMM. 对于不熟悉ZAMM的读者，有必要提供一些背景。许多人认为ZAMM是一本自命不凡的书，就像你大一室友（那个会在凌晨两点对着月光写俳句的人）会极力推崇的那种书。它在GoodReads上的评分平平，仅为3.78分，但正是那些评论捕捉到了不喜欢ZAMM的人对它的真实感受。

Here’s user “Zora,” who rated the book one out of five stars: I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no one should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another neo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I’m almost convinced that the only reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read: pompous scumbag) friends will accept them into their hippie circle. Although I know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to meet a single person who actually knows what it’s about. This book is a bigger hoax than the bible. —Zora 以下是用户“Zora”的评价，她给这本书打了一星：我从这本书中学到，你可以卖出十亿本根本不值得任何人浪费三分钟去读的书。这不过是披着小说外衣的新哲学书罢了。我几乎确信，人们买这本书的唯一原因，是为了让那些伪知识分子（即：自命不凡的人渣）朋友接纳他们进入嬉皮士圈子。虽然我认识大约二十个声称读过这本书的人，但我还没见过一个人真正知道它在讲什么。这本书比圣经还要骗人。——Zora

And here’s user “Lala BooksandLala,” who also gave a one-star rating but expressed herself more succinctly: absolutely not —Lala BooksandLala 还有用户“Lala BooksandLala”，她也给了一星，但表达得更为简洁：绝对不行。——Lala BooksandLala

So I will admit that a blog post about ZAMM and AI might not sound like a good time; if there’s anything more pretentious than ZAMM itself then surely it is a blog post about ZAMM. But I hope that by starting with this frank content warning I’ve won myself some of your trust, maybe even enough that you’ll be game to buckle in for the winding theme-park boat ride through ZAMM that I’m eager to take you on. Because, pretentious as ZAMM may be, I really can’t stop thinking about it now that we have to contend with the Maw. 所以我承认，一篇关于ZAMM和AI的博文听起来可能并不怎么有趣；如果说有什么比ZAMM本身更自命不凡，那肯定就是一篇关于ZAMM的博文了。但我希望通过这个坦诚的内容预警，能赢得你们的一些信任，甚至足以让你们愿意系好安全带，踏上我渴望带你们体验的、穿越ZAMM的蜿蜒主题公园之旅。因为，尽管ZAMM可能很自命不凡，但现在我们不得不面对“深渊”（The Maw），我真的无法停止思考它。

What is the Maw? The Maw is the gaping pit of nihilism that has opened up in the middle of the tech industry. The Maw is the explicit or implicit subject of roughly 63% of blog posts now shared on link aggregators like Hacker News, the subject that nobody can resist writing about, even authors who typically write about SAT solvers or microservices. 什么是“深渊”？深渊是科技行业中心裂开的虚无主义大坑。深渊是现在Hacker News等链接聚合网站上约63%博文的显性或隐性主题，是一个没人能抗拒去写的主题，即使是那些通常只写SAT求解器或微服务的作者也不例外。

The Maw is the looming threat that has prompted such an outpouring of cris de coeur in the blogosphere, which some might view as—though I hope events don’t go this way—just the death braying of a highly literate professional class. Lately, we had “Do I Belong in Tech Anymore?”, which resonated with many emotionally. Of course, there was also the epic 10-parter, “The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess.” My personal favorite is “I Think I’m Done Thinking About Gen AI for Now,” which is notable for complaining primarily about the aesthetics of AI and perhaps also for how quickly its author was not, in fact, done thinking about Gen AI. 深渊是迫使博客圈发出如此多“心碎呼喊”（cris de coeur）的迫近威胁，有些人可能将其视为——尽管我希望事情不会这样发展——一个高文化专业阶层的临终哀鸣。最近，我们看到了《我还能留在科技行业吗？》，它在情感上引起了许多人的共鸣。当然，还有那篇史诗般的十部曲《我想，万物的未来都是谎言》。我个人最喜欢的是《我想我暂时不想再思考生成式AI了》，它值得注意的地方在于主要抱怨了AI的美学，或许也因为作者实际上并没有像他声称的那样“不再思考”生成式AI。

We, the software engineers, are clearly working through something. Software engineers aren’t known for shying away from new technology, so it feels like you need an extraordinarily good reason to opt out of using the latest agentic coding tools. And yet I think many of us are so disturbed by the implications of letting linear algebra write software that we are looking to articulate that reason, looking to cobble together a defense of the values that heretofore we took for granted but now are under attack. 我们这些软件工程师显然正在经历某种心理挣扎。软件工程师向来不以回避新技术著称，所以感觉你需要一个极其充分的理由才能拒绝使用最新的智能代理编码工具。然而，我认为我们中的许多人对“让线性代数来编写软件”所带来的影响感到不安，以至于我们试图阐明那个理由，试图拼凑出一种防御，来捍卫那些我们曾经视为理所当然、但现在正受到攻击的价值观。

This attack isn’t just the one implied by how capable AI coding tools have become. This attack sometimes comes from actual people. On Hacker News and similar sites, it’s common to see something like the following: Commenter A, expressing sympathy with an anti-AI blog post, recounts how the last time he or she used Claude Code it came up with a name for a function that was subtly misleading. Commenter B, Maw acolyte, then swoops in, asking why commenter A even cares about how functions are named, given that Claude can just read the whole function body to understand what the function does anyway, without breaking a sweat, and furthermore doesn’t commenter A realize that soon enough no humans will be reading the code at all? 这种攻击不仅仅是AI编码工具变得多么强大所暗示的那种。这种攻击有时来自真实的人。在Hacker News和类似网站上，经常能看到这样的对话：评论者A对一篇反AI的博文表示同情，讲述了他上次使用Claude Code时，它为一个函数起了一个微妙的误导性名称。评论者B，深渊的信徒，随即介入，质问评论者A为什么还要关心函数如何命名，既然Claude可以轻松读取整个函数体来理解它的功能，而且评论者A难道没意识到很快就不会有人类去阅读代码了吗？

Commenter B appears to be suggesting that software engineering is over. Not just that many individual software engineers will be out of a job, but that the entire discipline of software engineering—the accumulated wisdom about best practices, about effective architecture, about how to make software maintainable and performant—is defunct. That the difference between an accurate name and an inaccurate one doesn’t matter if the AI can still spit out working software. 评论者B似乎在暗示软件工程已经终结。不仅仅是许多软件工程师会失业，而是整个软件工程学科——关于最佳实践、有效架构、如何使软件可维护且高性能的积累智慧——都已经失效。如果AI仍然能吐出可运行的软件，那么准确名称和不准确名称之间的区别就不重要了。

This is what scares me most about the Maw. It seems to want to swallow forever the distinction between good and bad, leaving a world in which there is only code that works and code that doesn’t, and no code that is beautiful, or excellent, or virtuous, or funny. Every time I’ve encountered a comment written by commenter B, I’ve fallen into a bout of despair. I feel despair because I’ve always found the pursuit of excellence in my chosen profession motivating, but on my darker days I worry about whether excellence matters anymore. 这就是“深渊”最让我恐惧的地方。它似乎想永远吞噬好与坏之间的区别，留下一个只有“能运行的代码”和“不能运行的代码”的世界，而不再有优美、卓越、高尚或有趣的代码。每当我遇到评论者B写的评论，我都会陷入一阵绝望。我感到绝望是因为我一直认为在所选职业中追求卓越是我的动力，但在我情绪低落的日子里，我担心卓越是否还重要。

It seems improbable to me that AI will really make software engineers obsolete, though I can’t know the future; what seems more probable is that the software industry will value technical craft less than it did before. If I want to keep my faith in excellence, I’ll have to shore it up for myself. And so I have big, urgent questions: Is there still such a thing as a good programmer? As good code? If there is, why does “good” matter? What would it look like to be a good programmer who uses AI tools? What do I consider good, in the face of the Maw? 虽然我无法预知未来，但AI真的会让软件工程师过时，这对我来说似乎不太可能；更有可能的是，软件行业对技术工艺的重视程度将不如从前。如果我想保持对卓越的信念，我就必须自己去支撑它。因此，我有一些重大而紧迫的问题：现在还有“优秀的程序员”这种东西吗？有“优秀的代码”吗？如果有，为什么“优秀”很重要？一个使用AI工具的优秀程序员会是什么样子？在“深渊”面前，我所认为的“优秀”是什么？

I can’t stop thinking about ZAMM because I’ve discovered that this novel from 1974 ostensibly about motorcycles has helped me with these questions. In between some plodding bits about Aristotle and what Montana looks like from the highway, in ZAMM I’ve found a convincing—even moving—vi 我无法停止思考ZAMM，因为我发现这本1974年表面上关于摩托车的小说，竟然帮我解答了这些问题。在关于亚里士多德和从高速公路上看蒙大拿州风景的那些枯燥片段之间，我在ZAMM中发现了一种令人信服的——甚至感人的——vi（注：原文此处中断）