This is fascinating to me and has shades of Iris Merideth's The Problem is Culture. In other engineering fields, if you had a tool that cut costs but caused a threefold increase in failures you would be looking at a massive scandal, probably because if this was structural engineering rather than software engineering you'd be looking at a new Grenfell Tower or Hyatt Regency Walkway from every other project that used this shit. From what I've been following I don't know that vibe coding has directly racked up quite so literal a body count yet, but if this pattern holds (and I see no reason to expect otherwise) then it's only a matter of time before someone fucks up something important.
Also the fact that the framing here doesn't seem to treat this as an existential risk to the project of AI coding is fascinating. If you're not producing stable and secure applications in prod then what in the actual fuck are you writing all that code for?
I also question the degree to which "the other 99% of readers" actually don't care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of "I guess this is the world now" rather than actual acceptance. And I know we've talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn't a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can't tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the "median reader" statistic is misleading because the median reader isn't particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it's the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they're not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.