They were always junk, full of formulaic, self-promoting, astroturfing trash. In most cases, it would be more appropriate to view them as content marketing (c.f. digital pollution), not actual developer resources.
I disagree with the blanket statement. Lists like awesome-scalability [1] are actually pretty useful and full of great references. They dont recommend any specific tool, and it is a very good resource to learn unknown unknowns.
AI suffers the same problem Search Engines had: you cannot ask about something you dont know. Thats why monthly magazines were great: they pushed" knowledge to us so that we learned things we didnt know existed.
Very variable quality, I agree. But even an astroturfer has to throw in some actually useful tools in there to give cover for the payload they're promoting.
I'm pretty sure the astroturfer would just google for the most visible tools and put them in and then add their own.
i added a PR once to add a package of mine which I thought was useful and he told me it didnt qualify as "awesome" lol. the reaction led me to dig around and I realized "oh, this is just content marketing"
Completely disagree. When AI was new I found so many great tools through awesome-* repositories. There was some of that going on for sure, but most lists were a curation of good tools.
Depending on what "generation of developers" you belong to, this could differ by decades :) Are you talking about LLMs probably? At that point, "awesome" lists were already mostly used for spam and marketing, none of the original "curated list" concept remained at this point.
I think I noticed awesome-lists changing from "Here is a curated list of AWESOME software" to "Here is a list of every software ever built, related in any way" somewhere around 2015 (thanks IM logs!), which must have been pretty shortly after the concept was introduced even, but can't remember when that was.
I recently came across some notes from a lecture I went to at Los Alamos in 2013 where the lecturer (Steven Brumby) said "it's out of fashion to call it AI now so I guess this is machine learning" .
yup, remember seeing the same around that time. It used to be incredibly curated and limited, every list since then is just like the top 400 "related" repos
As the DeLorean community will tell you, repairing unfinished stainless steel to aesthetically pleasing levels is almost impossible.
Take a piece of tinfoil, crumple it, then try to uncrumple it to its factory finish.
Repairing painted bodywork is easy and cheap: hammer it to get a rough shape, apply fillers, then paint & polish to factory finish. Simple as.
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