I was scrolling through Bluesky one day when I saw a post about Frinkiac “modernising with AI”. Here’s the official part that was screenshotted:
Ten Years of Frinkiac: A Few Months of Modernization with AI
It’s been just over ten years (February 2, 2016) since we launched Frinkiac to the public. In those first few months after release we added GIF support, some new sites (hello Morbotron), and then we mostly stopped working on it. Everything worked well enough for us and the code sat unchanged on the same architecture we’d built in 2015.
In February 2026 it occurred to us that maybe we should point those AI coding tools we’ve been using at the Frinkiac codebase. The result of that work is live now and you can go see it on both Frinkiac and Morbotron, but we’ve also documented a subset of the experience in this post.
Now it looks noisier. I get that change is inevitable but also that’s the most banal and contextless phrase—now more than ever. This kind of change is very much evitable. The site was working fine enough from a user perspective so I don’t know why they felt the need to ruin 10 years of Frinkiac with AI coding tool outputs other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. This definitely feels like an experimental thing that they just went along with and there may be performance gains in the backend according to the announcement post but the UX shouldn’t suffer for that. The last paragraph about “Working with AI” doesn’t fill me with much hope. Fingers crossed it doesn’t end up like a Frinkian catastrophe.
I don’t liken this to “slop” and maybe someone shouldn’t get fired for this blunder but now I feel weird using the site. Change it back to the blissful boob it was!