Slop is when we put less effort into producing something than we ask the consumer to spend understanding it.
If you are focusing on quality, AI should make things slower, not faster, on that you still do the same work you normally do by hand, but in addition do that, you use AI to make it better. For programming it could mean you still write the code by hand, but you make an additional pass with a LLM to find bugs you could have missed.
... and it will save time in the future, sometimes, slow is fast.
I'm getting excellent code reviews with copilot; it really thinks through corner cases that would take a very long time to discover. It's also very easy to use with no learning curve.
But keep in mind that AI, like most technologies, is a "labor saving device," where the point is to lower the effort needed to create something. I'm often doing 2-4 days worth of work in 2-4 hours. Most of the time savings come from work that I understand and would produce similar results.
(Rejecting a labor saving device like this is foolish.)
It leaves me two options: do most of the work myself as to avoid AI stupidity, then have the AI help me with the corner cases it is so good at finding. It takes time but the final quality is better.
Or let the AI do its thing. The end result is usually worse than if I did it by hand but it is fast. I.e. slop. Sometimes, slop is fine: a one off script, a personal project,....
> What shipped, who's using it, and how it's helping them matters FAR MORE than lines of code, prs merged, tokens spent, or the number of agents running in parallel.
Sometimes when I hear shocking amounts of money spent on AI tokens, I wonder if someone's obsessing over the tech and forgetting that only the result matters.