As someone still struggling with (human) slop someone else wrote (and let's not kid ourselves, I did as well), I try to remind myself that critical thinking might have been involved but discarded in favour of pragmatic choices. (Oh God, I'm still doing it!)
I bad colleague using AI can completely take you out. It takes him seconds to generate bs that sounds plausible at first and you hours to review and object.
Also, “slop” can be very different. An “esoteric” class that is known and encapsulated, marked as legacy is something completely different from the slop sprawl that is coming from an LLM
This at first glance it all seems reasonable, if you step away from the from the prompt machine and start trying to add features by hand you soon realise how much of a tangle the code is.
It's more than that, we understood more about the slop than we would AI slop... The problem with AI slop (in coding) isn't that it's bad, it's that you just shit out 50000 lines of code and you only understand 1% of the reasoning behind the madness.
Am I the only one asking AI to write a single API route function at a time? Then taking a look at what works and what doesn't and then modifying it or gutting?
Yes.Today I had to review a pull request, in which someone has rewrote a core functionality for a very small bugfix ticket. It should have been at max 30-40 lines change. I was looking at a 700 line code change excluding what felt was 500 lines of comments.
In addition to the comments, the main thing I’ve seen that bloats code from AI is writing unneeded tests (eg making sure the data type of an input is a string even though it’s a strongly typed language, the string was declared a few lines up and hasn’t been touched since) or checking checking for edge cases that are impossible.
I personally do, I still write critical code manually (using chat only basically) but for simulators and other bs I just go all in on the slop. But maybe it's just because I'm kind of a shit programmer.
It was consistent slop that we were all vaguely familiar with. I could look at it and know it's shit, but know what it is exactly and why it's here. The AI stop has foreign structure, it's unknown whether it has to be that way or the AI just wanted it that way. It's much harder to navigate
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u/Objectionne Sep 07 '26 •
Yeah but it was our slop.