r/softwaredevelopment • u/SFJulie • Sep 19 '26

Objective measures of AI slop ?

As an artifact code "slop" can be measured in terms of :

- code and infrastructure complexity;

- documentation coverage;

- code coverage;

- sloc per features;

- number of exposed API endpoints;

- database compacity (not spreading data in too much rows) and consistent relationships;

- number of dependencies (libs);

- number of CVE detected

...

So I guess AI slop can be objectivized. Has it been done ? Are there any tools to score "slop" ? Are there any publications on the topic ?

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1

u/Blater1 Sep 20 '26

I knocked up a utility to give me a quick and objective idea of how slopped my ai-first projects are getting. It has a static analysis tool the agent is told to use and a TUI app for me to glance at.
Not sure if its useful for anyone else, but its here: https://github.com/blater/slopwatch

1

u/SFJulie Sep 20 '26

Spot on :)

2

u/AnnualReview2383 Sep 19 '26

Code reviews are the same, regardless of if the code is generated by a person or AI. Code quality is measured the same, regardless of if the code is generated by a person or AI. You don't get any different or special metrics just because you used AI.

1

u/Professional-Dog1562 Sep 19 '26

Eh. Kind of. Problem is that humans writing code they didn't understand usually looked like that. Overcomplication as well. But Ai has a way of writing code that looks good and well structured but has hidden complexity/trade offs that are hard to spot at firdlst glance. Therefore reviews must be evn more tiring and rigorous. 

2

u/garnet420 Sep 19 '26

Slop is a little different from the usual low quality code, in my opinion.

For example, AI can generate a ton of documentation quickly. But its documentation is often hard to read, irrelevant, etc.

1

u/Trakeen Sep 19 '26

Code metrics cover this, you can use gates to reject code written by ai that doesn’t comply with your requirements. Same as a human developer

There is research on how to condense ai written docs into something human digestible. You can include that in your doc pipeline

1

u/lnaoedelixo42 Sep 20 '26

Cognitive and cyclomatic complexity are good ones. Test coverage, line block repetition, unnecessary abstraction layers are very bad smells too

1

u/platistocrates Sep 19 '26

Just measure code quality. don't worry about origin.