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No More Slop – swyx
Takeaway
Generative AI has made slop an asymmetric war; defending taste at every output layer (code, content, agents) is now the AI engineer's job.
Summary
- swyx (AI Engineer organizer) declares war on 'slop' — Oxford's 2024 word-of-the-year shortlist runner-up to 'brain rot' — and argues humans, not just AI, produce it.
- Coins 'Six's Law of Anti-Slop' (a Brandolini riff): the taste needed to fight slop is an order of magnitude more than to produce it, while token costs drop 100-1000x/year.
- Examples: K-Pop Demon Hunters vs Electric State, autonomous coding hour brags without quality metrics ('no autonomy without accountability'), and engagement-bait Twitter content.
- Counter-tools: AI News only-publishes-when-there's-news, prompts that explicitly tell Claude not to produce slop, sub-agents to fight context rot, code maps from Cognition for codebase understanding.
- Closing chant: 'No more slop' as response to demands for more LOC, rushed releases, or engagement-baiting content.
culturequalityai-engineering
Original description
Why we need to eliminate low-quality code and work in AI engineering. Speaker: swyx | Curator, AI Engineer https://x.com/swyx https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/ https://www.swyx.io/