Surfing against the slop
On May, 2026 - I wrote a blog post about the word slop.
And as it is with every text written since time immemorial1Not a jab at the religious scriptures or ancient times. Or is it?, the perceived meaning was misinterpreted by a few of my friends2Those who never bothered to consider my other posts on AI throughout my years! as me saying that any AI-Generated content is slop.
Far from the reality. Interesting thing about words is that they’re very powerful. 3IIRC, a Bruce Lee’s video saying - “Hence why its called spelling In the sense that a word elicits a feeling in us. One other such word(prefix) that unfortunately got slaughtered by usage is Pseudo-. You talk to someone about something intellectually stimulating(at least for you) and if they want to dismiss you, they can simply prefix the whole thing with pseudo-intellectual talk. And boom - Goes the meaning. Wiped.
And the same goes for Slop. One end of the spectrum is where you’re just in awe of one-shotting so many things without any care in the world about what or how something is being built, especially the why. And the other end of the spectrum is fully hand-coding everything. The traditional software engineering.
But if you know me, I’d always simply say that life isn’t starkly black and white and that there are grey areas. That’s exactly where the meaning of what I consider slop is.
Surfing the grey between the extemists
We’re still early4If you take a look at my career timeline, you’ll notice how far we’ve come - Or at least my understanding of AI has come. Between hand-coding everything, and prompting away everything - there’s a middle ground - blurred, mispositioned, and often becomes the region that people debate endlessly on social media5If you’ve been following some of our industry ramblings - You know the one about reading code. And that’s also what I’m gonna say a few words about.
Surfing the wave without falling
Build something you use, even if by others’ definition it is still slop.
| Spectrum of sloppiness |
When we discuss the question of should we still be reading the code we generate with AI, I honestly believe we’re asking the wrong question. As any seasoned developer would say, It depends.
And a better question could be, How should we now learn what to still care about, and what not to, in the coding aspect of software engineering
Isn’t it funny that even after so much talk about context, context engineering, context length, etc - We still fail to see that context matters a lot? It’s never one or the other. As a favourite quote of mine goes,
“The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
~ G.K.Chesterton
By slop I mean building things that doesn’t need to be built in the first place. Low effort not in terms of creating something quickly, but in terms of low impact while being shiny. And finally - If something is useful, is it even slop?6Ah, the paradox of useful slop. And just so I’m clear here - Being useful doesn’t necessarily mean monetary/professional benefit alone. If it is fun for you with the slop you created, its the surfing I mean.7If something is too brittle for real use - no matter how small of a use that is, including generating joy, it can be safely discarded as useless slop. You can’t ride the wave that way
Case in point
I don’t code in Rust. This blog was built with MdBook - A Rust static site builder. If I had to follow the traditional engineering, I should get around to spending a couple hours getting meaningfully good at understanding at least the preprocessor scope of mdbook so I can write my own preprocessors. But that’s a learning effort that feels heavy and that is why it took me this long to revive this blog.
Agentic engineering made it possible for me to develop a few of the preprocessors that I use on this blog. I didn’t bother understanding the code that agents produced.
- Inline popover notes8Like this one 😜 gives a better reading experience, and it was possible only because I could whip up mdbook-inplace-notes.
- Timeline of career journey was possible with mdbook-timeline.
- Sticky banners atop the page across the book was possible via mdbook-utils
- … and the adventure hasn’t stopped here.
Nobody needs any of this. It’s not going to be useful in the long run. They’re one-off plugins that are a means to an end9Which here is reading experience of this blog
I wasn’t ready to learn Rust at this point in time but what I did learn though - was harness engineering with Pi, and building and playing around with extensions to support my software development workflows. And as I always say - There’s always a tradeoff10And the tradeoff here is picking my battles or which will offer me more fun along the way!
That’s it - That’s the secret: Build something that you’ll use, have fun with, and explore: not because of the hype and FOMO, but because you’re genuinely inspired to.