Slop Is Not Necessarily The Future\
April 13, 2026
A couple of years ago, “slop” became the popular shorthand for unwanted, mindlessly generated AI content flooding the internet including images, text, and spam. Simon Willison helped popularize the term, though it had been circulating in engineering communities in the years prior.
I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain. Competition is high between the AI models right now, and the ones that win will help developers ship reliable features fastest, which requires simple, maintainable code. Good code will prevail, not only because we want it to (though we do!), but because economic forces demand it. Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term.
I must admit to not being a particular fan of the term "slop" when it comes to AI-generated content of any kind, to be quite honest, but particularly when it applies to code.
The overall argument is one for another day. Here Soohoon Choi argues that there are economic incentives or code generators to increasingly improve the quality of their output. And that empirically maps onto what we have seen over the last several years.
