The speed at which code is shipped has never been faster and it’s never been so sloppy. I’ve started to see and feel the mid/long term effects of ai slop in programming. Everyone wants to keep up with everyone else so they’re running 10 agents in parallel on git worktrees to work on 10 issues at once, skimming over the code, tests & linting passes, works locally, push to production. Maybe the code even works end to end but it’s pure trash becuase you don’t understand it. It’s very easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand the code when you’re not writing it. You’re forced to understand it when you type it our character by character.

I feel like the craft of creating beautiful software is being thrown to the side in pursuit of maximum “productivity”. productivity in quotes because I’m not convinced we’re actually being more productive. What does productive programming look like in todays age? Some swear by LOC (lines of code) and I would argue this has never been a good metric in programming, in fact I would say this is a negative sign if you’re pushing this much code out into the world. More output does not mean good output. You need to understand every single line of code that is written.

I think we need to slow the fuck down like Mario Zechner suggested in his awesome blog post. I think we all need to take a second and truly understand what the future of software will look like if we are accepting a bunch of code that we don’t fully comprehend and code that qualifies as “not full comprehended” is the one you don’t type line by line.

I think the best way to use coding agents today is how you would have used Stack overflow or Google in the past. Code until you get stuck, need to check what methods are available or what properties an object has? Okay use the coding agent to answer the question but I fully believe everyone should go back to writing code by hand. It’s better to be slower and understand 100% of what is going on, than to ship more code. There is and will continue to be massive clean up required on these codebases that are fully ai generated.

Don’t contribute to the ai slopocolyse, resist the “productivity gains”, resist the hype.

Make beautiful software.