Slopcode Civilization

Large Language Models are revealing problems that have long been with us

The future is slop.

Slopcode out-competes clean code. It’s cheaper. You can move faster. Code that we actually understand won’t be economically viable compared to mountains of slop that nobody understands.

This is the fear animating many of my developer friends right now. They are worried about where we are headed.

My response is: my good dudes, we’ve been here for centuries.

Many of the problems caused by large language models aren’t new. We’ve just been ignoring them because we haven’t looked at the source code of our civilization, any more than an impatient product manager wants to listen to engineers blathering on about why they need to refactor.

The root of all of these problems is a neglect of our interior lives that’s been going on for centuries, ever since the printing press made arguments into potent, long range weapons. We’ve been arguing, collectively, for the last five hundred years or so. We don’t need more arguments.

It’s time to recognize the problem and do something different.

These Problems Aren’t New.

Yes, large languages models confidently make things up, and continue to sound just as confident when it’s clear they have been totally wrong. So do politicians, journalists, and all major institutions of power. They’ve been doing it for ages!

Most of us can chuckle at Obama in 2012 mocking Mitt Romney for saying Russia was America’s biggest geopolitical threat, and then four years later insisting Russia wrecked America by spending a hundred thousand bucks on Facebook ads. Or Trump running on no new wars, and then giving us two new wars. Or the media all insisting that Biden was sharp as a tack, all these rumors about his mental health are nonsense. Or Elon Musk telling us we have to elect Trump so we can cut the federal budget, as if such a thing were possible even in theory.

Is any of this fundamentally different from an LLM confidently saying “No!”, and then when pushed a bit, saying, “Yes!”, just as confidently?

Politicians and journalists have, for decades now, been rewarded for saying the right words, rather than for navigating reality successfully. Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” Is a loss function for an ML model really different from an incentive structure?

In both cases: if you reward saying the right words, you get confident sounding nonsense. If you only focus on immediate, tangible, visible results — without regard for internal integrity — you’re going to undergo interior rot.

If you’re an engineer who cares about quality, but you use AI as an economic necessity, you can probably already feel it happening in the codebase you’re working on.

An application without an intentional architecture is going to lose its ability to evolve effectively. It might be well fitted to an existing environment, but when it comes time to change it, the absence of internal structure makes it unsafe to change.

“No worries,” some engineers say with a straight face, “Just throw it out and vibe-code a new one!”

If you agree with me that this is insane, it’s worth asking how we got here.

I think the answer is, we’ve been here for a long time. We just haven’t realized it yet, because the slop hadn’t yet reached software. But we’ve been up to our ears in slop for decades.

The unmaintainable mess that is a vibe-coded application is not so different from our mess of a civilization.

The slop was already here, long before vibecoding. AI didn’t change things, it just accelerated the existing trend.

We’ve all been part of teams where the leadership, the people writing the checks, did not care about code quality. “Just get it done,” they’d say, and we’d grumble to ourselves about maintainability — or maybe find work elsewhere. AI just amplified this pattern, where economic pressures forced us to make compromises that always felt wrong to us.

And this is true out in more than just source code. It’s simply most visible in source code.

Source code is just materialized thought. Yes, it’s instructions for some kind of machine. But it’s also expressed thought. It’s both, in the same way that your thoughts are both electrochemical impulses in your brain, and ‘the means by which you move and act through the world.’

If we’re honest with ourselves, we can see our civilization has no principles other than what appears to work right now. We have no shared core beliefs for which we would sacrifice our comfort, not to mention our lives: just money and votes. Our values have no more internal consistency than a vibe-coded dating app.

We value numbers going up on a chart, and vibes like “freedom” and “justice”, without bothering to define what we mean and don’t mean by those things. The executives who can’t code telling engineers what to do are just acting out the same belief structure as everyone around them: just get it done. Just move. Just act.

We spend enormous amounts of time arguing, producing reasons we’re right and other people are wrong. These are all feature requests that were made by the product team inside of our heads, which consistently finds itself upset with the software engineers in our hearts, who just want the system to be reliable and safe.

The end result of all this focus on the outside world, on results, on winning, is a total collapse of interior clarity.

If you’re an engineer and you’re unhappy about all of this, you may be nodding your head until I get to this part:

The slop is probably in you, too.

I know it’s in me!

The thing that makes me reach for shortform video at the end of the day is the slopcode in my brain. The unexamined impulse that arises and is never questioned. The narrative that says “I need a break, I can’t handle this,” whispers its way quietly into the mental codebase. Unless I practice mindful awareness, it slips into production and starts driving my actions, just like a vibe-coded PR merged straight to master.

Without spending time in silence, with ourselves, observing our thoughts, we are constantly shipping slop, straight to production.

When I am too focused on ‘getting things done’, on navigating the world, I’m not so different from the engineering ‘leaders’ saying the code quality doesn’t matter as long as the thing works. It’s the same basic logic that says the interior life exists only to serve the outside. To act, to move, to do.

So what to do about all this?

Well, the answer is simple. Slow down. Try to do less.

“But how,” you ask, pulling your hair out, “how can I slow down when I have ALL THIS STUFF TO DO???!!!??!!?!”

The answer is simple but it’s not easy.

You’ve got to learn how to trust reality to be good enough, just as it is, without your intervention.

That’s not easy. You can practice it in small doses by sitting by yourself, and letting go of the desire to do anything. If you’re like me, you’ll find this process doesn’t move any immediate OKRs. It doesn’t drive shareholder value. This infuriates the rancorous board of directors in my head.

The investors in my head start screaming, “WHAT ABOUT MUH GAINZ!!!”

But don’t worry. They’re locked in place. They can’t short the stock without blowing up their own portfolios. Let the investors in your head shout, and you’ll notice that they don’t sell their stock. They can’t. They just want to be heard, after all.

When you do this, you’re giving the software engineers in your head time to refactor the code. Shhhh. No need to talk to them. Just let them work. They want nothing more than to clean things up, unify some parts that drifted, maybe instantiate some abstract classes to tie together some shared functionality.

As they do this work, all kinds of thoughts and emotions will arise. Just let them work. Don’t be “that VP” wondering where the results of all this refactoring will come in.

Trust them, those software engineers in your head, and give them some time to refactor the codebase that drives your life.

You’ll be glad you did.

If you liked this essay, please check out the memoir I have coming out July 16th.