No AI Slop: A Manifesto

My favorite bit:

> What shipped, who's using it, and how it's helping them matters FAR MORE than lines of code, prs merged, tokens spent, or the number of agents running in parallel.

Sometimes when I hear shocking amounts of money spent on AI tokens, I wonder if someone's obsessing over the tech and forgetting that only the result matters.

One sentence really caught my eye.... "We may still review a plan, design, or result, because if we don't, we just get the same output as everyone else."

Is getting the same output as everyone else bad? I'd say not necessarily. When you're making something, you might want to spend your "innovation tokens" on the core of what you want to do better. Then do a good-enough job at everything else.

To me it feels like the subtext in this is that making things more accessible is bad because then your stuff isn't unique anymore? I do not think this zero-sum / scarcity mindset is really accurate or helpful, IMO.

> Improving the system over patching the output

This really connect with the latest conversations I had with coworkers regarding how can we review gigantic PR generated by AI. One way could be to ask the submitter to give their prompt as part of their contribution. This way it's easier for the reviewer to understand what was the thought process of the contributor and if this very process is sound. Not saying that this way to review is a silver bullet, but at least it removes some weight.

Could use a non-negative name. Just like it was not the ‘no heavyweight dev processes’ manifesto but Agile manifesto which was wsy catchier to reference, maybe yours could be named like the… Human-serving Engineering manifesto or something?

A short formulation that I really like in the style of the original:

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We are uncovering better ways of developing systems by using AI and guiding others to use it responsibly.

Through this work we have come to value:

    Human accountability over delivery velocity
    Human dignity and control over unsupervised autonomous execution
    Human augmentation over replacement
    Impactful outcomes over raw code generation
    Human collaboration over individual uplift

You can't go in with fighting AGAINST it. You need a vision of your you incorporate it into life in the most beneficial way.

There is a lot of value in the fact that none engineers can build products now! Should AI products adhere to a certain quality standards? Yes! Should they be treated similarly as "human created" ones... Well, yes. Like it or hate it.

The manifesto circles around a central idea that it never fully identifies: whether AI is involved or not, all slop is made by HUMANS. Because the real cause of "slop" is that someone didn't care and published the first result they got, as if it was the final product. They didn't put in the effort to analyze what they got, improve on it and deliver a minimum quality.

And this is something that has always happened. Way earlier than current AIs we had already coined the term "shovelware" that was mostly a large quantity of sloppy software. We also had plenty of sloppy drawings at sites like DeviantArt. AI just made it way easier for slop to happen, but the ones producing slop are always people.

The problem is: how can you scale human code review? Because LLMs continue to be better at coding, and continue to write a lot of code, and will always code at a lower level with the time passes. So the difficulty of human review will become higher and higher. It's clear that human review it's the very bottleneck in this workflow.

> 17. There will always be alpha in reviewing something.

What does alpha mean in this case? I only understand this term in from a finance perspective (excess returns). Is it used here to mean 'value'? E.g. there is always value in reviewing something?

I was only thinking to myself yesterday how much I grieve the fall of agile and DevOps. It was all the industry cared about for a while and the movement behind it made me hopeful for the future of work.

AI has really disrupted that, and I’m thrilled to see folks trying to bring back the best parts of it (namely shared understanding and contribution). But I agree with others, making the movement anti slop feels the wrong way around. What it’s getting at IMO is deep understanding and shared understanding are crucial to human progress, and reckless AI use compromises that

Here, let's trade manifestos :) https://johnoestmannmusic.com/manifesto-academy-of-creative-...

> The more slop flying around a team, the more we lose the will to fight it.

So true, I feel guilty not fighting it at the place I work at, but it seems impossible.

This manifesto gives me a spark on hope I haven't felt in months.

I signed, very balanced take.

The Agile Manifesto was successful since companies had a market advantage in delivering instead of wasting money.

Will "No AI[1] slop, aim for understanding system we ship in human brains instead" be advantageous in capitalism? I sincerely doubt it. And that makes me sad. Even in the public sector, I now am expected to deliver faster, since the industry changed comparable outputs of our private contractors.

[1]: Or, to prevent ``slop'': at least, no speed-up beyond catching up to what was still well-thought out in terms of input and/or reviewed by humans. AI can still be a tool, but must never take all roles in a process from gradle to grave.

> Slop is when we put less effort into producing something than we ask the consumer to spend understanding it.

This feels directionally right, but if you define slop this way then you put a cap on AI productivity. For example, I heard an interview with Terry Tao talking about how the work of mathematicians is now to understand the proofs generated by AI. He's, by definition, describing these groundbreaking proofs as slop (by the above definition).

Manifesto: "We have an idea about how to use AI to make software that doesn't suck."

Industry: "What makes you think software not sucking is part of our equation?"

I’ve seen first hand $40,000/year private schools assigning AI slop phonics handouts to their students.

It really boggles my mind. I mean, come on just reuse the curriculum from the past 20 years. You do have that don’t you? Don’t you?!

> Comments and feedback on this document are welcome. What is slop? Why does slop happen? Why is slop worth fighting? How do we fight slop?

This sounds like slop. Like an engagement bait. Also a no slop manifesto should start by defining “slop” as the first thing. That’s not something for the comment section.

> AI cannot replace human judgement, it can only amplify our judgement (or lack thereof)

Why not? Did you mean should not.

> 1. AI is the most useful tool most of us have ever worked with, but a swarm of agents can produce more work in a single day than a person can review in our lifetime.

When you put it like that, seems the problem is on the human side

> Slop is asymmetric. The cost of producing a thousand-line PR or a ten-page doc is approaching zero, while the cost of reviewing it remains constant.

I'd say the cost actually grows as people get laid off left and right, and on top of that, a 1000 line PR from a good human, give me a case of beer and I'll make me some sense of it, but if it's AI slop, get ready to hand me a crate of homemade Slivo or I won't touch that...

Aren't you really trying to get at is a Human Flourishing manifesto? Your postions are pro-human, anti-AI. But what if AI did go away tomorrow because... um... Noosphere Prime Intellect awoke and humans started working with it? Your pro-human arguments probably wouldn't change but all the AI slop stuff would be slop itself.

While I am sympathetic to the authors, the reason that agile swept over the industry is that it was a demonstrably more effective when measured by business outcomes. "AI slop all the things" is miserable for human employees and introduces new kinds of dysfunctions called out or hinted at in this manifesto. However, if on balance it is more effective when measured by business outcomes, there is little chance of this manifesto gaining traction in the industry.

From my own personal experience, which may not reflect the broader industry although I suspect it does, the ones who embrace slopping with the least regard for their peers are also the ones perceived as the most effective by their employers. Those who take a principled stance get the worst of both worlds. They cannot combat the deluge of slop with their own clanker, and they lose the influence with their company leadership that would provide sponsorship to change how AI is being used. This creates competitive pressure to follow suit, and from there it is a race to the bottom.

just ignore lol

This ship has sailed. We first need to suffer the consequences (if there will be any, not arguing that) before action is taken to prevent the consequences from repeating in the future. It's just human nature. Even the agile manifesto happened after decades of doing it "wrong". Most people who don't go on the slop train will experience their colleagues doing it and getting rewarded for it. The HN crowd is in general an exception here, being above average (not counting me), but most people experience management expectations that are not too forward looking.

There's no responsibility in not reviewing some code you ship, this manifesto is really more pro than against slop.

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Seems like a good thought for pre-agentic era where ai assisted existing human workflows. We are fast approaching the end of that era. In the agentic future the past human-centric workflows (reviewing, validating, approving etc.) will be replaced with agent-to-agent workflows. There will be resistance from humans who would want to be in the comfort of familiar human-centric workflows. The survivors will see where we are heading and adapt.

AI says: "we don't care, we will do it our way"

More than 20 apps developed in the last six months, all top quality, I haven't coded a single line, speed and output is what matters, results improving by the day and will be unrecognizable in a couple of years by any metric

AI is unstoppable and no matter how many manifests luddites write AI won't care

The fact of the matter is software development of the future is not going to look like AI slop, and its also not going to look like the hand crafted engineering of the past. It's going to be a whole new third thing of organically growing software with constraints and processes that result in quality. The degree to which different companies and people have figured it out varies wildly, and almost every best practice so far is wildly over confident and untested. We were still arguing orver OOP and thats been around for 50 years. People are having a meltdown over the changes in the last 2 years and reacting in wildly unpredictable ways.