Anti-Slop

I am anti-slop, and I think using AI to make software you actually care about is anti-slop, too.

I was delighted to hear the hosts of the NYTimes Hard Fork podcast talking about their newfound love of Claude Code—building shiny new personal websites in an afternoon (complete with Easter eggs!), whipping up replacements for apps that had been discontinued, etc. They talked about it with obvious joy and awe, which is a sentiment I share:

This didn’t give me AI vertigo. It made me feel like I had super powers.

I sometimes wonder if I’m in a bubble. I mean, I think making software is obviously useful and fun, but … am I a weirdo? Does anyone else even care? Well, these guys care, and make a pretty great case as to why other people might care too—not just programmers like me.

In the first episode, they invited listeners to send in what they had vibe coded, and talked over some highlights on the next episode, which included stories like:

• A dad who gamified household chores with a leaderboard

• An interior decorator who made a wallpaper surface-area calculator

• A welder making his own business software

• A family Christmas letter turned into an interactive Zork game

I love this. I can’t get enough of it.

Sometimes, when you’re faced with just open-ended possibility, it can be stultifying (”gosh, I could create anything…”). But it just takes a little nudge to remember that there are opportunities literally everywhere. And the friction is so low, it doesn’t take much to try something, even if it might be a stupid idea.

For example: last weekend, I got together with some college buddies. At some point, someone suggested it would be funny if we had a bingo game for all our stupid inside jokes. Twenty minutes later, I was installing a web app on each of their phones with exactly that.

At one point, while talking about all these little apps and projects, Casey said something I found incredibly profound:

To me, this stuff is the flipside of slop. This is anti-slop, right? If slop is about a world where every surface online seems like it’s being taken over by these digital creations that you didn’t ask for, that you find confusing, they blur the line between reality and fiction, and they just sort of make you feel hypnotized and gross. This is the reverse of that. This is real people saying, I have a need in my life and I’m gonna go make it with my own hands. And we’ve always talked about AI as a dual use technology. We do spend a lot of time on the show talking about its many downsides, which are huge and real and scary. But there is also upside here, which is, at least in this moment, this can be an empowering tool.

Amen to that.

Slop is the word for when AI creates something vague and ungrounded, something that doesn’t represent the thoughts and desires of a real, living human. Slop is low quality, not because it’s technically bad, but because it’s vacuous and generic. No human cared enough to want it.

Anti-slop, then, is a perfect word for making something that you actually care about, that serves some function in your life, even a little one. It’s creative, it’s fun, and it’s led by what you want. It’s there because somebody wanted it.

I just wanted to draw a line in the sand. I am anti-slop, and I think using AI to make software you actually care about is anti-slop, too.