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by tikkabhuna 21 hours ago
The word “slop” was a good choice to talk about the mass of code generated by AI. I think it resonates with non-tech people and it conveys disgust. It’s clear that we should avoid slop.

“Technical debt” never hooked management in the same way and we have found it hard to convince them that it needs to be addressed. Debt in general is something that can be a problem, but doesn’t need to be avoided or addressed until it is a problem so the can is kicked down the road.
3 comments
jimbokun 12 hours ago
Just fix technical debt over time as you work on other things and budget for it as you give estimates.

This approach has always worked for me. Non technical management will never understand technical debt and really shouldn’t need to.

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serial_dev 16 hours ago
To be fair, they are also different things, though there is certainly overlap...

To me, tech debt, captures the idea that we cut corners now to move faster, with the understanding that it will need to be "re-paid" and cleaned up later, otherwise we take on too much tech debt, and everyone knows too much debt is bad...

AI slop code means people feed their tasks to a model, trust it to drive the changes, they might do some cosmetic clean ups, then generate a 3 pager PR description they didn't even read themselves, then toss it over to the code reviewer, let that chump figure out what the hell I was doing while I ship 3-4 more PRs...

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VBprogrammer 19 hours ago
Technical debt is a indefinable quantity which makes it very prone to be abused to mean "I wish I could rewrite this in [insert some fashionable language, framework or coding style]".

AI slop is an easier concept to quantify. It's basically the code for which insufficient people in the organisation have a meaningful understanding of how it works or what it does.

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strix_varius 19 hours ago
> It's basically the code for which insufficient people in the organisation have a meaningful understanding of how it works or what it does.

Its connotation also includes being vastly larger than needed for the purpose it serves, _if_ there is even any purpose.

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