Disagree on the slop point. By now the code of frontier models works well, and the need to read it is gone. The Claude word salad problem was pretty much solved with the 5.5 opus release.

The other 3 points made in article make sense though.

My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".

I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.

The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.

My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.

Again, the assumption that forms the crux of these objections of all of these is that we're going to hit some plateau where we are going to need humans to come back in, reskill, retake over, etc. I don't think most people are prepared for the fact that that's just a midwit problem and the AI will just keep getting better and won't need humans in the loop.

I'm a senior software engineer at my company. The AI slop is so bad that it's causing myself code review fatigue. The engineers are also intermediate with 3-4 years of experience.I had one guy report me to his manager because I wasn't letting him merge his PR in because of a critical bug with his code that his precious ai didn't understand.

It is very possible to use these tools in the wrong way. Companies that understand how to use AI will do better, those that have these 4 problems won't.

- AI should accelerate your understanding of the codebase and technical concepts. - Skills should ensure a higher quality of code than you could create without AI - Engineers should stay responsible for the code they product. - The available time freed up should be used for communication, product and marketing research. The definition of an engineer who just writes code is something that's going away.

Unless something is so simple that the AI can run it autonomously. There are actually many projects like that these days. And in those cases not looking at the code like DHH does is also a viable strategy.

The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.