> I don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever.

Well but something really is something totally new. Github went from x commits per year in 2025 (when AI-slop was already being pushed to Github) to the same number of commits in four weeks in 2026. 2025 compared to 2024 was already something like 15x.

It's never happened in the history of computing that so much new code was produced so quickly.

My bet is we'll see much more of this. And these aren't going to be 100% AI-pilled companies solving these issues but companies like the one in TFA: experienced devs using the help of LLMs to fix slop.

My other bet: slop shall outlive COBOL and dwarf COBOL's legacy big times.

Most of the new Github bloat will just be thrown away. Vibe coding scratches an immediate itch and it's easy to do. Once the problem changes nobody is going to update the first project because that's hard, they'll just vibe code an entirely new solution leaving the first to rot until they delete their dead repo clutter or move on from the company and the account and all of its repos are deleted in one fell swoop.

And those of us working in the slopfields will probably be employed until the day we die. Love it.