I don't know. We've managed to avoid most of this, I think. We have tech debt, but it feels more like regular tech debt than sloppy engineering practices. What's worked for us:

- Very strict linting, type checking, and so on.

- An opinionated flow of data and clear layers in the codebase.

- Good code review workflows with multiple AI code reviewers, along with a pretty opinionated SDLC.

- Agents that look for duplication and opportunities to simplify.

- Strong opinions about our core data model.

I really think that the companies that are struggling with slop probably struggled with slop before. It just moved slow enough that things could be fixed.

We’ve avoided nothing. This warning is literally coming before the debt has come due. The timeless warning of unpaid debt.

Watch the movie Two Hands for but one example.

I don't understand this slop debt either. I make lots of small changes, as I did before, alongside self-reviews. This time, the AI puts together the PR and helps with reviews.

> Slop debt comes from a lack of decision. Nobody chose the variable names, the error handling pattern, or the layer of indirection that does nothing.

Ofc people agreed on these things (and avoided the last one) because our teams do proper objective reviews.

> You open a file to fix a bug and find three different retry strategies, two different logging conventions, and a helper function that duplicates a standard library method for no discoverable reason.

Our team literally used AI to remove this duplication. It's very good at it.

> Slop debt resists this because it is everywhere at once, at low intensity. There is no single module you can point to and say, this is where the debt lives. It is smeared evenly across the whole codebase, a little bit of incoherence in every file.

This is pure FUD. Automated consistency will out perform manual consistency at scale and over a long period of time. This is statistically relevant and one of the many things AI is helpful with.

I still don't understand what the "debt" here is supposed to mean and this seems like the same anti-AI hand waving I've been seeing all year. Probably aimed at people who are vibe coding entire projects or modules, I assume.