Article URL: https://www.slater.dev/2026/06/the-optimal-amount-of-slop-is-non-zero/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632724 Points: 5 # Comments: 0

Regretting that code you vibed? Learn when skipping human review is and isn't a smart move. My regular readers might be shocked at the title of this post. If you've read my other posts, such as AI: Accelerated Incompetence or LLMs are not Bicycles for the Mind, you might expect that I would more readily miss my son's birthday than ship unreviewed LLM code. You would not be far from wrong: there are just a few narrow situations where I have. Today you'll learn about those and along the way my decision criteria for skipping code review. agentic coding: An LLM edits, runs, and tests code for you in a loop vibe coding: Accepting LLM-generated code without reading it slop: Low-quality, high-quantity AI-generated content Month by month, I encounter more people who have discovered agentic coding and have come to trust it so much that they are now unbothered to outsource not just software implementation but also verification to it. Just yesterday I chatted with a dev who says he's stopped reviewing code. He lets a team of LLM agents do it for him. I felt disappointed because he should understand this vexatious property of software, that externally observable appearance and behavior gives very little signal about internal quality. A program that does everything expected of it can still be riddled with quality issues. It works today but will break when revised and the world around it changes. As a daily user of Claude Code, I can attest that when given clear requirements and context, it regularly generates software that actually does what I asked. However, across hundreds of sessions, the code has not once been what I would call good, even after adversarial LLM review. Closed-source software is both an experience good and credence good1. We've all bought some downloadable software or subscribed to a SaaS. Before you bought, you evaluated whether the software works well for your needs, but there was no way for you, a prospective customer, to evaluate the quality of its implementation. You can only evaluate on externals. If there's a security flaw, you can't discover it. Certifications like SOC 2 exist to rebalance this information asymmetry between the developer and the customer. If you, a developer, outsource reading the code to an LLM, then you discard your information advantage and bring no more value over a nonpractitioner. Here's how we know software is a credence good: give an exec a slick-looking prototype, and they'll be ready to write a check for millions. Really all you've done is given them a poster for a movie that doesn't even have a premier date yet. This is why good prototypes deliberately look unfinished.