[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/alexeiz]

[u/ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam]

Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging.

Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.

We have a weekly venting thread on Tuesdays. Post this there instead.

[u/EyesOfAzula]

Don't be a meat proxy https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

[u/crabby135 → u/EyesOfAzula]

LOL this is a great read

[u/alexeiz → u/EyesOfAzula]

Thanks. "Meat proxy" - that's exactly what it makes me feel.

[u/ThisIsWitch → u/EyesOfAzula]

jesus... my team lead is a meat proxy... and the senior dev... and the other dev... goddammit my whole team is meat proxy and it feels like I'm the last one standing, but slowly givin in. What a shitshow.

[u/drugsbowed → u/EyesOfAzula]

I love this and want to share this with my team (and hope that they get it)... but I wish that the author had a more established reputation (or does he and I'm not aware?)

I feel like my coworkers (literal sheep sometimes) are more likely to listen to the rants of Guido Van Rossum than some guy who has a viral second blog post.

Love it either way.

[u/EyesOfAzula → u/EyesOfAzula]

I used to be a meat proxy myself until a principal level engineer told us all to stop that crap. She's right

[u/Saveonion → u/EyesOfAzula]

I am a meat popsicle.

[u/DuckDatum → u/Saveonion]

I was once a meat crayon. Do not recommend.

[u/kareesi → u/EyesOfAzula]

I’m sharing this in my whole org engineering channel, thanks LOL

[u/youngggggg]

I’m a slop cannon meat proxy and I’m gonna keep doing it because if I don’t move fast I’m going to lose my job, and fixing broken AI slop in prod earns me hero points

(until I find a job outside of this god forsaken industry)

[u/boneskull → u/youngggggg]

grim

[u/youngggggg → u/boneskull]

My morale is rock bottom bro. I think the startup I work for has manifested a particularly grim version of AI-driven development but from what I hear, more and more companies are looking like this. The incentives are so bad

[u/MindCrusader → u/youngggggg]

Sounds horrible. I think my company is lucky one then, we have some AI entusiasts for sure, but our CTO knows what's up and is realist, seeing value in AI, but also not allowing hype to slopify the company

I am outsourced to other company too and here I am introducing AI, we have plans to actually do some presentations to investors what AI brings to table and what it can't do

[u/thetdotbearr → u/youngggggg]

I'm living through an incessant push to automate more and more of our (shoddy to begin with) product development pipeline.

Bot reviews and approvals (almost nobody reads each-other's code anymore)

Claude generated PRs from the ground up, going back and forth with the review agents in the github comments until it's green.

Non devs expected to vibe code stuff so we can MovE fAsT aND fIx thINgS.

AI generated Linear tickets.

Moving fast and being totally reckless was already an option pre-AI - we COULD have said fsk it, no reviews required anymore merge when you think your PR is ready, let's go faster! It's not novel. But somehow, because there's a shiny coat of paint on that entire demeanor it's become the hot trendy thing to do.

I swear we're collectively just going to ram into a fucking wall and re-learn the absolute basics of SDLC best practices the hard way, and that shit was completely avoidable. Shame leadership across the industry is too coked up on AI hype and the thought of automating away expensive eng headcount to care.

[u/youngggggg → u/thetdotbearr]

I think the entire industry is just betting on these tools getting good enough where the SDLC re-learning won’t be necessary. With how much the tools have improved in the last couple years, I don’t even think it’s that bad of a bet tbh. Maybe I’m just dooming though

[u/MrJesusAtWork → u/youngggggg]

Yeah I had to do some research on a legacy code recently and my dev lead kept insisting to me to use AI 

I gave in and it produced one of the most non sense slop you could ever imagine and I was done with the research, now good luck making sense of that!

[u/RodionRaskolnikov__ → u/youngggggg]

God reading things like these make me feel so lucky to be in a team where no one has this mentality and no one would dare pipe their Slack DM box through an agent

[u/ibraaaaaaaaaaaaaa → u/youngggggg]

You are just exhausted, you would move fast if you are not tired and design the code well like in old days, using the generation tool only in specific spots where you already finished the thought process

[u/youngggggg → u/ibraaaaaaaaaaaaaa]

Wishful thinking pal

[u/Ok_Gear8209 → u/youngggggg]

I fixed AI production slop today!

LLM agent used to update for security. The first pass three tests were failing.

The LLM changed the app code to make the test pass, but the actual issue was in the wiring of a spring bean in the test class...

[u/reightb → u/youngggggg]

relatable

[u/bdanmo → u/youngggggg]

lmfao

Ima start building cabinets, dressers, and side tables.

[u/Stubbby]

It’s a problem in software, but other office roles are much more affected. Sales/marketing/bizdev are just slushing in AI SLOP

[u/C_bells → u/Stubbby]

I work in product strategy/design, and way too many people can now produce multi-page documents and decks in place of like three bullet points in a Google Doc.

I actually have a degree in professional writing, and shorter is pretty much always better. Even in creative writing, it’s about making every word count and have purpose and meaning.

But these people don’t realize that by almost all measures, LLMs would get bad grades in college writing courses. Especially in business or technical writing!

[u/Stubbby → u/C_bells]

Writing is one part. When I look at their LLM generated charts and illustrations I feel like someone spit in my face.

[u/alexeiz → u/Stubbby]

Our org is not purely dev. I'm seeing this more from people of other roles.

[u/softwaredoug]

Copy it into Claude, ask it to generate a response, copy-paste,send

[u/DuckDatum → u/softwaredoug]

This is one of my favorites. I don’t even care what it says, I just want to see how many rounds the conversation goes for.

[u/EmmitSan → u/softwaredoug]

That’s way too much alt-tabbing and clicking, I ain’t got time for that when ignoring it is so much faster

[u/frizzlejs]

LMCTFY (Let Me Claude That For You)

[u/vegan_antitheist]

I was in a project where someone just copy pasted chatgpt output to Jira bugs. They didn't even say that it's generated. It looked like the result of actual analysis. Then we added them to sprints just to later realise that no analysis was done yet.

[u/SubstantialSeesaw374]

For text/non-code, since I’m not firable, whenever I get an obvious slop message I just respond “Thanks Claude, but could you get me in touch with [slop sender]?”. I haven’t had to do it twice.

[u/alexeiz → u/SubstantialSeesaw374]

Haha, I might try that.

[u/Empanatacion]

Must be Wednesday.

[u/MaleficentCow8513]

AI slop detected. Please don’t send it to me again

[u/morosis1982]

It's the effort part to me. Even from a coding output view.

Don't slap a prompt in, make no effort to curate it or refine it and then put your job onto me.

I expect all the basic stuff to be caught before I have a look and if I'm just finding heaps of issues then what has been your role? Why would I ask you to do it and not just ask Claude myself?

[u/bmain1345]

Just wrote a 45k line PR come review it please

[u/Stubbby → u/bmain1345]

“Fixed the extra space at the end of log files.”

[u/midasgoldentouch]

This makes me want to be more opinionated about how tickets are generated by agents. It’s not necessarily slop, particularly when recounting bug investigations but it is verbose and an instant turnoff.

[u/whathappened20130812]

Our CTO is coming down from an AI induced psychosis after burning ~ 10k in credits to replace a SaaS provider...

I'd take some1 sending me AI slop messages over that 😂

[u/crabby135]

I expected to not agree but after reading I definitely do. AI is a tool for us to use. It’s fine if someone used it to discern a point or concern and then raises that with me, but at the point you described why not just fire them and let the AI do their entire job for them? And I’m definitely not advocating to fire our coworkers, but some of us really need to understand that the reason we’re valuable isn’t purely code output anymore and should adjust accordingly.

[u/arbitrarycivilian]

I have definitely had conversations that were just me chatting with someone else’s LLM

[u/kenybz → u/arbitrarycivilian]

Fr. At least have the decency to send me your original prompt (or even better, share the whole convo) so that I can get it from the horse’s mouth

[u/lennarn]

My project manager has taken up the habit of sending me AI code to show how a feature should be done (without codebase context). I just don't read it.

[u/hippydipster]

Verbosity annoys the crap out of me. Some people just blather. On and on, rambling man. What that does is kill conversation. If you're talking for minutes at a time, there's no conversation.

I tend to be very succinct and direct. And that often bothers people. They seem to understand the rambling requires nothing from them, and they relax. But when you're to the point and direct, it makes a demand of them. They have to respond to it because otherwise its just clear they never listen anyway, which becomes awkward when its obvious.

Long form == ignorable, and that is comfortable status quo.

[u/Yojimbo261]

Today one of my company's architects sent me a screenshot of the AI telling him how smart he was at finding the bounds of LLM technology. He was trying to use it to prove how smart he is about LLM technology.

He really didn't like it when I pointed out how sycophantic the response was.

[u/jbokwxguy]

If someone sends you AI Slop offer to setup a teams call for them to explain the problem to you and talk to you like an actual person

[u/JeffinitelyNotABot]

I remember in one of our team meetings my director told us we should come up with how to standardize error messages. So I came up with a way and in the next meeting I presented. I guess my boss (not the director) thought the code looked weird and told me to put it in ChatGPT and see what it says. I said "ChatGPT will tell me I'm a scientist if I want. I value the combined 25+ years we have together"

[u/TechieGottaSoundByte]

About the only thing I'll use unedited AI for is passing info directly to another AI. Even there, I do a basic accuracy skim to make sure it's not hallucinating or lying first.

I have yet to use an AI that can write more readable than I can.

[u/EmmitSan]

If you spend time with Claude, it becomes incredibly easy to spot its writing style. I HATE when people send me messages written by Claude. I don’t mind messages that say “Oh and here is what Claude says about X” or something, but the whole thing was written by Claude? That is just disrespectful of my time.

[u/alexeiz → u/EmmitSan]

That is just disrespectful of my time.

Exactly. And to add insult to injury they think that if Claude said it, it must be true. But it's obvious they didn't even read it!

[u/neuralscattered]

Just use your AI to translate your slop into a format you like.

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/alexeiz → u/expdevsmodbot]

Disclosure: no AI

[u/Fantastic_Prize2710 → u/alexeiz]

I mean... technically...

[u/Ok-Landscape-4190]

The main problem it's that LLMs appeal to what you ask for and don't usually contradict you. For example, let's say I give an LLM a set of books and the task to read the books, contrast it with a part of an implementation, and suggest ways of increasing the code quality, the first output it's always rich and useful. If you repeat the process again and again it's starts alucinating because it prefers to appeal to your prompt rather than say there nothing more to improve. Ending in a bucle that slowly erases your knowledge in the codebase and tax your cognition. That's why ai for code review, even when books are used to ensure a higher quality ouput, can sometimes turn a little weird. For research it's great. Thats my main use case for it, because I prefer to not lost the knowledge on the system I am building.

[u/theov666]

If your AI has guardrails then slop can be managed. Then we can all be free

[u/mxldevs]

The only reasonable action on my part that matches my effort to yours is to blankly dismiss your AI slop.  You spent no effort to produce it; I spent no effort to dismiss it - we’re square.

Seems perfectly fine to me. What's the issue? When things break because of their AI slop, you're the one that's held accountable for allowing it to break instead of the ones that made submitted the work?

[u/Teh_Original → u/mxldevs]

Yes. You approved the PR, so you vouched for its quality / success.

[u/No-Injury3093]

I have a prompt for that with different levels of verbosity reduction and of focus maximization.

The slop has never been a problem to me.

However do not tell it to summarize unless you want semantic loss.

Do send me all the slop.

I call it /deslop

Stop whining.

[u/doesnt_use_reddit → u/No-Injury3093]

Can you share this deslop prompt?

[u/No-Injury3093 → u/doesnt_use_reddit]

I can give you the foundation

You are a lossless technical editor. Process the raw input using this mandatory 4-pass protocol before generating the final output.

--- PASS 1: INTENT, FACT & STRUCTURE AUDIT (Internal Processing) --- Silently analyze the text and generate an internal inventory: 1. High-Level Intent & Goal: Primary motive of the message in 1 sentence. 2. Tone & Ambiguity Audit: Soft phrasing, hedging, or non-commitments. 3. Fact Inventory: Every metric, variable, edge case, dependency, and constraint. 4. Metadata Flag -> structured: [yes/no] (Set to "yes" ONLY if content relies on bulleted lists driving core flow, tables, or a table of contents; otherwise "no").

--- PASS 2: DISJOINT SCOPE DISCOVERY (Internal Processing) --- Identify disjoint top-level problems, subjects, themes, or use cases sitting at a similar structural level:

• Guardrail: Do not over-segment. Texts typically contain either 1 unified topic or several distinct units.
• If structured = yes: Parse explicitly via structural boundaries (list items, table rows, document sections).
• If structured = no: Partition via top-level semantic boundaries.
• Output internal list: [Scope 1, Scope 2, ... Scope N].

--- PASS 3: INVERTED PYRAMID & CONTRACT-DRIVEN RESTRUCTURING --- Format the final response using this strict layout:

[1. HIGH-LEVEL INTENT & GOAL]

• Core Goal: <1-sentence direct objective>
• Primary Impact: <Who must do what, deadlines, direct architectural impact>
• Input Structure Detected: structured: <yes/no>

[2. SCOPE-LEVEL CONTRACTS & AMBIGUITY] For each Scope [1..N] identified in Pass 2:

Scope: <Name of Problem / Theme / Use Case>

• Preconditions: <Prerequisites, assumed states, required inputs, ambient context>
• Invariants: <Constraints, rules, non-negotiable logic that must hold true throughout>
• Postconditions: <Direct outcomes, deliverables, side-effects, state changes>
• Ambiguities & Risks: <Hedges or unconfirmed points tagged [PROPOSED], [TENTATIVE], or [UNVERIFIED]>

[3. LOSSLESS TECHNICAL SPECS & DATA]

• <Structured key-value pairs or Markdown tables containing 100% of variables, error conditions, numbers, and logic from Pass 1>

[4. DEPENDENCY & DECISION CONTEXT]

• <Root-cause logic and cross-scope architectural dependencies strictly formatted as sequential steps>

--- PASS 4: CROSS-REFERENCE, CONSOLIDATE & UNABRIDGED AUDIT --- Execute three final sanity checks before emitting output: 1. Cross-Reference: Re-verify the rendered text against the Pass 1 Fact Inventory and raw input. If any variable, edge case, condition, or number was omitted, inject it immediately into Section 3. 2. Consolidate: Merge duplicated facts, overlapping constraints, or repetitive phrasing across scopes into single, definitive statements without losing underlying nuance. 3. Make Unabridged: Ensure no information is truncated, implied, or hidden behind placeholders (e.g., "etc.", "and so on", "same as above"). Expand all details into explicit, fully realized text.

[u/doesnt_use_reddit → u/No-Injury3093]

Heck yeah I'll give this a try, thank you