Keep Your Slop to Yourself

Sat May 23 2026

You’ve probably heard this already but, I keep coming across this pattern and I wanted to add another post to the cause.

Generating a wall of text is now free while reading, verifying, and distilling still cost time and effort on the recipient. That asymmetry is what makes you sharing that document consisting of raw unrequested AI output rude. As this vibecoded website says, stop sloppypasta!

The overall principle I keep in mind is what you send should take you more effort to produce than it takes me to read. This applies to chats, but also to code, bug reports, PRs, emails, docs, and now, it seems slides too.

This is also especially bad when the point of the writing is to demonstrate your thinking. Rewriting that with an LLM changes meaning subtly, blurs authorship, and erodes voice. And people can tell.

There is also “good uses of slop” though! I think it is ok to:

• Send a draft you’ve read, edited, and would defend as yours.
• Share the output as a side artifact. I like to see other folks’ raw prompts and sessions (I’ve learned a lot from reading Simon Willison prompts) so I can learn from it or fork it and tweak it.

So, two small asks:

1. Keep slop to yourself and share drafts once you’ve read it, verified it, and distilled them down to what actually matters.
2. If you do share it, disclose it. Ideally send the prompt and a link to the chat rather than the output. Sessions are more interesting than transcripts, and the recipient can tweak and run their own models on top of it (I don’t usually trust people’s LLM context management skills). If your prompt is too embarrassing to share, that’s a signal worth listening to.

These new manners are still emerging and I’m probably also offending folks with this sometimes (slopiness is an spectrum). But, let’s at least try not to outsource our thinking onto each other. Otherwise, we all end up drowning in slop or delegating to agents to get more slop!