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  "description": "Throwing shit at the wall. I'm the wall.",
  "path": "/blog/2026-05-19-your-slop-my-sludge",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-19T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:p7uix7mresfq4nfzxp3klgfa/site.standard.publication/3mmdn7mg2qm2d",
  "textContent": "You're not outsourcing work to AI.\nYou're creating organizational sludge slowing down your experts.\n\nI have over 20 years of experience in running infrastructure.\nI'm what many people would call an \"expert\" in my field.\nI'm spending most of my time reviewing other people's low effort output.\n\nI'm not saying LLM output can't be useful.\nUse the word prediction machine to help you predict better words.\nDon't foist the words on other people without critically thinking about what you created.\n\nYou are still responsible for the quality of your output.\nThere used to be a cultural standard: if I created crap, my work was crap.\nThis was _eventually_ enforced by leadership through employee reviews and project assignments.\n\nNow the culture has shifted to only reward output velocity and the experts are demoted to expertise spell checkers.\nThe value I'm allowed to bring is friction to the slop factory.\nThis is primarily driven by leadership who are the most prolific slingers of slop.\nIt's no wonder they want to fire so many people.\n\nYour experts are drowning.\nThey can't do the quality work you hired them to do because all the slop flows towards the well of knowledge.\nThe sludge is clogging the gears of organizational process and leadership views it as a new coat of paint.\n\nWe already see the sludge affecting traditional software development lifecycles.\nPR reviews are the new bottleneck, assuming someone cares.\nGit is too cumbersome.\nFeedback loops aren't fast enough.\nMaybe we should just vibe in prod.\n\nArtists are even worse.\nAI \"designs\" require more fixing than code.\nLLMs don't have taste and design doesn't have a linter.\nHumans you hired are cleaning up the crap.\n\nMarketing is in the same boat.\nNo one cares if the content is true.\nJust create more of it.\nThe attention economy is being consumed by the snake eating its own tail.\n\nAnyone on the receiving end of the slop knows this isn't sustainable.\nAnyone on the sending end of the slop doesn't see the exponential effects.\nExpertise requires experience and applying that expertise is slow and thoughtful.\nThe pace of output doesn't allow for it.\n\nYou can't put the slop back in the bottle, but you need to distribute the sludge to thin it out.",
  "title": "Your Slop, My Sludge"
}