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Every time I read AI proponents say, “A well-defined specification upfront is crucial for a successful outcome,” it feels like we're betting on improving the stage that the computer industry has always failed at: a well-defined specification upfront.
#SlopPunk Manifesto
We don't hate conversational interfaces & automation
We don't have a reactionary fear of agents on our computers
We don't like platform monopolies and bloated proprietary systems
We love free software & decentralization
We will wage asymmetric battles against Big Everything
The Rise of the Slopreneur.
As soon as I typed that sentence, I just knew that someone else had already typed it. So I checked, the old way. Sure enough, James Rendel had already opened a LinkedIn post with exactly that line. It is on his Substack.
1/11
AI is the recuperation of the anti-copyright critique.
“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.” Lautréamont, 1870
1/8
OpenAI defines their mission as creating "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
We need to flip this framing.
The economy is best understood as the way humans divide up the work, and distribute the results.
1/4
I want to coin another term, "Pyrrhic Productivity." When AI-coding agents promise speed by removing human effort but end up slowing work by breaking the feedback loops that produce understanding and shifting skilled work from doing to specifying and controlling.
1/9
I received a lot of responses to the Ptolemaic Code discussion, which brought up a good point. The early versions of the Copernican model were actually less practical than the Ptolemaic one
1/4
I hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase.
1/7