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Modern AI dev tools are becoming buggy 'slop fests' because they were built using early, imperfect AI models, creating a cycle of technical debt that requires aggressive 'sledgehammer' refactoring and stricter architectural discipline to fix.
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AI development tools are currently suffering from a lack of craftsmanship compared to older tools like Sublime Text. The core issue is that these tools were built using the very AI models they provide, which sounds like good 'dogfooding' but has actually introduced significant instability. While writing a C compiler in C is beneficial, writing an AI tool with non-deterministic AI models has led to 'slop'—code that is inconsistent and poorly structured.
Cursor and Claude Code are specifically criticized for deteriorating UX.
Every codebase hits a quality plateau. The quality of a codebase at the 6-month mark is generally the best it will ever be. If a project is 'vibe-coded' (letting agents do their thing without strict steering) during this period, the resulting technical debt becomes permanent. Claude Code is cited as a prime example of a project that felt great for the first six months but has since entered a downward trend of performance issues and RAM bloat.
Agents accelerate the spread of bad patterns. Because agents reference the existing codebase for context, they will happily copy a 'smelly' pattern if it already exists. In a growing codebase, bad patterns expand exponentially because they are often the most 'convenient' to find and replicate. No model can be better than the code it starts with; if the foundation is garbage, the output will be garbage.
To combat AI-driven slop, engineers must adopt a 'no tolerance' policy for bad code.
Using a personal anecdote from Twitch regarding the 'Artifact incident,' the importance of keeping unrelated features out of a core codebase is highlighted. In the past, developers stuffed features into one repo to avoid deployment friction. Today, AI makes it trivial to spin up new services. Developers should 10x the number of codebases they maintain to keep core projects clean and modular.
The game Vampire Survivors provides a model for the future: the creator prototypes in a 'slop' version (Phaser.js) and a team ports successful features to a 'real' version (C++). This 'file twice, merge once' approach allows for high-speed experimentation without ruining the production codebase. Engineering skills are not becoming obsolete; rather, they are being pushed to new limits to manage these complex, agent-driven ecosystems.
"The fact that all of these tools were written with these models is not an advantage. In many ways, it's a disadvantage." — Theo
"Later is another word for never in the software development world." — Theo
"I would argue the average human is a worse engineer than the average model at this point... but they all make mistakes." — Theo
"Incentivize new project creation instead of old project sloppification." — Theo
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