I've long avoiding saying "legacy". I think it's lazy to use it. It's always seemed to be a term to group together "a bunch of stuff i don't like".

Same with technical debt. Which I wrote about at length a few years ago.

They're words that mean "i don't like that" or "i wouldn't do that"

Worse. If you say them to ten people at least eleven different definitions were heard. It's just not good communication.

And now everyone says "slop"

I've noticed this creeping in. In bug reports "why even ship this slop" for features that were made in the beforetimes (pre-October 2025 and the great AI awakening). It just means "i don't like that" and it doesn't have a defined definition. It's just not good communication

Then, while writing this, I googled for the definition… if I'm gonna say it doesn't have a definition (and this is the load bearing part 🤢) I should check if that's true

And, well, it does have a definition… and it's fucking glorious.

Ok, i'll bite… what's the definition?

using this version of the Wikipedia page

If you go back far enough it's just "various types of loose clothing". 19th century British naval ships even had a "slop chest"

But in the 19th century as the industrial revolution bit and we could make things with machines in a way we couldn't really before "slop" had a negative connotation. There was conflict between bespoke tailors and slop traders. Slop was a term applied to all clothing that was not skilfully tailor-made for the customer.

And we all still wear bespoke tailored clothes, thank the maker for that

Machine-made clothes won out, right? In the UK at least it is rare to wear bespoke tailor-made clothes. But nobody calls it slop. Industrial clothes production was cheaper and closed the quality gap enough that most people don't care.

Well, I am wilfully going to confuse it with AI slop.

During the short-lived tab completion phrase AI made software badly. Claude's Opus, fable and Jippity's astra, and sol circle around making software passably. Sometimes they are amazing and sometimes not. You can meaningfully write software without ever actually writing the software.

Arguably, right now your bespoke tailor-made software beats the cheap ready-made stuff. Engineers still worry about the code being slop.

But…

It keeps getting better. And the slop only has to become cheap enough or good enough and that will flip. We won't call it slop any more, it'll just be code.

You and I as software engineers just need to decide when we switch and become software machinists or software therapists.

Personally, I don't really care if it is desirable since I think it is inevitable.

And to paraphrase my wonderful colleague Jon McCallum: I'd rather rise to the occasion than complain about it.