The Art of Shipping Slopware

LessWrong reports on a growing disconnect between how tech companies are deploying AI in development and how they should be. An essay on the platform argues that token-maximization leaderboards and traditional practices miss the real shift required. Code should be optimized for machines to read and modify, not humans. Programming philosophy should flip from bottom-up design to top-down, with AI handling implementation while humans focus on deciding what to build. The consequence sounds paradoxical: since AI labor is orders of magnitude cheaper than human labor, the new bottleneck isn't getting code written—it's preventing developers from shipping too much code too fast. Ownership and ruthless pruning become the critical skills.

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