in the Andrej Karpathy interview, he says that the code produced by AI is slop

in the Andrej Karpathy interview, he says that the code produced by AI is slop

i think we’ve arrived at “slop is in-distribution”, boring because it’s not unique. And Karpathy’s words reflect that’s how he understands the word

but my entire career i’ve strived to write code that is exactly that

there’s been all these mantras

“write boring code”

“innovation tokens”

the reason being that “slop” (as we use it today) scales well across human orgs. less surprise means less sharp edges

Karpathy deliberately made design choices that were out-of distribution (he said his reasons)

my goal when i use AI to write code is to write slop, highly functional slop

stay in-distribution, do the most normal and expected thing possible, avoid “cool” tech

it’s been my goal all along, but now i can get a huge boost by doing it, so i’ve doubled, tripled down on it

there’s another angle — what’s the goal

software engineers have always gotten tricked into thinking the goal is to write “good code”. but the goal has always been high velocity of impactful software

there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in the industry over that