AI slop. If you've heard the term, there's a good chance you are similarly exasperated with the onslaught of low-quality, AI-generated… well, slop. One team is now charging up to $10,000 per project to try and cut down AI-generated slop code and is, rather ironically, using AI to do it.
As reported by Tom's Hardware, the team is called Slopfix, and their aim is to cut down unnecessary AI-generated code by a certain amount, taking a percentage of the $10,000 fee depending on how much of the target they hit. The example given on their website is to cut down 100,000 lines to 35,000. This means, if they remove 65,000 lines, they would claim $10,000. If, however, they managed to cut it down by 32,500 lines, they would instead get $5,000.
The tool they use? Claude Code. But the team says they keep it "on a very short leash". The team of three claims to have "thirty years of combined experience about what maintainable code looks like" and says "the agent doesn't get a vote."
One of the biggest problems with vibe coding is not the eventual output, but that building on that codebase can be unstable. AI agents tend to produce the favoured output, but can't 'think' about the next steps, so AI code is often filled with duplications and inefficiencies, hence "AI slop".
This is a pretty common problem right now. Just a few months ago, the team behind a popular PS3 emulator asked users to stop "submitting AI slop code", and open-source game engine Godot was drowning in AI slop code at the start of the year. Just last month, Godot stopped accepting AI-generated code contributions as it couldn't "trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it".
Cleaning up AI code doesn't fix problems with users not understanding their output, but it could make it easier for AI agents to build on. Whether or not clients will want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a different team to use the same tools as them to clean up their codebase is anyone's guess, though. I, for one, am sceptical of whether or not the Slopfix website is human-made, and the text on the site doesn't give me the greatest confidence.
Still, one question sits in my mind. If those prompting AI-generated code are paying AI agents to fix up its mistakes, who makes sure that those AI agents are acting efficiently? And if the three engineers behind Slopfix are manually going through the code, what's the point of the coding bots in the first place?
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