“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem with workslop is that the effort involved is asymmetrical, like a denial-of-service attack: it takes almost no effort to produce text with AI, but it still costs effort to read.
I just spent a days reviewing and reworking “top priority critical” code that was entirely AI generated, on an AI written PR, and someone else’s AI approved it and said it was great and so clever.
At no point did the PR say what it did at a structural level, but it went on in great details the technical components and a bunch of numbers that all sounded good in isolation.
I had to shut it down because it didn’t consider any impacts of said code, and it was going to fuck the whole system up in incredibly expensive and non obvious ways.
Now I have a meeting with a VP about why this urgent feature isn’t getting shipped, because customers want it…
I’m so tired of this sloppifaction of my job.
Claude/Codex are fundamentally broken, they cannot communicate at all anymore. They’ve spent 10 months reinforcement training it to be “agentic”, which means bad at communicating and solely focused on achieving benchmark coding tasks.
If you paste Claude output in slack, an email, or a PR, I fucking hate you and will enter your dreams and murder you Freddy Krueger style.
If you ask a colleague to do their fucking job and they hit you with the ol’ executive function theft, you have every right to respond with “Seems about right. Let me know when you’ve had a chance to think about it/test it out.” Then give them a deadline (reiterate when you need their input, when the next status update is, set a meeting to discuss, or something) that makes it clear you regard the question as unanswered.
Just post the slop into Claude and send them the response
That might be a viable defense in one scenario, but as a global approach in the context of everything currently happening, it feels more like a “tools of the enemy” issue. Like combating misinformation with more misinformation, it will backfire sooner or later. And it profits the broligrarchy the whole time you’re doing it.
Profits don’t matter. The broliarchy can just let the US government print money for them and call it a “strategically essential sector”.
If you’re giving them your money, that’s one thing, but the AI slop industry will continue until the US government breaks with tech bros or the US economy collapses trying to keep it going.
Fair point, but an few emaisl more or less won’t make a difference in the subscriptiin that my company is already paying for. The broligarchs won’t profit of that. The misinformation is also minimal, since nobody will ever read any of it.
Yeah but hear me out: using these tools also has an element of deskilling and what early research is calling “cognitive surrender”. There’s also a hazard of cognitive self-harm in willingly using them in place of thinking. When your boss slop-bombs you, try actually reading it and then talking to them in person. See if they even know what they said, they might get scared straight.
But you should add a disclaimer that you will not be held responsible for anything that is said in this communication, because you did not write it or read it
In white text
No, because Claude always agrees with Claude. If you give it Claude input you have to massively fight it to admit it’s wrong.
Ask me how I know.
That’s exactly what the article suggested…
Another strategy is to use AI to fight AI. This is a good one for handling workslop from managers. You can do this in two broad ways. First, instead of carefully reading it, paste it into an LLM of your own and ask for a short list of the salient points. Second, you can sometimes simply ask an LLM for an entire response. In a sense, this makes you part of the problem, so I can see why some people might be uncomfortable with it. But it’s more sustainable than spending ten minutes of your effort for every ten seconds of theirs.
jfc… there is one guy that does this to me all the fucking time. Whenever he needs something from me I get a wall of AI text from him with the problem and how i should tackle what he needs, and its almost always fucking wrong. It pisses me off to no end, not that he is wrong but that he doesn’t even have the common fucking courtesy of just sending me an actual DM instead of just letting his AI bot dump a novel of bullshit on me. And anything I reply gets another wall of text in return.
Nice read.
I also enjoyed reading one of the linked articles: predators
I just ignore it.
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