No AI Slop manifesto gets 352 signatories, including Kent C. Dodds

Software engineers and leaders who attended the AIE Code Summit have published a short manifesto. It says how to use AI without flooding colleagues with low-quality output. The site is slopmanifesto.com. The Hacker News discussion reached 216 points.

What slop is, in the authors' words

Here is the manifesto's own definition. Slop is work that takes the producer less effort than it costs the reader. A pull request a model wrote in 30 seconds can cost a human reviewer an hour. That is slop. A long document a model produced for a decision a short note would carry is slop.

The 12 pledges

The manifesto lists 12 commitments the signatories make. They include:

• Take ownership of intent, taste and consequences of what the AI produced.
• Disclose AI authorship, and verify the parts that matter before sending.
• Keep reviewing output even as models get better.
• Give kind feedback when a colleague's AI output needs work.
• Prefer outcomes to output count. One finished feature beats five half-built ones.
• Improve the system and the guardrails behind each team, rather than patching one case at a time.
• Combine agent reviews with a human read, at a depth that matches the stakes.

The full text names more. The practical thread through them is this: a human stays accountable for the text and the code that goes out under their name.

Who signed

The site lists 352 signatories at the time of writing. Named ones include Kent C. Dodds (JavaScript educator and author), Tejas Kumar, Audrey Tang (the former digital minister of Taiwan), and Swizec Teller. The acknowledgments name Philip Kiely, Shawn Wang (Swyx), Lucas Meijer and Dex Horthy among the drafters.

What it is modelled on

The opening line references the 2001 Agile Manifesto. Seventeen software leaders met at a ski lodge in Snowbird, Utah, the manifesto says. They described the heavyweight software processes of their time. The No AI Slop Manifesto places itself in the same shape: a short public statement of values, signed by name, that teams can adopt without buying a product.

What signing commits to

The manifesto is a public statement of values. The signature is the whole commitment. Teams pick their own tools and their own models. A reader signs when the stance matches how they want to work.

The practical bar is whether a team that adopts this changes its code review and its content review. A rule that nobody acts on is text on a page. The simplest test is a change to the pull request template at a company. The template starts asking the author what the AI wrote, and what they checked. That is a small change and a measurable one.

Source

• No AI Slop Manifesto
• Hacker News discussion