AI Slop🤮

Chris Fairbanks — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:47:22 +0000

There's a term developers have started using for what's piling up in their pull requests: AI slop.

Not an insult to the tools. A name for the specific kind of low quality, plausible looking code an agent produces when nobody's watching closely enough.

If you lead a small engineering team, you've probably felt this even without a word for it. Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code made writing code faster than ever. They didn't make the part that actually protects you faster: making sure what got written is correct, secure, and won't quietly become next quarter's incident report.

The numbers back up the feeling:

AI generated code carries meaningfully more issues than human written code, including a higher rate of the critical and major kind
One security study found AI coding tools producing vulnerable code in roughly 4 of 10 security critical tasks
Review time on many teams now regularly beats writing time. You're not saving hours, you're just moving where they go

𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐭𝐨 "𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥𝐲" 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐚 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦. 𝐈𝐭'𝐬 𝐚 𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐞.

The teams handling this well aren't reviewing harder, they're reviewing differently, routing effort to where AI is known to fail: logic edge cases, security patterns, architecture fit, long term debt. Not a generic checklist that treats all code the same.

I'm putting together a full framework for this: a 4 layer review stack sized for small teams, no enterprise tooling required.

Curious what's biting your team the hardest right now. Drop it below, it's shaping what I write next.

DEV Community: Chris Fairbanks

AI Slop🤮