AI slop is everywhere. Here's what I keep coming back to.

MarvsonHelbs — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:03:33 +0000

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

There's this unspoken assumption in the dev community that a tool needs to be technically impressive to be worth building. Like, if you can't explain the architecture in a way that gets nods at a conference, it doesn't really count.

And then there's the other extreme—the AI slop wave. Products that seem sophisticated but solve nothing. Demos that work great until you actually try to use them.

Both of these things make me tired in the same way.
The stuff I actually reach for every day isn't clever. It's just... there when I need it. Does one thing. Gets out of the way.

I think a lot of builders (myself included, for a while) conflate "hard to build" with "valuable." But users don't care about the insides. They care whether the 15 minutes of friction is gone.

That's kind of become my personal filter when I'm evaluating ideas now: is there a real person who has this annoyance, and does fixing it actually free up something for them? Not "is this technically interesting." Not "is this AI-powered." Just—does it help.

Curious if others think about it this way. Especially when you're building smaller, focused tools—how do you justify the simplicity to yourself (or to others)?

DEV Community: MarvsonHelbs

AI slop is everywhere. Here's what I keep coming back to.