Your Slop, My Sludge - Justin Garrison

May 19, 2026

Your Slop, My Sludge

Posted on

May 19, 2026

•

2 minutes<br>&bull;

365 words

You&rsquo;re not outsourcing work to AI.<br>You&rsquo;re creating organizational sludge slowing down your experts.

I have over 20 years of experience in running infrastructure.<br>I&rsquo;m what many people would call an &ldquo;expert&rdquo; in my field.<br>I&rsquo;m spending most of my time reviewing other people&rsquo;s low effort output.

I&rsquo;m not saying LLM output can&rsquo;t be useful.<br>Use the word prediction machine to help you predict better words.<br>Don&rsquo;t foist the words on other people without critically thinking about what you created.

You are still responsible for the quality of your output.<br>There used to be a cultural standard: if I created crap, my work was crap.<br>This was eventually enforced by leadership through employee reviews and project assignments.

Now the culture has shifted to only reward output velocity and the experts are demoted to expertise spell checkers.<br>The value I&rsquo;m allowed to bring is a red squiggly line.<br>This is primarily driven by leadership who are the most prolific slingers of slop.

Your experts are drowning.<br>They can&rsquo;t do the quality work you hired them to do because all the slop flows towards the well of knowledge.<br>The sludge is clogging the gears of organizational process and leadership views it as a new coat of paint.

We already see the sludge affecting traditional software development lifecycles.<br>PR reviews are the new bottleneck, assuming someone cares.<br>Git is too cumbersome.<br>Feedback loops aren&rsquo;t fast enough.<br>Maybe we should just vibe in prod.

Artists are even worse.<br>AI &ldquo;designs&rdquo; require more fixing than code.<br>LLMs don&rsquo;t have taste and design doesn&rsquo;t have a linter.<br>Humans you hired are cleaning up the crap.

Marketing is in the same boat.<br>No one cares if the content is true.<br>Just create more of it.<br>The attention economy is being consumed by the snake eating its own tail.

Anyone on the receiving end of the slop knows this isn&rsquo;t sustainable.<br>Anyone on the sending end of the slop doesn&rsquo;t see the exponential effects.<br>Expertise requires experience and applying that expertise is slow and thoughtful.<br>The pace of output doesn&rsquo;t allow for it.

You can&rsquo;t put the slop back in the bottle, but you need to distribute the sludge to thin it out.

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