Quality in the Age of Slop
Quality in the Age of Slop
Jun 01, 2026
This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller<br>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also<br>about AI—there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear—but those familiar with<br>ZAMM should consider themselves warned.
Those unfamiliar with ZAMM are owed some context. Many see ZAMM as a<br>pretentious book, the kind of book your freshman-year roommate (the one who<br>wrote haikus at 2am by moonlight) would have gushed about. It has a middling<br>3.78 rating on GoodReads, but it's the reviews that capture how the people who<br>don't like ZAMM feel about ZAMM. Here's user "Zora," who rated the book one<br>out of five stars:
I learned from this book that you can sell a billion copies of a book that no<br>one should ever waste three minutes reading. This is just another<br>neo-philosophy book disguised as a novel. I'm almost convinced that the<br>only reason people buy this book is so that their pseudo-intellectual (read:<br>pompous scumbag) friends will accept them into their hippie circle. Although<br>I know about twenty people who claim to have read this book, I have yet to<br>meet a single person who actually knows what it's about. This book is a<br>bigger hoax than the bible.
—Zora
And here's user "Lala BooksandLala," who also gave a one-star rating but<br>expressed herself more succinctly:
absolutely not
—Lala BooksandLala
So I will admit that a blog post about ZAMM and AI might not sound like a<br>good time; if there's anything more pretentious than ZAMM itself then surely<br>it is a blog post about ZAMM. But I hope that by starting with this frank<br>content warning I've won myself some of your trust, maybe even enough that<br>you'll be game to buckle in for the winding theme-park boat ride through ZAMM<br>that I'm eager to take you on. Because, pretentious as ZAMM may be, I really<br>can't stop thinking about it now that we have to contend with the Maw.
What is the Maw? The Maw is the gaping pit of nihilism that has opened up in<br>the middle of the tech industry. The Maw is the explicit or implicit subject of<br>roughly 63% of blog posts now shared on link aggregators like Hacker News, the<br>subject that nobody can resist writing about, even authors who typically write<br>about SAT solvers or microservices. The Maw is the looming threat that has<br>prompted such an outpouring of cris de couer in the blogosphere, which<br>some might view as—though I hope events don't go this way—just the death<br>braying of a highly literate professional class.
Lately, we had "Do I Belong in Tech Anymore?",<br>which resonated with many emotionally. Of course, there was also the epic<br>10-parter, "The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess." My personal favorite is "I Think I'm Done Thinking About Gen AI for<br>Now," which is notable for complaining primarily about the<br>aesthetics of AI and perhaps also for how quickly its author was not, in<br>fact, done thinking about Gen AI. We, the<br>software engineers, are clearly working through something.
Software engineers aren't known for shying away from new technology, so it<br>feels like you need an extraordinarily good reason to opt out of using the<br>latest agentic coding tools. And yet I think many of us are so disturbed by the<br>implications of letting linear algebra write software that we are looking to<br>articulate that reason, looking to cobble together a defense of the values that<br>heretofore we took for granted but now are under attack.
This attack isn't just the one implied by how capable AI coding tools have<br>become. This attack sometimes comes from actual people. On Hacker News and<br>similar sites, it's common to see something like the following: Commenter A,<br>expressing sympathy with an anti-AI blog post, recounts how the last time he or<br>she used Claude Code it came up with a name for a function that was subtly<br>misleading. Commenter B, Maw acolyte, then swoops in, asking why commenter A<br>even cares about how functions are named, given that Claude can just read the<br>whole function body to understand what the function does anyway, without<br>breaking a sweat, and furthermore doesn't commenter A realize that soon enough<br>no humans will be reading the code at all?
Commenter B appears to be suggesting that software engineering is over. Not<br>just that many individual software engineers will be out of a job, but that the<br>entire discipline of software engineering—the accumulated wisdom about best<br>practices, about effective architecture, about how to make software<br>maintainable and performant—is defunct. That the difference between an accurate<br>name and an inaccurate one doesn't matter if the AI can still spit out working<br>software.
This is what scares me most about the Maw. It seems to want to swallow forever<br>the distinction between good and bad, leaving a world in which there is only<br>code that works and code that doesn't, and no code that is beautiful, or<br>excellent, or virtuous, or funny.
Every time I've encountered a comment written by commenter B,...