Deslopifying

"deslopifying" (verb): the (painful) process of making AI output your own.

"Deslopifying" sounds negative, and it should, because it is not an enjoyable activity.

It comes down to receiving a sub-par piece of work to review that requires you to dive in deeper and provide more detailed instructions than you would have liked to. You are fixing somebody else's slop.

And while you could have easily found yourself in this situation before AI, the big difference is that you could have chosen not to go deep into it and instead send the work back with general guidelines on what needs to be better, knowing that it's ultimately somebody else's responsibility to find a way to get there.

With AI, however, there is nobody else: the responsibility is yours. And there is only so far AI can improve its output without you going deep and providing detailed instructions.

A good rule of thumb for recognizing if you just went through "deslopifying" is if you asked yourself at some point: "Would I have been better off if I just did this manually?".

I am not saying all AI output is bad. Not all AI output requires deslopifying.<br>You might delegate a bigger piece of work to AI and receive output good enough for what you need at the moment, requiring minimal or no fixing.<br>Or you might give it such well-defined and scoped pieces of work that you can plug them right into your bigger piece of work while being confident about the quality being maintained.

Using AI successfully is really a problem of delegation, and deslopifying happens when you delegate too much . And then assuming control back, steering the output back on the right tracks, becomes grueling work.<br>Even if you end up spending the same time or a bit less time than if you had done it manually, it subjectively feels much worse, because the whole activity is deconstructive (analyzing someone else's slop) instead of constructive (being creative, in the flow).

I believe we should not accept "deslopifying" as a normal part of our daily work , but look at it as a negative work pattern that is to be recognized and minimized.

I am actively trying to recognize when I get into "deslopifying", pull myself out as fast as I can, and adjust my approach to avoid it happening further.<br>Reviewing AI-generated code feels like "deslopifying"? Means I let it generate too much with too little guidance/guardrails. Go step back, plan better, implement higher-level constructs first more manually, let AI fill in smaller pieces. Maybe put stronger rules/boundaries in place. Maybe don't let it generate whole files this time, but define functions and data flow yourself and let AI fill in the implementation details.

It's ok to potentially end up a bit slower in the short term, if you come out of it with more energy, more understanding, and in control.