Mold the Slop: carving a third road between embracing AI slop and micromanaging it
dscape · x · 2026-11-07
In an essay on nonsense.io, Gonçalo Silva rejects the binary framing of AI-era software engineering — either embrace AI-generated slop for speed or micromanage every output and become the bottleneck. His answer: put on the "engineer hat" and mold the slop.
- Engineers are shifting from bricklayers (laying every brick themselves) to civil engineers who steer and correct on a site they still know intimately.
- World-class engineering is deliberate and methodical yet ambitious: identify the right fundamentals to capture near-full AI productivity while keeping rigor and predictability.
- He argues the transition is as psychological as it is technological, and that bipolar online discourse distorts it.
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