<h1>Slop Paralysis</h1>
<blockquote>
slop paral­y­sis - noun
A com­plete or par­tial loss of func­tion while re­view­ing the out­put of a cod­ing agent.
</blockquote>
Let me paint you a pic­ture.
You have an idea for prod­uct.
It could be any­thing: A mo­bile app, a dash­board, or a script to au­to­mate your work.
So, you sit down with your fa­vorite LLM and de­scribe your idea.
Maybe you have a pretty good un­der­stand­ing of how it should be im­ple­mented.
You might even know the over­all struc­ture of the pro­ject in your mind.
You tell your cod­ing agent all of this.
Then, you let it loose.
It cooks and cleans and im­ple­ments your prod­uct for you.
In the end, you have some idea of how the end re­sult works, but it is not com­plete.
Since this is a pro­ject that is im­por­tant, which you in­tend to main­tain, you go to read the code.
That’s when it hits you.
Slop paral­y­sis.
<h2>The Problem</h2>
Slop paral­y­sis is the com­plete lack of de­sire to re­view the out­put of an LLM.
It could show up for any num­ber of rea­sons.
The most com­mon, for me, are:
<ul>
<li>The sheer amount of code de­mand­ing con­sump­tion.</li>
<li>Missing con­text (that the agent was aware of, but not you).</li>
<li>A fear of break­ing some­thing.</li>
</ul>
In the end, slop paral­y­sis slows you down and makes your life more stress­ful.
So, what can we do about it?
<h2>Some Solutions</h2>
I will de­scribe some so­lu­tions that have worked for me.
As al­ways, your mileage may vary.
The ob­vi­ous so­lu­tion is to sim­ply not use an agent.
Some­times cod­ing agents make your job eas­ier.
Some­times they do not.
<a href="./when_to_use_an_agent">Knowing which is which is dif­ﬁ­cult, but ex­tremely valu­able.</a>
When you do de­cide to use an agent, you can have the agent sim­ply pro­duce less code.
I have heard of <a href="https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail">pro­jects</a> that help you do this, but I have not ac­tu­ally tried them.
In­stead, I ask the agent to make a plan ﬁrst, then re­work that plan my­self to min­i­mize the num­ber of changes.
In the end, a plan which was orig­i­nally writ­ten by the agent be­comes one that has been mer­ci­lessly edited by my­self.
In this way, I min­i­mize the amount of code which de­mands con­sump­tion.
The side-ef­fect of this is that I then have an ex­cel­lent un­der­stand­ing of what the agent ac­tu­ally does, which helps with the con­text prob­lem.
The ﬁ­nal strat­egy, which I use when all else fails, is to refac­tor the code by hand.
When the agent has proven the tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity of the pro­ject, but the code is sim­ply too ex­pan­sive to prop­erly grok all at once, I sit down with a ﬁne-tooth comb and refac­tor it, mod­ule by mod­ule.
I do not need to care­fully read each func­tion and eval­u­ate its mer­its, but I do force my­self to, at min­i­mum, lay eyes on them all.
<h2>Stay Steady Out There</h2>
I ﬁnd my­self be­com­ing more over­whelmed by the dis­course every sin­gle day.
It’s ex­haust­ing how much is hap­pen­ing in the world, and even worst, how much you are ex­pected to care about it all.
Take some time for your­self.
Save your­self from slop paral­y­sis.

A complete or partial loss of function while reviewing the output of a coding agent.

A com­plete or par­tial loss of func­tion while re­view­ing the out­put of a cod­ing agent.

Slop Paralysis

Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.

Back in my day, we used math for au­to­com­plete.

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

<h1>Hacker News, sans AI</h1>
I like Hacker News, but I do not love that so much of it has turned into dis­cus­sion of a sin­gle topic: AI. So, I have cre­ated my own ver­sion.
A ver­sion of Hacker News, with­out AI.
<a href="/hnsansai">HNSansAI</a> pulls from the of­ﬁ­cial Hacker News API, looks through the con­tent of each ar­ti­cle, and dis­cards any that men­tion a term re­lated to “AI”. That in­cludes stuff like:
<ul>
<li>“OpenAI”</li>
<li>“Anthropic”</li>
<li>“Copilot”</li>
<li>“LLM”</li>
<li>…and many more.</li>
</ul>

I like HackerNews, but I don't love that so much of it has turned into discussion of a single topic: AI. This is a version of HackerNews, filtered to remove any article focusing on __AI__. Refreshes about every ten minutes.

I like HackerNews, but I don’t love that so much of it has turned into dis­cus­sion of a sin­gle topic: AI. This is a ver­sion of HackerNews, ﬁl­tered to re­move any ar­ti­cle fo­cus­ing on AI. Refreshes about every ten min­utes.

Hacker News sans AI

<h1>For The Love of <code>iframe</code>s.</h1>
I adore a good <code>iframe</code>.
They’re so el­e­gant as a web com­po­nent.
Just ex­pose an end­point, say <a href="https://writewithharper.com/editor?initialText=This%20is%20an%20interactive%20buffer%20you%20can%20use%20to%20to%20check%20your%20work"><code>https://writewithharper.com/editor</code></a>, set it up to ac­cept some query pa­ra­me­ters and get it hosted.
Now you can ac­cess this web-com­po­nent from any page that has a loose enough Content Security Policy.
For me, that means my <a href="https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/the_simplest_neovim_markdown_setup">school as­sign­ments</a> and other as­sorted doc­u­men­ta­tion.
It also means that I can avoid set­ting up a com­plex build sys­tem for MDX, while still be­ing able to in­clude in­ter­ac­tive com­po­nents.
The ex­am­ple from ear­lier:
<pre><code class="hljs language-html">&#x3C;iframe
 src="https://writewithharper.com/editor?initialText=See, we can now embed the the Harper editor%0Arght into this document!%0A%0AIt's a little too easy."
 width="100%"
 height="400px"
 style="border-radius:10px;border:0px"
>&#x3C;/iframe>
</code></pre>
One ma­jor caveat though: when we pass our ar­gu­ments to the com­po­nent through the query URL, this gets sent to the com­po­nen­t’s server as well.
I cer­tainly trust the Harper web­site’s server, since I main­tain it and the code is <a href="https://github.com/elijah-potter/harper/tree/master/packages/web">open source</a>, but that is­n’t al­ways the case.
<iframe src="https://writewithharper.com/editor?initialText=See, we can now embed the the Harper editor%0Arght into this document!%0A%0AIt's a little too easy." width="100%" height="400px" style="border-radius:10px;border:0px"></iframe>
You should also prob­a­bly avoid do­ing this too much.
Most browsers spawn a whole new process for every <code>iframe</code>, so if you want things to stay snappy it is best to limit your­self to just one (maybe two) per page.

Chronically underrated, chronically over-prescribed

Chronically un­der­rated, chron­i­cally over-pre­scribed

Elijah Potter

For The Love of `iframe`s.

Comments

Other Stuff

Slop Paralysis

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Hacker News sans AI

Elijah Potter

For The Love of iframes.

Comments

Other Stuff

Slop Paralysis

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Hacker News sans AI

For The Love of `iframe`s.