The rise of AI-generated code has flooded the internet with 'slop' - poorly written, mindlessly generated text, images, and spam. Simon Willison helped popularize the term, which had been circulating in engineering circles for years. At Greptile, we question whether programming best practices are obsolete.

I argue good code will prevail, driven by economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain than complex, brittle alternatives. Competition between AI models is fierce, pushing them to produce reliable, maintainable code for faster feature delivery. Markets won't reward long-term technical debt.