I'm traveling Sri Lanka this week. Every second restaurant menu has an AI-generated food photo. The billboards along the coast road are AI illustrations. The logos on half the local shops - laundries, tuk-tuk bakery services, dive schools - are the same three-color minimalist thing the model produces when you type "logo for [business]".
Our world already is full of slop. None of it is any good. All of it is passable.
AI did not raise the ceiling of what a small business owner can produce. It raised the floor - from "handmade sign painted by a cousin" to "same generic AI output as a laundry in Colombo, a taco truck in Berlin, and a nail salon in Manila". The look is now globally uniform because a single model has a single taste.
The heartbreak is not the aesthetic. The heartbreak is that the shop owners are proud of the slop. They think they caught up with designers they never could afford. I'm sure a lot of them had terrible logos before. Maybe they looked cheap, or boring to half their customers. The rest probably didn't care. Now their new logos are screaming "AI slop" to everyone. Or may I be the only one who notices all this slop?
There used to be a gap in design quality. Now it is a gap in perception - when I look at all the AI slop in restaurant menus and on billboards in Sri Lanka, my immediate reaction is somewhere between amazement, disbelief, and disgust. I can't help it, but my brain associates it with "tourist trap", "lack of values" and "low quality". I'm sure that's not always the case. But to me personally, when I can so clearly spot AI slop, it's nothing but appalling. And then I pull out my phone and take a photo.
Here are some of the photos I took on my trip:
And here's a photo of my favorite ad that I spotted during my time in Sri Lanka. It's for a Spiderman movie, hand-painted:
What the shop owners certainly lack is taste. And shop owners without taste seem to turn into slop owners. Thinking about that sentence for a while made me a bit worried about our industry. Because to build out taste, you need friction. Didn't we just remove friction?
When it comes to software engineering, taste is not acquired by reading good code. You do not absorb it by watching a senior work, or an AI churn out great interfaces. It comes from one place: making something bad, being forced to live with it for a week, watching it fail in front of you, and then doing it again. The apprenticeship was not the typing. It's the endless hours spent in Photoshop, the endless drafts, reloads, browser tests, meetings, and the spaghetti code you're still ashamed of today. That was a wall you had to climb, the apprenticeship. And the humiliation of shipping the first version before you knew any better.
When we introduced Agentic Coding to junior engineers, we removed the wall and called it productivity. How do they build out taste, if they never climb a wall? That thing that quietly turned juniors into seniors while nobody wrote a training program for it?
I'm a bit worried, that five years from now, someone will ask why nobody in the company can tell passable from good anymore. The answer might be that we deleted the classroom and didn't even notice, because it was invisible while it worked.
Agentic Coding tools strip the friction in creating great software. That's certainly a good thing. But we must make sure that we don't lose the curriculum. We might actually have to build a new one, deliberately. Let's try to prevent a generation of slop owners.