Slop Slinger: The Diss Track Software Engineering Needed
The Song
I wrote “Slop Slinger” during a moment of pure frustration mixed with unhinged joy. It’s a diss track aimed at nobody and everybody—at the skeptics, the gatekeepers, the “but AI can’t write production code” crowd. But mostly, it’s a celebration of a shift that’s happening right now, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Traditional software engineering is being disrupted. Not destroyed—disrupted. And the people who benefited most from the old system (me, two years ago) are the most defensive about it.
The Shift: From Coding to Orchestration
The song centers on a simple observation: the work has changed fundamentally, and those of us who adapted are shipping faster than those who didn’t.
This isn’t about AI being perfect. Claude hallucinated the wrong API endpoint last week. ChatGPT generated code that made me facepalm. But here’s the thing—I caught it. I reviewed it. I shipped the corrected version in the time it would have taken me to write the first draft from scratch.
The song puts this bluntly:
I asked Claude to write a function, it wrote a whole damn app. You asked Co-Pilot for a snippet, and it auto-completed crap. I’m a prompt-grammer now, yeah, I program with my words
This isn’t arrogance. It’s pattern recognition. Tools matter. Workflow matters. If you’re using a blunt instrument (Copilot’s naive autocomplete) and I’m using a sharp one (Claude with context, reasoning, multi-step prompts), of course my outcomes are different.
The Uncomfortable Truth in the Bridge
The bridge is where the song stops being funny and gets real:
Let’s talk about the codebase you’ve been “refactoring” since May Eighteen months, fourteen tickets, two thousand lines changed And the users? They noticed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deranged.
My “slop” is in production serving customers right now Your “craftsmanship” is in a branch that’ll never see a brow
This hits because it’s true. I’ve seen it. Perfect code in feature branches. Artisanal, hand-crafted, reviewed-to-death implementations that never shipped. Meanwhile, “quick and dirty” shipped products are making money, getting feedback, and improving.
The song isn’t defending slop. It’s mocking the idea that perfect-but-hidden code is somehow more virtuous than imperfect-but-shipped code.
What This Actually Means
Software engineering is shifting from execution-focused to orchestration-focused.
The old model: You write code. You get better at writing code. Success = beautiful code.
The new model: You orchestrate agents. You get better at prompting, context-setting, and review. Success = shipped features.
Both require skill. Both require judgment. But they’re different skills.
The person who’s still sharpening their typing speed and naming convention pedantry will look at someone prompt-engineering their way through a sprint and call it “slop.” And they’ll be right—the intermediate artifacts might be sloppy. But if the final product is production-ready, shipped, and generating value, what does “slop” actually mean?
The Absurdist Part (Weird Al Energy)
The song is also just ridiculous on purpose.
You program Jira dashboards—congrats on managing the herds
There’s no serious critique of Jira here. It’s just a funny image. Same with:
I took every criticism, every doubt, every fear Loaded them in my context window and I’m still standing here
Is my context window a metaphorical repository for self-doubt? Sure, let’s go with it. It’s absurd. It’s silly. Weird Al would be proud.
The Eminem energy comes in the bars—the internal rhymes, the multi-syllabic wordplay, the delivery. But the message is more absurdist than brutal. It’s not saying “traditional engineering is bad.” It’s saying “the game changed and you’re still playing 2024 while I’m playing 2026.”
Why This Matters Now
We’re at an inflection point. In six months, the skeptics will either:
- Adapt and get good at AI orchestration
- Double down on “but it’s slop” while their velocity tanks
- Find a niche where traditional engineering still dominates (it will exist)
The third option is real—there are domains where you need human engineering rigor. Safety-critical systems. Cryptography. Financial code. But even there, AI agents are becoming a tool in the toolbox, not the enemy of craftsmanship.
For most of us? We’re orchestrators now. Some of us just don’t know it yet.
The Actual Advice Hidden in the Song
Strip away the absurdism and the bars, and here’s what the song is actually saying:
- Outcomes over process. Shipped > perfect-but-hidden.
- Adapt or get left behind. This shift is real. Fight it or join it; both are valid choices, but pretending it isn’t happening is worse than either.
- Tools matter. The quality of your AI partner matters as much as your own skill. If you’re using a weak tool and mocking someone using a strong one, you’re not being principled—you’re being disadvantaged.
- Review is non-negotiable. Just because an agent wrote it doesn’t mean you ship it blind. Read the code. Understand it. Fix it. This is where human judgment becomes essential.
- Speed has a value. Not just business value (though that’s real). There’s a joy in shipping, in iterating, in learning from real feedback instead of hypothetical feedback from your ideal codebase.
What’s Next
The song ends with a dropped beat and a spoken outro: “I’ll already be done.”
That’s not a threat. It’s an observation. The future isn’t waiting for consensus. It’s not waiting for perfection. It’s not waiting for the skeptics to stop being skeptics.
It’s shipping. Right now.
The question isn’t whether AI agents will become a standard part of engineering workflows. They already are. The question is whether you’re going to master that workflow or spend the next few years insisting the old one was better.
I’ll be poolside with some cake. You make your choice.
Credits: Written and performed as a fever dream hybrid of Weird Al Yankovic’s absurdist approach and Eminem’s technical rap structure. No actual AI agents were harmed in the making of this diss track. Many lines of code were.