~/
zbmowrey
▊
Home
Blog
Slop Guide
About
Zach Mowrey on GitHub
Zach Mowrey on LinkedIn
Zach Mowrey on X
~/blog
/
slop-taxonomy
in Markdown
Essential Field Guide · v1
The Slop Code Taxonomy
5 root causes · 9 categories · 83 signals · 10 agents + 1 conductor.
Taxonomy
Root causes
Agent team
Data
Filter:
All
Context blindness
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Volume outpaces capacity
Optimized for "does it run"
Institutional exposure
🏗️
Structural Incoherence
12
Context blindness
Inconsistent solutions to similar problems within the same codebase
→
🔓
Security Vulnerabilities
10
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Missing input validation or sanitization at trust boundaries
→
📦
Supply Chain Poisoning
7
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Dependencies in the build that do not appear in any official registry
→
🔀
Concurrency & State Errors
8
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Race conditions in payment or transaction code
→
🫧
Bloat & Waste
9
Optimized for "does it run"
Commit diffs that add far more code than they remove
→
🐌
Runtime & UX Quality
12
Optimized for "does it run"
N+1 queries generated by AI ORMs on growing tables
→
🧪
Testing & Verification Gaps
8
cross-cutting
Optimized for "does it run"
Tests covering only the happy path — edge cases systematically ignored
→
🧠
The Human Bottleneck
8
Volume outpaces capacity
PR volume exceeding team review capacity
→
⚖️
Legal & Regulatory Exposure
9
Institutional exposure
GPL/AGPL-licensed code reproduced by AI without attribution
→