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slop-taxonomy
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Essential Field Guide ยท v1
The Slop Code Taxonomy
5 root causes ยท 9 categories ยท 83 signals ยท 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
๐๏ธ
Structural Incoherence
12
Context blindness
Inconsistent solutions to similar problems within the same codebase
โ
๐
Security Vulnerabilities
10
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Missing input validation or sanitization at trust boundaries
โ
๐ฆ
Supply Chain Poisoning
7
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Dependencies in the build that do not appear in any official registry
โ
๐
Concurrency & State Errors
8
Pattern mimicry without judgment
Race conditions in payment or transaction code
โ
๐ซง
Bloat & Waste
9
Optimized for "does it run"
Commit diffs that add far more code than they remove
โ
๐
Runtime & UX Quality
12
Optimized for "does it run"
N+1 queries generated by AI ORMs on growing tables
โ
๐งช
Testing & Verification Gaps
8
cross-cutting
Optimized for "does it run"
Tests covering only the happy path โ edge cases systematically ignored
โ
๐ง
The Human Bottleneck
8
Volume outpaces capacity
PR volume exceeding team review capacity
โ
โ๏ธ
Legal & Regulatory Exposure
9
Institutional exposure
GPL/AGPL-licensed code reproduced by AI without attribution
โ