Your Code Is Too Important to Read—Generate More Slop Instead

Theo makes a counterintuitive case: if your code is so important that every line must be read, you should be generating orders of magnitude more cheap, AI-written slop—not merging it, but using it to verify, test, and probe your core system. He flips the 'read every line' dogma into a 'generate infinite verification' strategy.

Citing his own shift, he notes code generation is now near-free, making the old read-to-write ratio obsolete. Instead of hand-reviewing 100 lines, you can generate 800 lines of exploratory tests, custom debuggers, and parallel implementations to stress-check your critical code. This adds layers of security previously uneconomical, not a review bypass.

The operational implication is that engineering orgs must separate merge-worthy code from verification code. Leaders need to encourage a culture of 'creative slop'—writing code that will never ship but that significantly hardens shipped code. Ignoring this means leaving cheap safety on the table.

Tradeoff: the loud 'vibe coding' movement poisons the conversation, making teams defensive about any AI-generated code. Theo acknowledges that but urges ignoring the noise and focusing on high-volume, low-risk code generation as a defensive practice, not a production one.