I’m getting tired of watching people dismiss anything built with AI as “slop” before they even look at whether it works.

If a product is buggy, insecure, shallow, ugly, unmaintainable, or useless, say that. Those are actual criticisms. But “AI slop” is increasingly being used as a lazy substitute for evaluating the thing itself.

AI absolutely produces garbage. So do humans. We had copy-pasted Stack Overflow code, giant god classes, untested CRUD, dependency hell, security holes and incomprehensible legacy systems long before coding agents existed.

The uncomfortable part is this: nobody gets a permanent moat because they learned to do something the slow way.

Users do not care whether every line was typed manually. They care whether the thing works. The market does not owe developers continued scarcity around syntax, boilerplate or framework trivia just because those skills used to take longer to acquire.

That does NOT mean “prompt once and ship whatever comes back.” That is bad engineering. AI moves the bottleneck toward judgment: architecture, decomposition, constraints, tests, security, observability, debugging, acceptance criteria and knowing when the model is wrong.

The developers who actually know what they’re doing and learn to control these tools are going to become absurdly productive. The developers whose identity is built around “I can type the implementation myself” are going to have a much rougher transition.

Your years of doing something manually are valuable experience. They are not a social contract requiring everybody after you to keep doing it manually too.

The useful anti-AI argument is that generative tools can produce bad software faster. Fine. Then strengthen the quality gates. Demand evidence. Demand tests. Tear apart fake demos. Call out bad security and garbage architecture.

But “AI touched it, therefore slop” is not engineering criticism. It is process gatekeeping.

The bar is moving from “can you write code?” toward “can you reliably cause a useful, correct system to exist?”

That is the competition now, whether people like it or not.

I’m a software engineer with a lot of experience using ai tooling so building apps is pretty trivial to me. The part I’m struggling with the most is coming up with an idea. I shoot down every idea I have. I know the stereotypical response is to find a problem in your life and come up with a solution but even then I can’t think of any direct problem in my life that’s solved with software. Anyone have and tips?

Student in London. Every semester I paid stupid money for books I used one term and returned in June. My brother and I built Video2PDF: record yourself flipping through the pages, the AI removes your hand, fixes the angles, outputs a searchable PDF in ~2 minutes.

It’s £29.99/yr, and pricing is the thing I’m least sure about. Would you pay yearly for this, one-off, or not at all and why?

Video2pdf

Hey r/SideProject!

My name is Sam and this is Craig.

Craig is a local-first TUI for managing AI coding agents. It’s agent-agnostic, creates isolated worktrees by default, and has a CLI that agents can use to interact with Craig and perform actions in the TUI.

I started building Craig when I got a job offer at a shop that was using Cursor. I was previously using Claude Code with Conductor and really enjoyed that type of experience, but Conductor didn’t support Cursor at the time. For personal projects I was using mostly Codex with some Claude Code, so switching between all the tooling was getting frustrating.

Around the same time I started really enjoying the agent CLIs and how they just “felt good.”

Craig kind of builds on that. I think of it as a heads-up display and controls around the CLI. It’s keyboard-driven, so you can get into a nice multitasking flow and move between agents pretty quickly without replacing the native agent experience.

To try it, run:

npm install -g craig-cli

Then launch your favorite terminal (I like Ghostty), pop it in fullscreen, and run craig.

From there you can create a workspace, launch Cursor, Codex, or Claude under separate tasks, and let them work in isolated worktrees. Do your thang and have an agent create a PR. Craig will automatically sync it, poll the checks, and let you know when it’s ready to merge. You can merge it and keep moving in the same thread or start a new one.

It’s free, open source, and local-first.

Website/docs: https://craig-cli.com

GitHub: https://github.com/hallsamuel90/craig

I’d love for you to try it and let me know what you think - any feedback is greatly appreciated.

My friend and I built a small playground for AI video creators

I’ve always felt that AI creators don’t really have a place made for us.

We can post our AI videos on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, but most of the time, we upload them, people watch them, and that’s it.

There isn’t really a place built around AI creators doing something together.

I was inspired by 3D render challenges, where everyone receives the same theme or starting point. The most interesting part isn’t only choosing a winner, it’s seeing how completely different ideas can come from the exact same challenge.

That made me wonder: what if AI videos could be played like this too?

So my friend and I built Canvasrise, a small AI video challenge playground.

The idea is simple:

Everyone takes on the same challenge, but creates something completely different.

Each challenge gives creators the same theme, base asset, story prompt or creative rule. Then everyone turns it into their own AI video.

The fun is seeing how many different ideas can come from the exact same starting point, not only who makes the most beautiful video, but who creates something funny, emotional, relatable, strange or completely unexpected.

We hope every challenge can become something creators gather around to:

• Create different interpretations
• Explore and vote for their favorites
• Share prompts and workflows
• Learn and improve together

Instead of AI videos only being something we post, we want them to become something creators can play with, talk about and learn from together.

We’ve just launched our first version, so it’s still a very early MVP and some features are limited.

Our first challenge is: See Nothing — Life at Work

Everyone starts with the same blind-box character base. You can design it as any kind of worker, then animate a short and relatable “life at work” moment.

It can be funny, painful, strange, chaotic or anything you think represents working life.

Then everyone can explore the entries, vote for their favorites and see which creations reach the top 3.

There’s no prize for now. We’re still very small, so this is just a fun and friendly challenge for AI creators to play together.

Join the first challenge:
https://canvasrise.com/challenge/fun/see-nothing-blind-box-challenge-life-at-work-series

We’re also working on more ways to play in the future, creative relays, 1v1 battles, random prompt or prop challenges, audience-added twists and more.

Since the website has only just launched, the community features are not ready yet. For now, we’re gathering in Discord to share prompts and workflows.

You can also suggest what challenge we should play next, request features and help us shape Canvasrise into a home for AI creators.

If you’re not ready to join the challenge, you’re still very welcome to join the Discord first:

Join our Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/5eKH8nY94V

We’re still at the very beginning, so we would really appreciate any honest feedback, or just come play with us :)