In your opinion, a codebase has become slop when...
@datarama I worked with two guys whose LLM-generated code I could not distinguish from the code they wrote before LLMs. They were top-notch programmers in my opinion.
Funnily enough, I worked with two guys that produced aberrations with LLMs. Unfortunately, I couldn't examine their earlier work.
For me the defining characteristic of slop is that it's anti-minimalistic. Either because the human thinks it's cheap or because the LLM defaults to producing in that style.
@datarama so LLM slop to me is code that revolts me because I would hate to maintain so much useless code. It's funny how I think I've seen that prior to LLMs, but very few times. (Someone I mentored commented how much code I would remove when I reviewed his code. But, as he was a smart human, he learned fast.)
In a way, slop fascinates me. Either it says a lot about the code we make public, or it puzzles me how LLMs gravitate towards a specific peculiar defect.