“The Art of Shipping Slopware” by lsusr

Meta famously created an internal AI-usage leaderboard in pursuit of tokenmaxxing. I thought this backwards incentive structure was an anomaly until my friend who works at <other major tech company> told me that his company has one too. Token usage leaderboard are, obviously stupid, because they incentivize the wrong things. My friend was tempted to waste tokens just to get on the leaderboard, and only his personal honor stopped him. Tokenmaxxing leaderboards illustrate that big tech companies have no idea how to best use AI to accelerate software development. Most seem to have bought their programmers subscriptions to Claude/Codex and otherwise continued business as usual. In my experience, this is a mistake. LLM-based software development is different enough from artisan software development that it requires brand new best practices. The frontier is moving fast. Best practices for Fable 5 (released in June 2026) are different from best practices for Opus 4.8 (released May 2026). For this reason, I'm going to pretend that Fable 5 is the best LLM we'll ever get. Consequently, this post may be obsolete in a matter of months. Programming Top-Down The most important thing to understand about writing software is that [...] ---Outline:(01:21) Programming Top-Down(03:54) Management(06:28) Going too Fast --- First published: August 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juRRtv5KB7YbP5zaa/the-art-of-shipping-slopware --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.