Aakash Gupta has just asked Folkman how to build a workflow that avoids slop. Folkman pushes back on the premise before answering, pointing out that the pre-AI baseline was not good documents and good code but people copying from Stack Overflow. He is chief AI and product officer at a company selling AI workflows, which makes the concession an odd one to volunteer.
Nobody does. A lot of times, I think you're kind of almost kicking the effort over to another person, right? Like, you just keep bouncing the level of effort around where it's like, oh, I need you to do this thing. Okay, I'll have AI do it and then I'll send it back to you. And you're like, Okay, I mean, I could have done that. So, like, what was the value add
exactly? So, how do we create like a non-slop loop? Maybe you can help us like program a loop from scratch. And
non-slop is kind of interesting because you hear the word slop thrown around a lot. And I would argue that some AI slop is actually better than human slop that I've seen before AI. And so, one thing I like to remind people is before AI, we did not live in a perfect utopia of only good documents and good code running around the universe. A lot of stuff was bad. People don't like to remember, but we used to copy and paste code from Stag Overflow, right? Like it was not that different than AI, just less efficient. So, for me, when I think about writing a good skill, and we could even go through this. Go back here. I'll just make a temp directory. So, like, if you're going to make a skill, honestly, one of the first things you can do is, and I'll just type here, but I actually think if in the best case, you're going in here and we'll just do skill.md, which is very basic. It's not including any code. I would write the first pass by hand. There's actually a lot, not a lot, but I've read some papers that suggest that skills authored by humans are often better than the ones authored by AI. And I think the reason for that is you know more and can express more of like what you want this thing to do. And if you offload that to AI, you might tell yourself it's it's kind of like you know, e-bikes are kind of popular. I live. Like, yeah, I got an e-bike, but don't worry. Like, I still want to get exercise and we'll pedal. Once you get on the e-bike, you're not pedaling. Like, that's just the truth for most people. So, with AI, once you kind of get on the AI loop, it can be really hard to be like, now I'm going to inject my thinking because the loop's moving so fast, right? It's like you're on the e-bike and it's moving and it's fun and you're getting the dopamine. It can be a little bit hard to get off that treadmill. So, how do you start? I'd start like a human and just be like, help me make good decisions. I specifically struggle, and I'm just going to make stuff up with decision fatigue and would love someone to use more, what's like a good word for this contrarian thinking, but also help push me to make a decision. And you can tell I suck at typing now since AI. When enough thinking's been done, I also like to know latest research and have a partner that questions, pushes me, uses the Socratic method and calls my BS. Also, be succinct. I always add this because, man, if you use Opus 5, the thing likes to talk
about the average length of responses between like and Opus 4.6. They're like in one realm, and then Opus 5 is just like so wordy.
It's so wordy. It definitely for me regressed. It sounds more like AI than any AI I've used. It's insane.
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