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AA Adam Argyle Adam Argyle Web developer, designer and educator with more than 15 years in front-end architecture, design systems and teaching.

“Before slop, there was spaghetti code. We're all out here saying 'your code is spaghetti, my code is lean.' I'm pretty sure your code is spaghetti too. You just felt really good about it the night you wrote it. Give it a month. Look back at what you wrote later, and you almost always think, what was I thinking?”

Whiskey Web and Whatnot · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“Before slop, there was spaghetti code. We're all out here saying 'your code is spaghetti, my code is lean.' I'm pretty sure your code is spaghetti too. You just felt really good about it the night you wrote it. Give it a month. Look back at what you wrote later, and you almost always think, what was I thinking?” — Adam Argyle, Whiskey Web and Whatnot

Context

The hosts were discussing whether AI-generated code is slop. Adam Argyle points out that his years at Google had plenty of slop in the codebase before AI, a counter to the idea that human-written code was clean.

Transcript

Whiskey Web and Whatnot Around 25:26 into the episode
Adam Argyle

…code that we were all writing before. This is, you know, seven years of Google, seven years of Google. There was slop going into that code base before AI. All right. So it's like we're all out here. Like, we're not spaghetti. This is the other. This is like before slop, there was spaghetti code.

Speaker 2

Your code is spaghetti code. My code

Adam Argyle

is lead code. I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure your code is spaghetti too. You just felt really good about it the night you wrote it. Give it a month. Look back at what you wrote later. And you almost always look back at what you're, what am I thinking? You know, like, what about? Yeah.

Robbie Wagner

Anytime I look at code that's more than a few years old, it's always trash. Like even if you had good, like you were good about making it good for then, it's just everything changes. So like, even from a browser standards, you know, standpoint, it's like things that I've always had to implement…

Adam Argyle

modal is automatically inerts the rest of the page. Yeah. Yeah.

Robbie Wagner

And like stuff like that. Like there used to be thousands of lines of JavaScript to handle the edge cases of all this little stuff where every like a you know a product person's like it needs to do this and when you press this button it does this and like but then now actually that is…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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