Tyler Folkman
Chief AI Officer at JobNimbus | Building AI that solves real problems | 10+ years scaling AI products | LinkedIn Top Voice
“…I would argue that some AI slop is actually better than human slop that I've seen before AI.”
Product Growth · Product & Design · September 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
…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…
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.
Quick thought experiment for you. Is there anything in this video you should be trying on your own? If there is, try it. Take a screenshot, post it on LinkedIn, and tag me. I'd love to see what you're learning. Now, a quick word from our sponsors before we get into the back half of the pod. I used…