Paul Ford
Writer and co-founder of Aboard, who has published essays and stories on Ftrain.com since 1997 and writes about software, AI and vibe coding.
“If the constraints aren't there, no one can perceive what you're doing. It's just more slop. That's what slop is. Slop is a slip out of the form that somebody's expecting.”
The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · June 2026
Near the end of the Hobbes episode, Paul cites a line he attributes to William Morris, that you can't have art without resistance in the materials. He argues software used to be so expensive that its processes acted as a constraint, and that people no longer feel it. He goes on to say the fix is for people to assert the value of the form.
Transcript
he hit a great line. And the line was, you can't have art without resistance in the materials. There it is. And you cannot have creativity without constraints. And it's not just that the constraints kind of give you a to-do list. The form and the structure of things are how people understand what you're doing. If I suddenly start singing a song right now, that would seem bananas. But if I said, Rich Ziade been composing funny little songs. I want you to hear a couple of them. You'd be like, all right, I'll evaluate based on what I think a song should sound like. Software was so expensive that we had zillions of processes to manage the costs because failure was a normal and natural constraint.
Yes.
And we lived inside of that. And now people no longer feel that constraint. They don't feel it in making video and images and pros. But if the constraints aren't there, no one can perceive what you're doing. It's just more slop. That's what slop is. Slop is a slip out of the form that somebody's expecting. They're like, I thought that would be a nice picture of a girl, but her face is all kind of like, it's like a little glowy. It feels weird. And so I see it with the Hobbesianism. I think you don't even need the monarch. You just need people to start to assert the value of the form. And one of the forms that has value is good, simple software that doesn't have 8 million features, but is actually focused on a particular group of people achieving a shared goal.
Yes.
And I think that right now, for all the power of these tools, they are not optimized for building that.
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