Build more slop

Software is becoming increasingly easy to produce, so naturally people are producing more software. The counterforce to this is that good software is still not easy to make, so most software being produced is "slop".

Slop is software that looks functional but isn't. Slop is software that is fun to think about but painful to use. Slop is vaporware, software with no purpose, software as aimless compute.

Slop sucks.

And yet, slop is useful as a prototyping medium.

Slop gives ideas substance. People should go out and build their ideas to test them against reality, as early and often as possible. Do you really want that minimal text editor you've been dreaming about all those years? Do you really need that new TODO system? That second brain? You might find the answer surprising and useful. An idea before it touches reality is mostly a convincing illusion.

Slop is really nothing new. We all produce slop as a byproduct of doing and thinking. Over time, we hope the slop gives way to something neater.

Good software isn't the absence of slop, not exactly. Good software is simply software that was sloppy enough for long enough that, eventually, it wasn't, because someone cared enough to make it through.