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Jul 16, 2026     Tags: ai, oss    

(Thanks to Facundo Tuesca for the name inspiration).

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your working day (and a good chunk of your personal time) reading code online. Increasingly, that means accidentally reading a lot of “slop”1.

Personally, slop isn’t annoying per se2: it’s okay for personal software3, for example, to be slop. What makes slop annoying is the feeling of being bait-and-switched: much like the written word, I want to be informed4 before I spend my human attention on machine outputs.

I’m a big believer in giving people a way to express honest intentions. For example, I do sometimes want to drop some slop on the Internet (to save for myself later, or for others to reuse without reading), but I don’t want to mislead people about the intent or effort behind it.

So: what if we gave people a way to express their honest intentions with slop? We use README files to tell users where to start when reading a project; I think we should have a READMENOT5 file that users (or their agents) can add to their projects when they’re slopping it up. The presence of that file would serve as an unambigous warning that the code within the project is unsuitable for unwitting human comprehension6.

A READMENOT could contain anything, but it seems to me like a good default would be a short human-friendly explanation of why the project shouldn’t be read. For example:

1
2
3
4
5

Warning!

You're reading a project that isn't intended for direct human consumption.
You may wish to use an LLM or another tool to interact automatically with
this project.