Machine Learning Street Talk · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Shawn Wen defines 'slop' in AI as generation without competence, often stemming from a lack of context. He stresses that effective AI, whether for coding or voice agents, requires meticulous 'contextual engineering' to ground agents with relevant information and preferences. This ensures that AI outputs are not only coherent but also contextually appropriate and valuable to the recipient.
“My definition of slop is generation without competence.”
“And it knows what to do, and that AI does not produce Slab. Being Slab, unfortunately, is probably a little bit more subjective in a way that I... engineer and context engineer my agent so that the agent doesn't feel like a slap to me, but it may feel a slap to the other person who is actually reading my message.”
“So then when they read it, they thought it's a slap because it doesn't actually see the context behind the reasoning. So that is a bit subjective problem.”