Slopapalooza

2026 Lineup

The Anti-Patterns

Fourteen acts. One repo. Zero acceptance criteria. Each one is a real pattern we keep seeing — what it is, how it happens, why it’s dangerous, and how a serious team prevents it.

Headliner

Prompt & Pray

Vague prompts, accepted output, hoping the architecture is sane.

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Headliner

The 9,000-Line Component

AI keeps adding to one file because nobody stopped to redesign.

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Headliner

The Duct-Tape API

Endpoints added one at a time with no coherent model, naming, or errors.

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Vibes-Only Migration

Framework, platform, or database swap with no real migration plan.

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The Context Window Bonfire

A chat thread as the source of truth instead of specs or docs.

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The Infinite Patch Spiral

Every AI fix creates two more bugs because the design is wrong.

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Slopsquatting Festival

Hallucinated package names get squatted by attackers — and your AI keeps installing them.

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The Rubber-Stamp Stage

Twelve-hundred-line PRs, three-bullet AI summary, ship it.

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Secrets on the Big Screen

API keys, prod credentials, and customer data pasted straight into the prompt.

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The Fake Confidence Refactor

AI rewrites working code with great confidence and quietly breaks edges.

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Coverage Theater

Tests and code wrote each other. They agree. They’re both wrong.

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The “It Worked Once” Deployment

The code ran locally once, so everyone pretends it’s production-ready.

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Screenshot-Driven Product Spec

“Make it look like this.” No behavior, data, permissions, or errors.

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The Disappearing Apprenticeship

Teams stop building the engineering judgment AI assumes they already have.

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