• "I built a mobile app with no coding experience."
• "I cloned Spotify in a weekend."

A lot of people online would call these slop. I would too. But while I see a lot of the discussion being around the quality of the code, I would argue it's more about the quality and focus of the product.

Building something and deciding what's worth building are different activities. AI has made the first massively cheaper and faster, but it hasn't really touched the second.

For example, take video games. AI can help build one quickly.

• Is it fun?
• Will people play it?
• Would someone pay for it?

When building was hard, friction filtered things. A competent execution of an okay idea could still find an audience simply because fewer things existed.

"Fine" software now has to compete with everything else someone can spin up over a weekend. The bar isn't whether something works. It's whether people actually want to use it.

Good products always came down to solving a real problem in a way people genuinely like. But when building was expensive, it was easy to mistake the difficulty of production for the value of the result.

For most people working in software, the uncomfortable truth is that the middle is getting thinner. Competent execution of well understood problems is becoming less defensible.

You either go deep into problems that are genuinely hard, where AI can't follow yet. Or you develop the product skills that give the output its value.

Product sense, taste, user understanding, the ability to spot a real problem or niche. These were always important. Now, in a world with slop, I think they're primary.