SlopOps

It's 2013. You — and you alone — got access to Claude Code. Imagine how much you could have shipped! Like other daydreams, it emerges reflexively and is mostly harmless. But for some people, the residue of the daydream becomes a maladaptive mental model. They make decisions as if everyone else didn't have the same capabilities. They fail to recognize that these capabilities are now table stakes, not a competitive advantage.

The most obvious bad strategy implemented under this mistaken frame is smearing attention across 1000 projects that don't add up to anything heading in the same direction. Brownian quantity over focused quality. Compounding towards zero. I think it's almost an extension of 2025 Cluely "solve for distribution at all costs and don't worry about solving for anything else" bullshit. A lot of people got caught up in that fad; the same people are getting caught up in this one. Just because you can troll the internet into looking at your startup, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can produce 1000 semi-baked apps while telling yourself, "even if just 1 hits, I'm golden," doesn't mean you should.

Again, you don't enjoy a monopoly over these new capabilities. You can jubilantly cry, "we're so early!" on twitter all you want, but the population of people who can now produce good-enough demos has dramatically increased. It's no longer restricted to people who know how to program. Yes, there remain dramatic differences between what a skilled engineer can do with these tools versus someone who has never shipped anything before. But when you employ the directionless 1000 projects anti-strategy, you're choosing to enter an arena where that doesn't matter — you're playing the slop lottery.

To be fair, there are people who make money launching a thousand small bets. You can absolutely look at them and ask, "well, why can't I do that, too?" There is certainly no evidence of extraordinary technical prowess. The agent is doing all the heavy lifting, and some of the most successful people playing that game admit so regularly. But that's the wrong question to ask. A better one would be, "hey, does Pieter Levels have something I don't have?" The answer is an obvious, "yes, distribution." You probably don't have that. You're just exchanging attention and tokens for fast-fashion wares to sell on Temu.

Worse than that, the window during which the lottery ticket game can work is closing. Supply for this level of effort is going to infinity. It will probably happen before the end of 2026. If none of your scratch-offs pay out before the music stops, what then? You'll have to retreat to trying to use these incredible tools as a force multiplier in service of a serious and worthwhile project that takes sustained effort. Something that could actually differentiate itself. Something ambitious.