The proliferation of AI-generated code, often referred to as "AI slop," has led to a new niche service: cleaning up that very code. A team named Slopfix is now charging up to $10,000 per project to reduce the volume of AI-generated code, employing AI tools in their process.
Slopfix operates on a tiered pricing model based on the amount of code reduction achieved. For instance, a project aiming to reduce 100,000 lines of code to 35,000 would cost $10,000 if the target reduction of 65,000 lines is met. If only 32,500 lines are removed, the fee would be $5,000.
The team utilizes an AI tool called Claude Code, which they state is kept "on a very short leash." Slopfix asserts that its three-person team possesses a combined thirty years of experience in identifying maintainable code, ensuring the AI agent does not dictate the cleanup process. The primary issue with AI-generated code, according to the report, is not necessarily the final output but the instability and inefficiency that arise when building upon such codebases. AI agents often produce favored outputs but lack the foresight for subsequent steps, leading to duplication and redundancy.
This problem is not isolated. Developers of a popular PS3 emulator have asked users to cease submitting "AI slop code," and the open-source game engine Godot experienced an influx of AI-generated code earlier this year, eventually stopping contributions of this nature due to concerns about developers not fully understanding the code they submit. Godot's stance was that it could not trust heavy AI users to adequately fix their code.
While cleanup services like Slopfix may make AI-generated codebases easier for AI agents to build upon, it remains to be seen whether clients will be willing to pay substantial fees for this service, especially when the cleanup itself involves AI. Questions persist regarding the oversight of the AI tools used for cleanup and the fundamental necessity of AI coding bots if human engineers are still performing the bulk of the maintenance.