AI Slop Is the Second Ship
As the story goes, Theseus sailed to Crete, killed the Minotaur, and brought home the young Athenians who had been sent there to be fed to it. The ship that carried them had thirty oars. Athens decided it was too important to lose. So the city kept it. Every year it sailed to Delos on a sacred voyage, and that voyage mattered so much that Athens paused all executions until the ship came back.…
In the myth of Theseus, the hero sailed to Crete, defeated the Minotaur, and returned home with the young Athenians who had been sacrificed to the monster. The ship - Theseus' ship - was of great importance to Athens. It sailed to Delos every year in a sacred voyage, and Athens paused all executions until the ship returned. Socrates spent his final month waiting for the ship to come back.
Today, we can think of an AI system as a second ship. This second ship is less glamorous than Theseus' ship, but it is just as important. This second ship is a retry module for a payments service. It retries failed calls to the payment provider, waiting longer after each failure before giving up. One line in this module matters most - it refuses to retry a payment unless the request includes an idempotent key, allowing the provider to identify repeated attempts. This line was added after a bad week when a flaky network turned one payment into two.
The retry module becomes so important that it is never replaced, even as the original codebase is gradually refactored. Over time, the AI-generated module becomes second nature to the team, who are unaware of the original code's idempotency check. Eventually, a new module is built using the same patterns as the original, but without understanding why those patterns were necessary. This new module works, but it lacks the crucial idempotency check.
The AI-generated second ship sails the seas, retrying failed payments without regard for idempotency. Some of these retries result in double charges to customers. The team is unable to trace why the module retries payments, as no one can remember the original rationale. These second-ship planks, generated by an agent, slip into the codebase without being questioned or understood. The trouble begins when these planks become too common, as each one is a part nobody knows how to repair when it fails.
Just as Theseus' crew knew the purpose of each plank on his ship, we need to ensure that someone in our codebase understands the role of each AI-generated component. If we let AI-planks accumulate without clear explanations, the codebase will lose its identity, and we will end up with a second ship that cannot be trusted or repaired. The key is to maintain a human touch, ensuring that every plank in our codebase is chosen with purpose and can be explained when necessary.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
