I've said it multiple times: I'm in a position where using AI is completely optional. And in a place where there's a strong divide between those that do and those of us that don't, the result is apparent: ship fast and have no clue what to do when shit hits the fan, or ship slow(relatively speaking if you have 3 major updates/week) and be able to handle the inevitable shitstorm.
Overall, I am not concerned about the slopification beyond the fact that cybersecurity is dead. Your only way out of it is to do what I've been doing and cut all ropes to cloud providers and and self-host everything, but that's a different topic.
I've had to scroll through tons of slop and the harsh truth that sloppers/clankers/ai evangelists cry over is the fact that you end up with a ton of unmanageable, over-engineered spaghetti soup that is held together by hope and dreams.
The constant data leaks, security incidents, downtime are not becoming more frequent by pure coincidence. The endless todo apps are not gaining traction because there is no demand for them at all and is the only reason why security incidents are not more frequent.
The real hard to swallow pill is that most people in software engineering were not in software engineering because of their passion or desire to be there: it was the relatively-higher pay and nothing more. AI didn't destroy that - the masks are finally down. What is sad is that more often than not, businesses are obsessed with delivering features as if there's an infinite number of clients that require them and an infinite amount of clients that would jump on board the second you release them. Sooooo. Throw a plane full of cash at anthropic/google/openai/etc. And hope for the best with a pinky-promise IOU. For those that are/were passionate about software and are not as fortunate as me and forced to slop their way though the work day, this is no doubt heartbreaking. Software is a lot like Lego - you have some basic tools, you know what you are trying to achieve and you have to fight limitations. Putting the pieces together is the most rewarding part of the process. For those people, slop machines took the most rewarding part of the job.
There's also the fact that slop is currently heavily subsidized by investors so most people are paying a symbolic fee. The real question I have is what would happen when the real prices hit? I suspect a lot of companies dying if they don't have a financial backup strategy/enough cash to invest in people figuring out what the endless slop does or simply having to shut down operations. Only time will tell.