The Great Software Garbage Patch

Maybe you’ve heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP).

It’s a collection of plastic and floating trash out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s real and needs attention (and receives attention), but also, it’s not a walkable floating island of plastic water bottles, which one team doom-markets it as.

AI is currently creating the Great Software Garbage Patch.

Billions of lines of garbage code, throwaway prototypes, and AI slop. It’s a little harder to put your finger on because it’s dispersed across GitHub and GitLab, the cloud, and 100s of millions of laptops and servers.

Like the GPGP, it’s real, and it needs attention.

It’s happening because AI makes coding accessible to everybody with an idea. It’s happening because AI enables software engineers to do more and create more faster, the byproduct of which is slop and tech debt. It’s happening because, like with many other things in our world, we assume more is better.

Hard drives all over the planet (and yes, “the cloud” is really just servers connected to real hard drives) are screaming for relief.

Maybe we can use AI to help clean itself up.

I wonder if our future includes altruistic organizations focused on cleaning up, reigning in, and managing AI output. I think we’re trending in that direction.

But like with the Ocean Project, somebody’s gonna have to care enough to take it on.