Who We Follow · Influencers
Swyx (Shawn Wang)
Named the bottleneck: changing the slope of slop
Swyx coined "AI Engineer" as a discipline and, in "Scaling without Slop" (Jan 2026), argued the defensible move in an age of effortless mediocrity is not more output but better quality-at-scale through editorial judgment, curation, and evals — "changing the slope of slop, not giving up on humans." That is verification-as-moat in the builder mainstream's own words, with a handle the whole field now uses.