The slop cannons in your engineering org
The article discusses the emergence of 'slop cannons' in engineering organizations, referring to individuals who excessively rely on AI agents for development tasks. These engineers often produce a high volume of pull requests, but the quality of their work is frequently subpar, leading to a significant amount of noise in the system. The trend raises concerns about the impact of such practices on code quality and team dynamics.
- ▪AI agents generated approximately 17 million pull requests per month on GitHub in March 2026, a 325% increase from September 2025.
- ▪A study found that 90% of agent-authored pull requests are considered noise, with a legitimacy rate of only 1 out of 10.
- ▪AI-generated code has a 45% failure rate on secure coding benchmarks, indicating significant quality issues.
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The slop cannons in your engineering orgA field guide to the engineers and designers firing AI agents at every problem in sightJake HandyMay 07, 20263835ShareGetting this out of the way first: I’m writing this as someone who loves Cursor and Claude Code. I once spent a Sunday evening having Claude Code build scripts for automated social media video counting while I was simultaneously playing Diablo IV, and it was, for the record, a great Sunday night. You won’t find a bigger believer in agent-driven dev on Substack.Which makes what I’m about to say more credible, not less. There is a specific, identifiable type of person inside modern SaaS organizations who has weaponized these tools against their own team. They run agents like a slot machine.
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