Slopification and its Discontents

Charles Leifer (author of Peewee ORM) shares a detailed, hands-on account of using Opus 4.6 on real open-source projects — Peewee asyncio, cysqlite optimization, and documentation reorganization. He identifies a consistent pattern: Claude excels at analysis, bug-finding, and planning, but struggles with large-scope generation and in-place refactoring, with quality degrading as context size grows. He concludes that effective AI-assisted development requires tight iteration loops, upfront specification, and prompting strategies that converge with coding discipline itself.