Pilled

The tent goes up in a field. The preacher comes out. The crowd is already swaying. Someone in the back gets the spirit and falls; an usher catches them with the easy grace of long practice. He is on a per-soul retainer. The collection plate goes around twice. The second time, somehow, weighs more.

Whether the sick got better, the lost got found, or the future arrived is not measured. The point was the swaying. The preacher does this again next Friday.

A lot of what currently passes for AI is a revival.

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The slop is the tell¶

AI is productive. That’s the easy part. A real person with real judgement and a real audience — a customer, a reader, a client, a boss — can do, with AI in the loop, things that took a small team last year. Decks, memos, plans, code, analyses, drafts. The output is faster and most of it is good.

This is the boring true thing, and almost nobody is here for the boring true thing.

What’s happening in the discourse is a louder, busier thing. Hundreds of thousands of tokens generated. Dozens of agents fanning out in parallel. A forty-slide deck produced over lunch. A twelve-page strategy memo nobody asked for. A campaign generated in an afternoon. A vibe-coded app and eight posts about the vibe-coded app. A research brief that took ninety seconds and reads like it. A LinkedIn post that begins “I asked my AI a question today and it changed my life.” Six thousand reactions. A think-piece about how to think about AI, written in part by AI. Nobody has remarked on this.

Vibe-coded is what we are calling untested this year.

The volume is real. The volume is not the same as the work.

Slop has a specific tell. It is fluent. It is plausible. It is structurally complete in a way that hand-written work isn’t, because hand-written work has the seams of someone actually thinking. Slop is what the writer would have written if they hadn’t bothered to think. It reads like a competent person on autopilot. It was produced by a competent system on autopilot. The match is exact.

The reason slop feels productive is that, until recently, producing this volume of fluent material required labour. The volume was the bottleneck. The volume signalled effort, and effort signalled value. Now the volume signals nothing. It now signals approximately the same thing as having a printer.

The careful version doesn’t look like this. It looks like a small number of pieces of output that someone stood behind. It feels slower because it is slower, in the sense that the verification was the work. Volume is no longer a brag in a world where the volume costs nothing. Standing behind it is.

Pilled¶

A non-technical stakeholder asked me, in a recent meeting, whether engineers were still writing code by hand. She followed up by asking whether AI was reviewing the code — the code also being written by AI.

In a different room, both questions are good ones. A senior engineer turning over what verification means when the author and the reviewer are the same system — that’s a real conversation. This was not that. The questions weren’t really questions. They were a small, friendly survey of which side I was on.

That’s the giveaway. The slang is the giveaway too.

To be pilled — red-pilled, black-pilled, AI-pilled, presumably others on the way — is to have seen the truth others haven’t. It’s a conversion vocabulary. Before, you didn’t get it. Now, you do. The people who still don’t get it are mostly pitied, occasionally mocked, and quietly noted for later.

This is religion language. It’s the shape of testimony from the tent. I was blind, and now I see. It carries the religious rewards — belonging, the small thrill of being early — and the religious costs — the inability to update without losing face, because updating would mean the conversion wasn’t real.

The pilled person is excellent company for about eight minutes.

You have met this person before. Two years ago they were holding a sourdough starter. Last year, a cold plunge. This year, an LLM. The person is constant. The product varies.

The pilled aren’t wrong that something is happening. Something is happening. The error is sliding from “this is real” to “this is everything, immediately, and the people who don’t see it are stupid.” That isn’t an analytic position. It’s an identity.

You can spot it by the predictions. The pilled produce predictions that are bold, specific, and structurally unfalsifiable on any short timescale. Half the knowledge workforce automated by next year. Lawyers, marketers, analysts, engineers, designers — all gone by 2027. Schools obsolete. Universities obsolete. Management obsolete. The wheel possibly obsolete, give it time. AGI was due last June. It is now due next June. It will be due next June again next June. (Doomsday cults have run this exact play for a long time. The technique is reliable.)

The predictions are not predictions. They are loyalty oaths.

Compare with the careful version: “this changes how my team works, here is what we’re doing about it, here is what we don’t yet know.” That doesn’t recruit anyone. It also doesn’t get held to a deadline.

The crypto echo¶

This rhymes with crypto, and the rhyme is in the pattern, not the underlying thing. True believers, a conversion dialect,¹ unfalsifiable predictions, Discord servers full of busyness that produced nothing, an entire generation of think-pieces that aged into embarrassment, then deletion, then quiet reuse in the next wave’s think-pieces. AI is not crypto — its productive uses are larger and more general, reaching almost anyone whose job involves words, numbers, images, or code. But the evangelism pattern looks identical whether the underlying thing is a generational shift or a five-year sugar high. You cannot tell from inside the tent.

Nobody keeps the receipts¶

The thing that should chasten the pilled, and doesn’t, is that we already ran this play and nobody paid the bill.

The people who in 2021 said every company would have a Web3 strategy by 2023 — where are they now? They didn’t disappear. They mostly repositioned. The Discord moved. The newsletter pivoted. The thought leader who was big on NFTs is now big on agents. It was a find-and-replace.

This isn’t an accident. There is no ledger. There is no professional consequence for being publicly, loudly wrong about a wave, because the audience is also moving on, and bringing up your bad call would also bring up theirs. The agreement is mutual, unspoken, well-organised, and works beautifully.

Which means: the fact that today’s loudest voices sound very certain tells you nothing. It tells you they have figured out, correctly, that there is no downside to certainty. The careful voices are the ones who might still be talking in five years with their reputations intact — because they didn’t take positions they will need to quietly walk away from.

How to tell¶

There is a test for whether something is the real shift or the slop. It is not subtle.

Look at what got delivered to someone who actually needed it. Look at whether they used it. Look at whether the person who made it can answer, in a normal voice, what it does, who it’s for, and where it might be wrong.

A cake test, basically. Did anyone want the cake. Did anyone eat the cake. Can the baker, without looking, tell you what’s in it.

The normal voice is important. The pilled voice will not pass. If you don’t know which one you’ve got, listen back to your last meeting. You’ll know.

The real shift clears all three. The slop clears none. A lot of what’s currently being celebrated clears one — usually the first — and is being graded on a curve, because the celebration is the product.

The pilled will tell you the test is too narrow, too old-economy, too trapped in legacy thinking. They will mean it. They are also describing the criteria by which scams have always been defended. You don’t get it. You’re not seeing the bigger picture. You’re stuck in the old way. If you have heard this before — from crypto, from the metaverse, from the friend who joined a multi-level marketing scheme — it has not improved with use.

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The tent will come down eventually. It always does.

What’s left, when it does, is the small number of people who were doing the work the whole time, and the much larger number who confused being in the tent for being part of the work.

The work is fine. It always was. It just doesn’t fill a tent.

Footnotes¶

1. Have fun staying poor, NGMI (“not gonna make it”), WAGMI (“we’re all gonna make it”) — the in-group dialect of 2021–2022 crypto, used to mark insiders from outsiders. Every wave grows its own version. AI’s is shaping up nicely: agentic, context window, P(doom), moat. The words sound technical, which is the job. Sometimes — and this is the unfair part — they also happen to mean things. ↩