The Social Tax Is How Slop Paralysis Starts
Two things happened yesterday. They weren't connected until they were. First, I read "Slop Paralysis" by Elijah Potter. His definition is sharp: "A complete or partial loss of function while reviewing the output of a coding agent." Three causes: sheer amount of code, missing context, fear of breaking something. The solutions are sensible — plan before coding, make minimal changes, refactor manually module by module. Then I read "The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool" by ohadravid. Different problem, different domain. LLMs aren't tools — you don't feel them as extensions of your body. But they also don't give you what human collaborators give: social reward. You pay a social tax — you converse, negotiate, persuade, sometimes even get angry — and what you get back is "more of the same: more code, more tests, more excuses." Here's the thing nobody connected yet: the social tax is how slop paralysis…
