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Chapter 5: Know Your Team

This is the heart of the discipline. And it's the most challenging technical aspect. I have allocated a Chapter of this book as your primer. [currently Ch3]

Every component of every bot contributes to its overall capabilities. To reach a gestalt understanding of the teammate, you must know the pieces.

Think of it like knowing a bit of psychology so that you can better relate to other people. But we rarely have the benefit of asking "How would I feel if...?"

A Bot is an alien intelligence.

Analogies are useful, but we must also sometimes wrangle with the true nature of bots, as engineers and technicians, in order to relate to them appropriately.

A Bot has a world model, as I described earlier. [sharpen the connection between this "Know your Team" chapter and "How Bots Work" overall]

You only have to know them well enough to make good decisions regarding them. There's more depth in this book than you really need, but it's also insufficient because the world is changing fast. You have to maintain currency. [expand]

We can classify bots as Creative vs. mostly analytical. Generalist vs. narrow. A major split is bots with bodies versus bots without.

A bot with a body — a humanoid, a welding cell, a warehouse picker — can hurt people and wreck equipment in ways a pure software bot can't. So a physical bot gets torque ceilings, speed governors, joint stops, e-stops, geofences,e tc.. These should fail safe, and they should sit below anything a prompt or a casual config edit can reach.

Knowing them includes knowing their limitations. The concept of "AI Slop" can guide us toward an understanding of those limitations.

On Slop

Slop is a derogatory term that we'll take to mean "a thing that AI did that I don't like."

Mixed in with the quality of the thing that AI did (the object) is

  1. The fact that it was done by AI, and
  2. The "I" (the subject) who does not like it

A lot of subjects just don't like AI, and that muddies any objective assessment; If Slop is anything made by AI, then it's a useless term, overlapping with "GenAI / AI-generated," "synthetic," and "automated." If Slop means inferior product then it describes a real problem, and one that can be fixed with better AI. For that reason, I expect that we will go through a repeating cycle of GenAI products being Slop and then indistinguishable from good (or human-made) products.

graph LR
1[Slop Product]
1 -->|AI Improves| 2[Slopless Product]
2 -->|Fashions Change| 3[New Slop Identified]
3 --> 1

At the moment (April 2026), AI frequently exhibits some stylistic tells in its writing that lead to a bad experience for the reader. E.g.:

  • False Complexity: The persistent use of words like however, but, or yet to artificially inject depth into what are often basic, common-sense observations.
  • Em-Dash Obsession: A reliance on em-dashes—like this—to tack on seemingly "profound" concluding thoughts or break sentences up into digestible, corporate, online-postable chunks.
  • Syntactic Symmetries: Overusing perfectly balanced sentences ("It’s not just about [X]; it’s about [Y]"). It quickly gets hollow through repetition.

I think it's only fair to address the other side of the coin: These GenAI characteristics were probably formed via RLHF, meaning that there's something there we must like. So we could, for example, infer that we should use more em-dashes in our own writing! But I digress…

Slop leads to a bad experience for the reader, so we should know how to spot it. Know what your bots are doing to degrade your team's work product and aim for Slopless.

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