Slopification and its Discontents

Summary

Slopification and Its Discontents March 23, 2026 21:33 / ai python / 0 comments O sovran, virtuous, precious of all trees In Paradise! of operation blest To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed. A couple weeks back Anthropic announced a promotion offering six free months of their maximum Claude plan to open-source developers. I submitted an application, and a few days later an invitation arrived in my inbox and I was up-and-running on the latest Opus 4.6 model. Previously I had been limited to Sonnet on whatever pittance of tokens is given to free accounts, so this was quite a shift from everything I had been accustomed to when using AI tools. With the fruit of the tree plucked and in my hand, I plunged in. I began by having Claude review some of the work I'd been doing on Peewee to implement asyncio, finding ways to optimize performance in cysqlite, and creating a plan for re-structuring Peewee's documentation. All of these tasks were fairly self-contained but dealt with increasingly large amounts of data and context: asyncio extension to Peewee is under 800 lines of code. cysqlite is several thousand lines of Cython, but the surface area is very well-defined in terms of both Python's DB-API, and the straightforward interaction between connections, cursors, and statements. Peewee's prose and API reference documentation is organized in a hierarchy, and the content is structured (reStructuredText). It is about 750KB of text. Claude's performance was mixed across these tasks. Several bugs were identified and fixed in the asyncio implementation, mostly around resource cleanup which can be a fairly tricky problem with asyncio (destructors being synchronous, specifically). Ultimately this work led to a cleaner implementation of task-local storage, which comprises about 50% of the magic needed to make Peewee async. The implementation required very close review of the diffs and a lot of discernment to judge whether the proposed solutions were any good. Taken piecemeal, the...