“Our team used to spend every Friday (20% of the week) cleaning up “AI slop.” Unsurprisingly, that didn’t scale.”

— Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI · Entropy and garbage collection

Quote · openai.com

From “Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world”, found 2026-10-14.

Take

Agents copy whatever patterns already exist, so drift compounds. The replacement for the Friday cleanup was recurring agents that open small refactoring PRs.