According to a new study by BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, AI-generated “workslop” is a real thing which many of us have already encountered.
Workslop is “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” according to an <a href="https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">article published in Harvard Business Review</a>.
In a survey of 1,150 U.S.-based employees, 40% reported encountering workslop in the past month!
It’s not all rainbow and butterfly after all.
Have you encountered workslop? What do you think?

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A BetterUp Labs and Stanford study reveals that 40% of employees have encountered 'workslop' - AI-generated content that appears professional but lacks substance to advance meaningful work. The research highlights growing concerns about AI tools producing low-quality output that masquerades as productive work.

Is vibe coding just a "workslop" factory?

If you are actually completely vibing the thing, then this is probably true but if you are a good dev who uses AI occasionally for things where you know its going to perform well, then the results are not just “workslop”.

Yup, seen many vibe code an app, having it mostly look like it works but the code was terrible, filled with meaningless comments, code duplication, file duplicaiton.
And worst of all, a huge amount of useEffect misuse.
There’s a reason that it’s called “Copilot”, it needs a dev to make sure that the output is actually good and steer it in the right direction.
Well, for useEffect it’s kinda tough because both ai and devs often misuse it, <a href="https://dev.to/paripsky/using-effects-effectively-in-react-stop-misusing-useeffect-once-and-for-all-5fpm" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">I even wrote about it recently here</a>.

What if the specs and design are workslop? Does it increase the work load for developers?

I use AI as a kind of a “workhorse”. I solve the problem, then guide it to convert that to code step by step instead of letting it do everything by itself.

What no one is accounting for is the cost of storing slop vs the actual knowledge created. What is the shelf life of any generated content is mandatory to look into. Especially required when a project is archived, to know if you are filing assets or just junk.