Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, on why AI agents still produce "slop" without human taste in the loop: "You can create code and run all night and then you have like the ultimate slop because what those agents don't really do yet is have taste." Peter is direct: raw capability without direction still produces mediocre output. "They are spiky smart and they're really good at things, but if you don't navigate them well, if you don't have a vision of what you're going to build, it's still going to be slop. If you don't ask the right questions, it's still going to be slop." Great AI-assisted work is defined by the human guiding it. @steipete describes his own creative process when starting a new project: "When I start a project, I have like this very rough idea what it could be. And as I play with it and feel it, my vision gets more clear. I try out things, some things don't work, and I evolve my idea into what it will become." Most people skip this part entirely, front-loading everything into a single prompt and wondering why the result feels hollow. "My next prompt depends on what I see and feel and think about the current state of the project." Each step informs the next. The work itself is the feedback loop. "But if you try to put everything into a spec up front, you miss this kind of human-machine loop. And then I don't know how something good can come out without having feelings in the loop — almost like taste." The agentic trap is what happens when you remove yourself from the process too early.
