August 3, 2026
I recently shipped this stats panel in Macro. The feature isn’t very good. There are a couple of charts in there that I don’t really understand, or just skip over because they don’t provide much value. That’s fine, and it’s kind of the point.
It’s what I call a “Lorem Slopsum” feature. I basically just gave Claude a short prompt of something I wanted and let it one-shot it (I think it was actually more like 5 shots). Like Lorem Ipsum, it’s a placeholder component, but unlike Lorem Ipsum, Lorem Slopsum has some basic functionality.
The most valuable thing is having the stats panel, imperfect as it is, available to me. When I’ve looked at it over the past few days, I’ve had a concrete sense of how I’d like to improve it, because there’s something there. The stats view is now something I can just improve as I go, rather than a big lift I keep deferring until I have 2-3 days to think hard about it and plan it all out. I don’t need to theory-craft what makes a good stats panel, or invest a bunch of time designing something I think would be good only to find out it’s not. Lorem Slopsum builds are the “launch fast” for things inside your product.
I’ve been leaning on the Lorem Slopsum technique a lot as I’ve built Macro.
In the early days of Macro, there were entire features that were purely Lorem Slopsum. When I’d run into them in the course of normal usage, I’d come away with a sense of clarity about how that feature should look and feel because I was touching something that already existed and could see and feel the gaps. When building and exploring new product surfaces, Lorem Slopsum helps you get the right shape faster.
With Lorem Slopsum you pay the cost of doing good engineering later. Every single thing I’ve built Lorem Slopsum style ends up breaking in the predictable AI-slop way — fixing one thing breaks something else. By the time I’m ready to design quality software, I’ve got a clear sense of what the feature’s capabilities are, and it saves me from over-designing or over-abstracting for things that may or may not ever exist. It ends up being a net win for me.
Like everything, it’s a tool that has a time and a place. Probably not a great idea to Lorem Slopsum your security layer or the core flows in your app. Lorem Slopsum is a debt you take on. And if you’re too busy just spamming new features to eventually de-slop things, it’s probably a technique that won’t serve you in the long run. But the thoughtless fire-hose of slop, when wielded by a thoughtful hand, can be a step towards producing good software.