These days I’m quite busy handling cloud infrastructure and security for a client. This role is quite demanding with everyone using AI to do their job: on one hand, software ships faster; on the other hand, CVEs get discovered faster and need to be remediated much faster as a result.

One thing that is starting to seriously annoy me is the rather new phenomenon of people with a complete lack of competency in infrastructure & security handing me over detailed step-by-step instructions of what to do in order to get something from me. I’m calling these slopstructions: seemingly correct instructions (or so it may apper to the author prompter) based on a fundamental misunderstanding and lack of knowledge of the process, technology, security implications, etc.

Reading slopstructions is like listening to someone who has never been in a car in their life confidently tell you how to handle the clutch and shift gears, all the whilst the car is an automatic.

When given slopstructions, instead of knowing what is needed and getting it done I now need to decypher what the original intent was. And what makes things worse is that in many cases, the slopstructer doesn’t even really know what they need in the first place, which makes the entire exercise rather useless.

Please stop. It’s not helping.