Brian Madison, speaking about AI-assisted coding, offered a prediction that is easy to miss because it describes a failure that doesn't look like one:

"I think people are going to start running into a slot apocalypse and it might not manifest in broken code. might not manifest in the agent not being able to implement. But what it will in what it will manifest is is more token spend and just more cycles and things will slow down."

(He said "slot apocalypse"; the phrase that's stuck is "slop apocalypse," after "slop" — the catch-all term for low-effort AI output.)

His point: the worst outcome of letting AI generate code carelessly isn't a program that crashes. It's a program that works — but is bloated, tangled, and progressively more expensive to keep working on.

Here's why. AI assistants charge by the token, roughly per word of text they read and write. Every time you ask an assistant to change your code, it has to read the existing code first. If earlier sessions left behind duplicated logic, dead ends, and verbose workarounds — slop — the assistant burns more tokens just understanding the project, and more cycles of trial and error to make a change stick. Nothing announces this. The app still runs. Your bill just creeps up and each new feature takes longer than the last.

If you've used an AI tool to build something without being a programmer yourself — a personal dashboard, a small app, a script to automate a chore — this applies to you directly. The natural way to use these tools is to keep prompting until it works and never look at what got written. Madison's warning is that the accumulating mess is a real cost even when nothing ever breaks.

That said, the honest audience for this is mostly people building and maintaining software with AI coding agents — developers, and the growing group of non-developers who build working applications with them. If you only use a chatbot for writing and planning, token spend on code isn't your problem.

It's also worth being clear about what this is: a prediction, not a shipped product or a measured result. Madison doesn't cite numbers — no figures on how much token spend inflates, no data on slowdown. It's an experienced practitioner's read on where things are heading, and it's being discussed, not proven. The slop apocalypse is an idea people are talking about, not a documented phenomenon with benchmarks behind it.

Still, the practical takeaway is cheap and usable now: the cost of AI-generated code isn't what you pay to generate it, it's what you pay every time afterward. If a session produces something convoluted, having the assistant clean it up — or throwing it out and starting a fresh session — isn't perfectionism. It's cost control on a bill that otherwise never stops growing.