Michael van Rantwijk opened Gathering #13 with an admission. The original title of his talk was Part 1: Hard-Won Lessons in Enterprise AI. He had rewritten both the title and the slides five or six times in the weeks leading up to the evening, because AI moves so fast that every draft felt outdated by the next release. The final version was blunter: AI Made Building Cheap. That is the Problem.
The argument of the first half of his talk is that the product management population is currently committing a collective act of slop. His word. Not borrowed from a newsletter, he said, just a label he found useful. Product slop is what happens when the cost of building collapses, the backlog stops throttling itself, and product teams start shipping AI features because they can rather than because anyone asked. The most visible slop of the 2026 cycle is the chatbot, and Michael spent a large part of his talk explaining why it is almost always the wrong answer for professional software.
