I disagree with this. I mean, I read it and felt mildly insulted, so higher than baseline chance I'm rationalizing, but

1. I'm somewhat suspicious of the "slop" label in general. I don't have a crisp description of the general underlying cognitive phenomena, but calling stuff slop seems to me to come from the same place as people calling industrially produced furniture or clothing bad, or people calling stuff made in china bad. 
   1. Part of the phenomena is probably that
      1. 1) you have an expensive and arduous way to make a thing
      2. 2) -> you find a less expensive/arduous way to make it
      3. 3) -> people don't want to admit that the expense was unnecessary. 
      4. Ie, I buy an expensive clock. Then someone coming along with a identical clock, saying they found some way to get it for way cheaper. I can very clearly imagine myself feeling bad, and a part of my mind coming online that grasps for reasons why I didn't actually make a suboptimal choice 
   2. There are/were some not entirely senseless criticisms of industrially produced goods, and stuff made in china. But like, AIs write code that works. I think people are stopping calling AI code slop, or will stop soon. Writing is harder to objectively evaluate the quality of than code, which makes it hard to make AIs good at writing, but also makes it easier for people to rationalize why AI writing is bad.
2. I don't think the complexity thing actually makes sense. Ie saying "But the actual range of flavors is a lot less rich or varied than a real hamburger". Is this true? I've eaten meat burgers before, and the meat they're made of has been ground up, so the taste variation within a single burger is pretty narrow. I feel most of the variation in taste comes from different bites having different ratios of different parts of the whole burger. Ie if bite two has some mustard on it or some fresh onion, which bite one didn't, that dominates the variation of taste within the two bites of the meat part of the burger. 
   1. If you're just talking about the complexity of the taste of the burgers themselves, then I don't think that makes sense. Like, how would you objectively measure the complexity of the taste? Like the ingredients list of an impossible burger is longer than the ingredients list of a hamburger. Maybe meat itself is very high complexity, it contains very many different molecules. But the impossible burger contains stuff like yeast extract which I think contains a bunch of different molecules too
   2. If you're talking about variation between burgers, that's fair if you're talking about just the impossible burget. But between different vegan burgers, and different meat burgers, I'd say there's more taste and textual variety between the vegan ones. Eg, a lentil burger, a mushroom burger and an impossible burger have more taste variation between them than three meat burgers.

With basic prompt engineering techniques and a proper agent harness, Opus 4.6 can solve the provided puzzle in 7 minutes, demonstrating hard technical skills (math, python) as well as multiple intuitive leaps.

Puzzle: https://puzzmon.world/puzzles/hidden_numbers

The setup was simple. I copied the puzzle to Opus, asked her to write up a CLAUDE.md for an out of the box puzzle solving agent, then ran that agent in Claude Code and approved all tool calls (mostly to Python). On the first run, the agent identified the integers thing, then discovered a connection to ip addresses, and extracted the domains. This took about six minutes.

She stopped there, but after I pointed out that the answer had to be a string of some kind, she almost immediately made the intuitive leap to converting the domains to the string "SURFS UP" via indexing into them.

Link to conversation (note that I tried to use the Ralph Loop plugin, but it's buggy and doesn't properly restart the agent after it goes down). So I had to manually say that the solution was incomplete.

https://pastebin.com/qxUpw5ZT (system prompt)

https://pastebin.com/rQMpF3wB (full transcript)

Here is her writeup on the solution:

SOLVED: "Find the Domain"

Answer

The answer to "find the domain" is literal internet domains — the seven functions encode IP addresses that resolve to:

How It Works

Step 1: The Clue — "INTEGER"

The polynomial coefficients [9, 14, 20, 5, 7, 5, 18] map to letters (A=1, B=2, ...): I-N-T-E-G-E-R — telling you to find the integer in each domain.

Step 2: Find the Integer in Each Domain

Each restricted function constrains the domain to an interval (or union of intervals) containing exactly one integer:

Step 3: Evaluate f(integer)

At each integer, the restricted function produces a nice value (log₁₀(10) = 1, cosh(0) = 1, sin(π/2) = 1, etc.), and the large polynomial constants were specifically chosen so that f(integer) is itself an integer:

Step 4: The (a)(b)(c)(d) Tuples Split f(x) into IP Octets

The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples encode digit group sizes — how many digits each IP octet occupies:

Every octet is in [0, 255] — valid IP addresses. Function #5 producing 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is the dead giveaway that confirms this interpretation.

Step 5: Index into Domain Names

The integer from each domain does double duty — it's also a 1-indexed position into the domain name, extracting one letter:

Final Answer: SURFS UP

Puzzle Design Elegance

• The word "domain" is a pun: mathematical domain → internet domain
• The coefficients spell "INTEGER" as a breadcrumb clue
• Each restricted function is carefully constructed to have exactly one integer in its domain
• The restricted functions evaluate to "nice" values at those integers (1, 17, 10, 49, 2, 13, 4) — making f(x) exactly an integer
• The large polynomial constants are reverse-engineered from the target IP addresses
• The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples serve double duty: they look like multipliers but actually encode digit boundaries
• Including 127.0.0.1 (localhost) serves as an internal consistency check

I could not have solved this; I would not even have known where to start. I have no mathematical expertise to solve the first layer. I also would never have made the multiple intuitive leaps that the puzzle required.

Impossible Burger tastes fine to me, but — as Benjamin Franklin would say — it creates in the bowel a great quantity of wind, usually offensive to company.

I generally share your distaste for imitation meat, though. Tasty vegan or vegetarian food seems to come from cultures that have iterated on it for a while, and who don't seek to imitate meat-eating. Rastafari Ital is a pretty interesting historically-recent example.

I am not so sure about applying the general category of "slop". A sincere effort to figure out the features of X and replicate them without some undesired property Y, seems like a good thing to try. I am not sure it should be conflated with mechanical imitation.