Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke argued on a podcast that AI is creating new friction at work by enabling people to produce and pass along low-value output that others must clean up. He warned that easy-to-generate AI content - long, unchecked emails or draft work - gets tossed between coworkers as what he calls "slop grenades," forcing recipients to spend time recompressing or reprocessing information, often by using another AI. The core complaint is not about productivity per se but about responsibility: tools let people generate volume quickly without ensuring usefulness or accuracy, shifting verification and editing onto colleagues.

At the same time, Shopify has aggressively integrated AI into operations, including internal agents, and Lütke said an internal system named River handles a large share - possibly half - of the company's production code pull requests. He framed AI’s real value as making thinking clearer and helping humans own outcomes, rather than adding extraneous work. His position is that machines can inform and amplify human responsibility, but when they produce unchecked material they degrade collaborative workflows instead of improving them. Shopify did not immediately respond to requests for comment.