Shopify CEO Coins "Slop Grenade" to Describe Unreviewed AI Output Passed Between Coworkers

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has given a name to a workplace pattern he says AI adoption has created at his company: the "slop grenade," a piece of AI-generated work passed to a colleague without the sender reviewing it first.

Lütke made the remarks on The Knowledge Project podcast, hosted by Shane Parrish, in an episode released on September 15, 2026. When Parrish asked whether AI had made anything worse inside Shopify, Lütke responded that the nature of lazy work had changed.

"The failure case now of lazy work is not lack of output," Lütke said, according to Search Engine Journal's account of the interview. He described the new problem as over-output and offered two examples: an employee approving a code change generated by an AI agent without reading it, leaving colleagues to review it; and a worker using a language model to expand a short point into a long email, which the recipient then shortens again using another model.

"So we call those 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other," Lütke said.

Lütke credited Harry Brundage with coining the term, according to a post he made on X, and said he hoped the phrase would gain wider use.

His advice on the email example was to use AI to make a point shorter, not longer. He also noted that machines cannot take responsibility for work — people do.

AI at Shopify: From Mandate to Universal Adoption

The podcast comments come roughly 17 months after Lütke posted an internal memo stating that "reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify." That April 2025 memo said AI use would factor into peer and performance reviews, and that teams requesting additional headcount would first have to demonstrate why AI could not do the work.

By October 2025, a Shopify engineer wrote that the company had reached what was described as "universal adoption of AI code editors," with thousands of Cursor licences and unlimited access to top AI models across every team.

On the podcast, Lütke described an internal AI agent called River, which operates in Shopify's Slack channels and can open pull requests. He estimated that up to about half of Shopify's pull requests are now created from conversations in the company's chat where River operates.

Review Work Rising Beyond Shopify

The shift Lütke describes — where AI output generates a downstream review burden — is reflected in data from freelance platforms. According to a September 2, 2026 report by the Guardian, citing internal platform data, listings on Freelancer.com tagged with phrases such as "correct AI" and "AI hallucination" grew by 87%, reaching 10,760 worldwide, from August 2025 to June 2026. Upwork data cited in the same report indicated a 70% year-over-year surge in AI remediation gigs. Fiverr searches for "AI cleanup" services increased more than 20-fold from 2023 to 2026.

A separate survey conducted by BetterUp in September 2025 in partnership with the Stanford Social Media Lab, involving over 1,000 full-time U.S. desk workers, found that about four in ten respondents said they had experienced "workslop" — AI-generated work that appears polished but does not advance their tasks — in the prior month. Each instance took nearly two hours to resolve on average. Search Engine Journal noted that all figures from the BetterUp survey are based on self-reported data.

Outlook Uncertain

Freelancers quoted in the Guardian report disagreed on how long AI cleanup work will remain in demand. One writer expected much of it to dry up within five to ten years as models improve. A designer predicted AI would match her logo work within a couple of years.

Search Engine Journal observed that Shopify's reported universal AI adoption does not indicate whether work has been saved or simply shifted to the recipient, and that for content and marketing teams using AI for initial drafts, editor review time forms part of the overall cost.