{"slug": "shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else", "title": "Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else", "summary": "Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said on \"The Knowledge Project\" podcast, released Tuesday, that employees using AI to generate unchecked work — which he calls \"slop grenades\" — are creating more work for colleagues, citing the example of an unnecessarily long AI-written email that forces the recipient to run another large language model to summarize it. Lütke said Shopify's internal agent, River, handles possibly as much as half of the company's production code pull requests, and argued AI is most valuable when it makes thinking clearer and more concise. \"Humans take responsibility,\" Lütke said. \"Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better.", "body_md": "[AI makes tech jobs easier](https://www.businessinsider.com/sarah-friar-openai-cfo-ai-replacing-mundane-jobs-2026-9). Right?\n\nNot always, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said during an interview on \"The Knowledge Project\" podcast, released on Tuesday. His take: AI helps employees produce more material, more quickly — without taking responsibility for whether it is useful or correct.\n\n\"We call those 'slop grenades' that people toss at each other,\" he said. \"And that's definitely a bad thing.\"\n\nThe problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.\n\nHe offered an example: Someone might send an unnecessarily long AI-written email, forcing its recipient to use another large language model to summarize it.\n\n\"Why did we invent decompression and recompression?\" he said. \"This is terrible.\"\n\n[Shopify has aggressively embraced AI](https://www.businessinsider.com/artificial-intelligence-helping-amazon-shopify-sellers-2023-11). The e-commerce platform has rolled out AI tools for agents. Internally, Lütke said it's internal agent, River, handles a large share — possibly as much as half — of the company's production code pull requests.\n\nLütke said AI is most valuable when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise. The tech is least valuable when it's adding slop to a coworker's desk.\n\n\"Humans take responsibility,\" he said. \"Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better.\"\n\nShopify didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-ai-slop-grenades-can-make-work-harder-2026-9", "published_at": "2026-09-17 09:33:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-17 09:54:19.949156+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-products", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Shopify", "Tobias Lütke", "The Knowledge Project", "River", "Business Insider"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/shopify-ceo-says-employees-slop-grenades-are-making-more-work-for-everyone-else.jsonld"}}