Shopify CEO says employees' AI 'slop grenades' create more work; internal agent handles up to half of code PRs
shivsingh · x · 2026-09-18
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, on The Knowledge Project podcast, coined "slop grenades" for AI output employees fire at each other without verifying usefulness — like a bloated AI-written email that the recipient must then summarize with another LLM: "Why did we invent decompression and recompression?"
Key points:
- AI is most valuable when it makes thinking clearer and more concise; least valuable when it piles slop on a coworker's desk
- He revealed Shopify's internal agent "River" may handle as much as half of the company's production code pull requests
- Shopify has aggressively rolled out AI agent tooling internally
- "Humans take responsibility," he said — machines should help people take more responsibility, not dodge it.
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