Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke warns of ‘slop grenades’ from AI use

Tobias Lütke spent the last year telling Shopify employees that AI wasn’t optional. Now he’s dealing with the consequences of everyone actually listening. The Shopify cofounder and CEO has coined a new term for what happens when workers lean on AI without bothering to review the output: “slop grenades.” These are unexamined emails, code snippets, and documents that land in a colleague’s inbox or codebase, shifting the burden of quality control to whoever happens to open them next. From mandate to mess In April 2025, Lütke issued what amounted to an internal edict: AI use would be treated as a “baseline expectation” at Shopify. Teams were told to prove they couldn’t accomplish a task using AI before requesting additional headcount or resources. AI proficiency was woven into performance evaluations. Roughly 50% of production pull requests at Shopify now originate from interactions with River, the company’s internal AI agent, across somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 Slack channels. Speaking on The Knowledge Project podcast, Lütke described a new failure mode that his company hadn’t anticipated when it went all-in on AI. Workers were generating outputs at a pace that outstripped anyon...