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

AI makes tech jobs easier. Right?

Not 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.

“We call those ‘slop grenades’ that people toss at each other,” he said. “And that’s definitely a bad thing.”

The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.

He offered an example: Someone might send an unnecessarily long AI-written email, forcing its recipient to use another large language model to summarize it.

“Why did we invent decompression and recompression?” he said. “This is terrible.”

Shopify has aggressively embraced AI. 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.

Lütke 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.

“Humans take responsibility,” he said. “Machines can help us take more responsibility because they can inform us better.”

Shopify didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.