Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says AI has produced a new kind of lazy work at his company: employees who generate too much output and hand it to colleagues without checking it. Staff have a name for it. They call it a "slop grenade."

Lütke made the comments on The Knowledge Project podcast, released Sept. 15. Asked by host Shane Parrish whether AI had made anything worse at Shopify, Lütke responded around the 16-minute mark of the episode.

"The failure case now of lazy work is not lack of output," Lütke said.

What a 'Slop Grenade' Looks Like

Lütke described the problem as over-output and gave two examples. In the first, an employee asks an AI agent for a code change, approves the pull request without reading it closely, and leaves colleagues to review it. In the second, someone uses a language model to turn 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," he said.

His advice on the email example: use the model to make a point shorter, not longer. Earlier in the interview, he said machines cannot take responsibility for work — people do.

Lütke did not claim the term as his own. In a post on X, he credited Harry Brundage with coining it and said he hopes it becomes popular.

AI as a Baseline Expectation

The podcast comments come roughly 17 months after Lütke shared an internal memo, in April 2025, stating that "reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify." Roger Montti covered the memo for Search Engine Journal at the time.

The memo said AI use would factor into peer and performance reviews. Teams requesting more headcount would first have to demonstrate why AI could not do the work.

That October, a Shopify engineer wrote that the company had reached "universal adoption of AI code editors," with thousands of Cursor licenses and unlimited access to top AI models for every team.

On the podcast, Lütke described River, an AI agent that operates in Shopify's Slack channels and can open pull requests. He estimated that up to about half of Shopify's pull requests originate from conversations in the company's chat, where River operates. He also devoted much of the interview to his own AI use, including a team of agents he consults to debate both sides of difficult decisions.

Review Work Is Showing Up Elsewhere

The cleanup burden is not confined to Shopify. Internal platform data shared by the Guardian on Sept. 2 shows rising demand for freelancers who correct AI-generated work across three marketplaces.

On Freelancer.com, listings tagged with phrases like "correct AI" and "AI hallucination" grew 87%, reaching 10,760 worldwide from August 2025 to June 2026. Upwork data showed 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.

Lütke frames the same process as an internal cost — checking work inside a company, where the price is paid in a coworker's time rather than an external bill.

In-house data points in the same direction. BetterUp, a workplace coaching firm, ran a September 2025 survey with the Stanford Social Media Lab covering more than 1,000 full-time U.S. desk workers. Roughly four in 10 respondents said they encountered "workslop" — AI-generated work that appears polished but does not advance their tasks — in the past month. Each instance took nearly two hours to resolve on average. All figures are self-reported.

Why This Matters

Shopify reports universal adoption of AI code editors, yet its CEO still names unreviewed output as the thing AI made worse. Adoption rates say nothing about whether work was actually saved or simply shifted to the recipient. For content and marketing teams using AI for first drafts, the time editors spend reviewing those drafts is part of the total cost.

Neither the 2025 memo nor the October 2025 adoption post offers a specific estimate of how much time Shopify employees spend reviewing AI output.

The freelancers in the Guardian report disagreed on how long cleanup work will last. One writer expected much of it to dry up within five to 10 years as models improve. A designer predicted AI would match her logo work within a couple of years.

Source: Search Engine Journal (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/shopify-ceo-ai-slop-grenades-coworkers/590292/) / Source: fs.blog (https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/tobi-lutke-3/)