# Slop grenades

> Slop grenades are AI-generated emails, messages, and pull requests sent without review. The output is fast, but someone else has to check it.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2026-09-21 | Topics: [AI](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/ai/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/slop-grenades/

A slop grenade is AI output you send to someone without reading it first.

Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, coined the term on [The Knowledge Project podcast](https://youtu.be/G9P9D9hptq8?t=973) with Shane Parrish. The episode came out on September 15, 2026.

About sixteen minutes in, Shane asked if AI had made anything worse inside Shopify. Tobi said:

> The failure case of lazy work is not lack of output. It's actually over-output. Internally we have come to call these things that people are lobbing "slop grenades" at each other, which I think is a really fun term that we should push into industry.

## What it looks like

At Shopify, up to about half of all pull requests now start as conversations in the company's shared chat with River, its internal AI agent.

You ask River for a change. It creates a pull request, you approve it without reading it, and now a colleague must find everything that is wrong.

The same happens with email. You have one point to make, but an LLM turns it into a long message. The other person then asks another LLM to summarize it.

Tobi called this decompression followed by recompression. We inflate one thought, then use another model to shrink it again.

## The work moves to someone else

You generate something in seconds. Someone else spends twenty minutes checking it.

Earlier in the podcast, Tobi said machines cannot take responsibility. Humans can use machines to make better decisions, but the decision still belongs to a person.

If my name is on a message or pull request, I should know what it contains. Sending raw AI output makes the receiver responsible for checking my work.

I use coding agents most of the day, so I can also throw slop grenades at myself. If I accept an agent's report without checking the result, I might discover the problem a week later, when I no longer remember why the code changed.

## Read it before you send it

The fix is boring. Read the output.

If someone asked a direct question, answer it first. A chat reply should look like a chat reply. If you need a document, write a short answer and link to it.

For code, run the result and inspect the diff. Asking a colleague to review a pull request does not replace your own review.

I also ask agents to report in a fixed shape: files changed, tests run, decisions, uncertainties, and review points. This is in my [`AGENTS.md`](https://flaviocopes.com/agents-md/). It gives me something concrete to check.

If I use an LLM to help with a message, I ask it to make my point clearer and shorter. I do not ask it to make the message look more substantial.

I wrote more about cleaning up AI output in [why I use anti-slop skills](https://flaviocopes.com/anti-slop/).