Slop Grenades

In 2025, the CEO of Shopify wanted their team to be able to “prove jobs can’t be done by AI before asking for more headcount”.

Fast forward to the present, and they now seem to be surprised by the realization that “slop grenades” are making more work for everyone else.

It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but I do find it fascinating how the narrative has changed since last year.

It's a classic misalignment of incentives.

Back in the 90s, a company decided to reward its devs based on the number of lines of code they shipped. This resulted in a bloated, unmanageable codebase full of garbage code simply put in there to enhance the engineers’ bonuses.

The same goes for just rewarding team members for “using AI”.

Keep your eye on the end goal. Building businesses and products that your customers love and will stand the test of time, and AI slop is not maintainable long term.