The slop grenade you send every week

Tobi Lütke went on The Knowledge Project last week and gave a name to something everyone with a job has felt this year. Shopify calls it a slop grenade. Someone tells an AI to make a change, the AI produces it, the person approves it without reading it, and the whole thing lands on a colleague's desk to be checked line by line. A task that should have cost the sender ten minutes costs the receiver an afternoon.

His sharper point was about what laziness looks like now. It used to be visible because a lazy person produced too little. Today it is visible because they produce too much. The output has flipped from a shortage to a flood, and the cost has moved from the person who was lazy to the people around them.

He was talking about code. It is worse in writing, and nobody is calling it out yet.

The slop grenade you send every week

Every company got AI this year. Most people used it to write more. The Monday update went from four paragraphs to eleven. The proposal grew an executive summary, a background section and three appendices. The meeting notes became a transcript with a summary on top that nobody asked for.

None of it was checked the way Lütke means. Not for errors, that part is usually fine. For whether a reader can get through it. The writer hit generate, skimmed the first screen, saw competent sentences and hit send. The reading was outsourced to everyone on the thread.

That is a slop grenade. The pin was pulled by someone with good intentions and a deadline, and it went off in twelve inboxes.

Why writing is the worse case

Code has a reviewer. At Shopify the grenade lands on someone whose job is to catch it, and Lütke can see the cost on a dashboard. A document has no reviewer. It has readers, who are busy, and who quietly stop reading at paragraph three. There is no dashboard for that. The only signal is the question in your inbox a day later that was answered in paragraph six, and most people never connect the two.

So the writing grenade goes unpunished, which means it keeps getting thrown, which means the people upstream of you are now reading forty of them a week on a phone between meetings. That is the room your work is being judged in.

The fix is not less AI

Lütke's answer for code is the obvious one: you are responsible for what you send. The machine cannot be held accountable, so the person who pressed the button is. Read your diff before you ship it.

For writing, the equivalent is not "write less" or "use AI less." It is: send something a reader can finish. That means the number they need is at the top, not in the third paragraph. The ask is called out, not implied. The decisions are labelled. It fits on a phone, because that is where it gets read. Doing that by hand is the afternoon nobody has, which is why nobody does it and why the grenades keep flying.

This is the whole reason foldout exists. You give it what you wrote, rough or finished, and it comes back as a page built for reading: numbers set big, the ask up top, a diagram where you described one, the same page as a deck and a PDF. Nothing changes without you approving it, which is Lütke's rule applied to documents. You are still responsible for what you send. You just get to send something people finish.

A test for tomorrow morning

Take the last thing you sent. Open it on your phone. Count how many screens you scroll before you reach the point. If it is more than one, you threw a grenade, and the people who received it have already decided how they feel about your work this quarter.

Then paste it into foldout and look at the difference. It takes a minute, and it is the cheapest way to find out whether your writing has been slop this whole time.