The Slop Dictionary

There’s a name for that shared doc you received this morning. “Slop grenade.”

Tobias Lütke, who runs Shopify, coined it last month. It describes the unchecked AI output people generate in seconds and toss to a colleague. The bloated email. The 39-page slide deck. The memo nobody asked for.

The person who pulls the pin saves a few minutes. Everyone nearby pays for it.

Naming a problem is the first step toward doing something about it. Until it has a name, it’s just a vague sense that work got noisier and nobody knows why.

So, here are a few more I’ve come up with based on real AI frustrations:

• Slop tax: The time you spend reading, checking, and fixing someone else’s AI output so they could save five minutes.
• Slop debt: Code and documents written by AI that nobody read closely. It works today. The bill arrives later, with interest.
• Slop accordion: Three points, stretched by AI into a ten-page deck, sent to a manager who uses AI to squeeze it back into three points. Lots of motion. No music.
• Slop minutes: The AI notetaker’s summary. Every tangent is there. The three decisions that mattered are missing.
• Slop laundering: Running AI output through a second AI so it sounds like you. It still isn’t you.

AI can write anything instantly.

What we need is people willing to read it first.