September 2026

Shopify's CEO calls unreviewed AI output slop grenades. Over a long migration I generated hundreds of AI pull requests and kept the slop to myself. But careful engineers can only do so much. I think stopping slop grenades takes a process that makes them impossible.

Evals, backpressure and agent guardrails are the feedback loops we already had. The mechanism didn't change, only who reads the output.

Attention budget and attention curve describe different parts of the same problem. Budget is about how much attention there is. Curve is about how it gets distributed across the context.