YAP and TAZ are both transcriptional regulators with central roles in cell growth. Mariana Pavel, So Jung Park and colleagues from the Rubinsztein lab have discovered a feedback loop linking autophagy with YAP/TAZ signaling. Publishing in Nature Communications, the researchers show how α-catenin protein levels regulate this feedback loop. These findings explain how different cells can exhibit very different relationships between autophagy and growth pathways, highlighting a source of variation in experimental cell model and potentially guiding therapies aimed at either increasing or decreasing autophagy in different disease contexts.