See how we used Shopify’s internal agent River to take iterative ui improvements from prototype to production, shipping value to our merchants along the way.
I’m a huge fan of shipping iteratively. Let users start benefitting from each new improvement as soon as it's ready.
Get to know River, our internal agent that among other things drastically reduces the cost of context gathering across the company. No more digging through docs, Slack, and requiring people to spread context. A new kind of information architecture.
Talked about this with @tobi on our Context episode:
Recently @tobi shared the philosophy behind River, our Slack-native AI agent, and how it has become a teaching workshop for all of @Shopify.
Below River lies the Aquifer. Principal Engineers @burkelibbey & Javier Moreno share the engineering story of how River came to be, and the substrate it runs on:
Look, I’m not a die hard Toronto fan. I do think the city is unique and special.
I see all the negativity about Toronto Tech Week though. It makes no sense. It’s okay to enjoy life, life is beautiful. It’s okay to have positive vibes, you don’t have to just be repressed. I personally hate events but this is special to me because we see all the excellence around you. If you miss it, it genuinely is a skill issue.
Nothing is ever perfect. By that same logic some of ya’ll should delete Twitter before you get your bread up.
Lastly, on @skanwar. Man, you guys don’t know how much he does for the love of the game. The guy is a certified G but he’s up at 6am personally running around just to pay it forward. There is excellence everywhere for those with eyes to see.
Here’s a good heuristic. Next time before you complain, ask yourself are you part of the solution. If not then whatever you have to say is kind of irrelevant.
Thank you for all that you do @skanwar. Let me speak at TTW next year 🤐
Coding isn't holding you back. Product work is.
Introducing Modem, your dev team's auto-triage PM.
It listens to user signals 24/7, finds problems before you do & does the work you're slow at – filing tickets, pinging teammates, closing the loop.
Sign up today at @modemdev
December 2025 (🤖) changed everything and caused Shopify app submissions to go way up. Review times got painful. We heard you.
We shipped a bunch of new tooling (👇). And, now, the review queue is shrinking. Still more work to do, but it's headed in the right direction 📉