Shopify’s Senior PM says their internal AI Agent, River, is one of ~1000 new toys their product teams get to play with internally.

Rather than keeping AI interactions private - like ChatGPT or most coding assistants - River works exclusively in public Slack channels. Anyone can watch as colleagues use the agent to solve problems, write code, or debug issues.

This visibility creates what their CEO Tobi Lutke calls a "Lehrwerkstatt" (teaching workshop) - an environment where learning happens through observation.

Support engineers watch how backend engineers query logs, then apply the same approach the next day.

New hires review past conversations to understand how experienced colleagues frame requests.

Last week, roughly one in eight merged pull requests was authored by River and reviewed by humans.

Full write up on it here: x.com/tobi/status/20531…