Before Tobi Lütke ran Shopify, he learned programming through Germany’s apprenticeship system, the way people have learned trades forever: in a shared workshop, watching people who already knew what they were doing. More recently, describing Shopify’s River, he reached for a related word: Lehrwerkstatt, a teaching workshop where “the whole shop floor is the classroom.”
X has been agog by the numbers around River, Shopify’s Slack-native AI agent. In total, 5,938 Shopify employees worked with River across 4,450 different Slack channels, and River now coauthors roughly one in eight merged pull requests across the company. It’s a big deal, but understanding why it works that way is the most important part.
River can read code, run tests, open pull requests, query the data warehouse, inspect production traces, and sometimes push back on a plan it thinks is bad. Great. Lots of companies will have clever coding agents someday soon. Some already do.
