Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said on Shane Parrish’s The Knowledge Project that as many as half of all Shopify pull requests now begin with someone talking to River in Slack, an AI agent its 7,000 employees use across 10,000 channels. River remembers each person and each channel it works in, has sandboxed access to Shopify’s code and systems, and stays in open channels so people can watch each other use it. Overnight it reviews the day’s conversations for what it struggled with and updates its skill files. Lütke gave it permission to be sarcastic, a break from the sanded-down chatbot voices that followed Microsoft’s Sydney. His worry now isn’t too little output but too much, a pattern he calls slop grenades, where someone waves an agent’s pull request through and leaves colleagues to read it.
