Tobi Lütke, Shopify: “You just tell the AI to go nuts. It makes a pull request. Yo…”

You just tell the AI to go nuts. It makes a pull request. You just say, “Yep, that’s good.” You don’t really read it, and now it has to be reviewed by your colleagues.

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

Interview: The Knowledge Project (podcast by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, independent), transcript on fs.blog, The Knowledge Project (podcast by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, independent), transcript on fs.blog, September 10, 2026. Reported by Shane Parrish.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Shopify: $11.6 billion revenue, FY2025

Filed under

How do coding agents open and merge changes?

Who is speaking

Tobi Lütke, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. Runs the company and wrote its April 2025 AI-before-headcount memo, so Lütke speaks first-hand about internal AI use. Lütke also promotes Shopify, so numbers Lütke gives are self-reported.

How this was checked

Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-10-31).

Tobi Lütke turn about 'slop grenades'. Exact match after curly-quote normalization. He is describing what people do in general (second person), not himself.

How to cite this passage

Tobi Lütke (Shopify), “The Knowledge Project (podcast by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, independent), transcript on fs.blog”, The Knowledge Project (podcast by Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, independent), transcript on fs.blog, 2026-09-10. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/tobi-lutke-3/ Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/shopify-you-just-tell-ai-go-nuts-makes-2026

More from the same source

Inside of Shopify, the amount of people I know who really write code is vanishingly small now.

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Shopify: $11.6 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

it’s probably up to about 50% of pull requests in Shopify, which again, pull requests, every time you change your production system, you write a pull request, are created now not by engineers doing engineering work in the traditional sense

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

50% agent pr share, as of the September 2026 interview. Level not stated

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Shopify: $11.6 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

So periodically at night or in off hours, we give River, “Here’s all the conversations you’ve had today. What went well? What did you struggle with?

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Shopify: $11.6 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

Very often 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 instances of them all through either subagents or just different windows coordinating.

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Shopify: $11.6 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

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