Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Shopify.
Co-founded Shopify in September 2004; Chief Technology Officer until April 2008, CEO since. Worked on the core team of the Ruby on Rails framework and created open source libraries such as Active Merchant. On the board of Coinbase.
Why their word counts: 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.
Profile from this source, checked 2026-10-19.
About one in eight pull requests merged into our codebase last week was authored by River, reviewed by us.
Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, 
Shopify
Social post: Learning on the Shop floor, X post by Tobi Lutke, CEO, May 9, 2026.
An improvement from 36% to 77% over two months came from people watching River work
Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify
Social post: Learning on the Shop floor, X post by Tobi Lütke, CEO (long-form article "Learning on the Shop floor"), May 9, 2026.
In the last 30 days, 5,938 Shopify employees worked with River across 4,450 different Slack channels. It opened 1,870 pull requests in the last week alone in our main monorepo.
Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify
Post: Shopify careers page reproducing an internal post from the CEO to all staff, May 2026, Shopify careers page reproducing an internal post from the CEO to all staff, May 2026, May 2026.
Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.
Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify
Social post: Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify, X post by Tobi Lütke, CEO (CEO memo shared publicly), April 7, 2025.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.