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Learning on the Shop floor
@tobiarticlethreadx
TL;DR. Shopify built River, an AI coding agent that only works in public Slack channels — turning the company into a German-style "Lehrwerkstatt" where everyone learns by watching each other prompt.
Takeaways
- River authored ~1 in 8 PRs merged into Shopify's monorepo last week (1,870 PRs); 5,938 employees used it across 4,450 channels in 30 days.
- The key design choice: River refuses DMs. Forcing AI use into the open made conversations searchable and turned osmosis learning into the default.
- Reframes the AI-deskilling fear: the risk isn't that AI does the work, it's that it does the work in private where no one else learns from it.