Learning on the Shop floor
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-05-11
Simon Willison highlights Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke's description of River, an internal AI coding agent that operates exclusively in public Slack channels to create an organization-wide osmotic learning environment Lütke compares to the German concept of a Lehrwerkstatt.
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Extraction
Topics: enterprise-ai-adoptioncoding-agentsorganizational-learningshopify
Claims
- Shopify's internal AI coding agent River refuses direct messages and operates only in public Slack channels, making all AI-assisted work visible to the entire organization.
- River's public-channel design enables osmotic, curriculum-free learning by letting any employee observe and join AI-assisted work sessions.
- Lütke explicitly frames River's design philosophy using the German concept of Lehrwerkstatt — a teaching workshop where the shop floor itself is the classroom.
- Willison draws a parallel between River's public Slack interface and Midjourney's early public Discord interface, crediting both with driving adoption through shared visibility.
Key quotes
River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start working in.
Shopify wants to be a Lehrwerkstatt at scale and River has now gotten us closer to this ideal than ever. It's osmosis learning, because it does not require a curriculum, a training plan, or a manager. It just requires everyone's work to be visible to the maximum extent possible. Everyone learns from each other.