Learning on the Shop floor

Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack:

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. I myself work with river in #tobi_river channel and many followed this pattern. Every conversation is therefore searchable. Anyone at Shopify can jump in. In my own channel, there are over 100 people who, react to threads, add color and add context, pick up the torch, help with the reviews, remind me how rusty I am, and importantly, learn from watching. [...]

As so often with German, there is a word for the kind of environment: Lehrwerkstatt. Literally: A teaching workshop. The whole shop floor is the classroom. You learn by being near the work. Being a constant learner is one of the core values of the firm.

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.

I'm reminded of how Midjourney spent its first few years with the primary interface being public Discord channels, forcing users to share their prompts and learn from each other's experiments. I continue to believe that the early success of Midjourney was tied to this mechanism, helping to compensate for how weird and finicky text-to-image prompting is.

Tags: ai, slack, generative-ai, llms, midjourney, coding-agents, tobias-lutke