Serious results, unserious methods: Shopify’s AI playground

We take our merchants’ needs very seriously. Paradoxically, one of the ways we do this is by keeping some things super unserious. Especially when it comes to AI.

In April 2025, Tobi sent us a memo: “reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.”

I heard this internal memo of mine is being leaked right now, so here it is: pic.twitter.com/Qn12DY7TFF

— tobi lutke (@tobi) April 7, 2025

TL;DR: default to AI. 

Since then, we’ve hit universal adoption of AI code editors, thousands of Cursor licenses, and near-constant usage of our internal AI tools. Every team has unlimited access to top AI models. And as our usage climbs, an undercurrent of joyful energy flows through the company: we’re tapping into our tinkerer’s DNA.

Tobi himself is a tinkerer. He plays with technology. He’ll adopt the newest version of any tech despite how buggy it may be. And he invites all of us to tinker with him.

Tinkerer’s DNA

Like me. I started programming by making games, a common origin story for fellow tinkerers. When I joined Shopify in 2011, I worked on an internal tool called Unicorn, which gives colleagues shoutouts for what they’ve shipped. The gaming nerds in us wanted to make it playful so we added easter eggs, levels, and points.

There was even a 3D game where you could virtually walk a little wizard around the office. It was completely silly, and people loved it, and then they would go, “Oh shit, that’s 3D. Wait—how did you build that?”

That’s where the magic happens. Discovering what’s possible using new technology, sharing it in a fun way, and letting curiosity spread. The “how did you do that?” moment is viral learning, knowledge transfer disguised as entertainment. 

We call it unserious exploration and it’s how we stay at the bleeding edge. Our millions of merchants depend on it. When new tech emerges, we aren’t scrambling to catch up—we’ve been playing with it for months. The result is that Shopify merchants get access to the latest technology before it’s mainstream. Fun is a competitive advantage.

Why unserious exploration matters

Many of the best tools start as toys. The internet was a toy. Personal computers, AI. Even Slack began as a chat tool for a failed video game. If you only build what’s obviously useful, you’ll never stumble onto the next breakthrough. 

Tobi has built a culture around experimenting without the pressure to produce something “useful” or “shippable.” It’s like kids climbing on a playground to learn motor skills, or musicians jamming for the joy of spontaneous creation. For us, it’s a cultural principle. We encourage everyone to build small, weird, sometimes silly things just to see what happens. Like doodling, but for programming. 

AI has supercharged our unserious exploration: now anyone can vibe code an idea and see it live in minutes. The AI job-apocalypse narrative gets it wrong. AI is a force multiplier for us, turning our tinkerers into superhumans who can build anything they imagine.

As Tobi says, “You can’t forge great things at room temperature.” Methods like his AI memo add heat to our mix, and keeping the temperature high allows innovation to flourish. The result is a tidal wave of experimentation. A return to hacker culture, and this time everyone is invited. 

When faced with new technology, we pick a small, tightly scoped prototype with the goal of learning something. We don’t worry so much about what we’re building—as long as we are building. We’d rather burn through 10,000 wild ideas to forge the one that matters, because we’re not interested in shipping room-temperature software.

There’s one critical requirement to all of this: we share our learnings.

What unserious exploration looks like at Shopify

To make sharing easy, we launched Quick, a kind of internal GeoCities where anyone can spin up a prototype site in seconds. It’s our experiment sandbox where we showcase our discoveries, shippable or not. Since launching in mid-2025, we’re at more than 5,000 Quick sites (according to my Shopify Counter 🤓). These sites contain everything from innovative business dashboards to silly ideas like a phone pole you can rotate and staple posters to.

Some of Shopify’s best features were born from joyful tinkering. The Shop app began as a Hack Days project, our AR “rate my fit” feature too (where AI will either pump you up or roast your outfit depending on your preference).

More recently, our Scout AI tool pulls together hundreds of millions of merchant feedback items, tightening our feedback loops so we can make improvements and ship fixes faster.

The unserious part is the secret sauce here. If you only build with a business case in mind, you’ll spend all your time justifying, scoping, and planning. You’ll never doodle. You’ll never try the “dumb” idea that turns out to be genius. Because it’s only unserious until suddenly, it’s not.

Sidekick, our AI-powered business partner for merchants, is the perfect example of how our unserious explorations have turned into serious advantages for our merchants, enabling them to supercharge their business because of everything we’ve figured out about AI.

We’re building muscle memory for a world that doesn’t exist yet, and there’s a beautiful paradox here: the more childlike the exploration, the more adult the impact. Kids aren’t constrained by what’s practical; they see a paperclip and imagine 50 uses. That’s the mindset we’re cultivating. We’ve paired kid brain curiosity with the most powerful AI tools in human history, and the combination is pretty freakin’ rad. 

If you want to come tinker with us, our playground is open.

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Daniel Beauchamp is a Distinguished Engineer at Shopify. He spends his days building things with tech that always seems to have a two-letter acronym, like AI, VR, AR, and 3D.