source: simon willison: learning on the shop floor
level: business
shopify built an internal coding agent called river that only works in public slack channels. it refuses direct messages and asks users to create open channels instead. this forces all interactions into the open, where anyone at the company can search, read, and join in. tobias lütke, shopify's ceo, works with river in a channel called #tobi_river, and over a hundred employees watch, react, and add context to the threads.
the setup creates what lütke calls a lehrwerkstatt, a german word for a teaching workshop. the entire shop floor becomes a classroom. employees learn by being near the work, without a formal curriculum or training plan. visibility is the key mechanism. when someone uses river to write or debug code, others see the prompts, the agent's responses, and the back-and-forth. they pick up techniques, spot mistakes, and understand how the tool behaves in real tasks.
this approach mirrors midjourney's early days, when the image generator operated mainly through public discord channels. users had to share prompts and results openly, which helped everyone learn the finicky art of text-to-image prompting. simon willison notes that midjourney's early success likely came from this forced transparency. shopify's river applies the same idea to coding agents, turning everyday work into a shared learning resource.
why it matters: public agent interactions create a searchable knowledge base and speed up skill building across teams without formal training.