Shopify CTO unpacks AI-native engineering at scale

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin joined the Latent Space podcast to discuss what happened inside Shopify after a December 2025 model quality inflection point that drove near-universal daily AI tool usage across the company. He argues that the real bottleneck in AI-assisted coding is no longer code generation itself, but PR review, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment stability — and that more AI-written code can still mean more bugs in production. Parakhin also describes Shopify's internal AI stack, including Tangle for reproducible ML and data workflows, Tangent for auto-research loops that iteratively optimize pipelines and prompts, and SimGym for simulating customers using historical merchant data and browser-based agents. He also emphasizes that running many parallel agents without communication is an anti-pattern, and that high-quality critique loops — where one agent's output is reviewed by a second, ideally different, model — produce significantly better code despite the added latency.