How Marketing Ruined Shift Left | Semgrep’s Tanya Janca

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:11)
This week, we're talking about Claude's new learning mode, Microsoft's original source code, and Shopify's controversial AI memo. Ben, what catches your attention?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:22)
Well, because I've already had some conversations on social about this one, I want to talk about this Shopify memo, because I think it actually is a pretty good story, so tell us about it.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:31)
So the CEO of Shopify releases an internal memo saying that staffers, they need to prove that jobs can't be done by AI before asking for more headcount or more people to join their team. So this obviously has a variety of reactions from folks within Shopify, many of which have taken online to talk about it, and it feels like the whole tech industry is kind of spectating and commenting on this mandate that's happened within Shopify.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:57)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:57)
My take on it is just looking at it, you know, it's a good idea, maybe taken to a bit of a functional extreme. How do you prove that a job can be done by AI? And if a job exists right now, but AI can do it in six months, what then? You know, how do you really justify the longevity of a headcount in that kind of space? And more importantly, after reading the memo, it kind of sparked a little bit of curiosity in me. I'm kind of wondering, like, what are the workflows at Shopify now that are performing this kind of AI powered work? Like, what kind of impact is that driving for them? I'd be curious to know.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:29)
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I actually kind of agree with Tobi Luquez, the CEO of Shopify, with his general sentiment that AI really is fundamentally disrupting knowledge work. And, you know, like many skills, I think this is a muscle, like you need to develop it over time. You really need to work with it regularly in your workflows so that you normalize and habitualize the practice. And the harsh truth is that, like, if you're not doing that today, then you're risking being replaced by others who are doing that. I'm not even just talking about your job. Like, your competition is thinking about these types of things, and they may already be taking action on it. But I also want to point out that this kind of highlights the disconnect between, like, executives and individual contributors that we talked about last week. How do you prove a negative? Like, how do you prove that AI can't do the job? You know, like, Lukey mentioned, they gave their employees a chat bot. And, you know, we've discussed on multiple occasions how chat really is not the best interface for these AI.
And if that's all you're doing, then like, it's not enough. Like, you need to be giving your employees a lot more support, a lot more tooling than that. And, you know, I'm not saying that Shopify is not, because I just, what I'm seeing from them, I actually think that they have done a pretty good job incorporating AI into their workflows, but it's got to be more than a chat bot.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:48)
Yeah. I see we're speculating about it in the same way. So, you know, we'd love to have someone from Shopify, maybe in the future, come on and tell us about, hey, AI is transforming them.
I think there's a story there for sure that we could all possibly learn from.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:02)
Yeah. And I want to take a moment just real quick to plug a personality quiz we published around AI collaboration. So if you've ever wondered, how effective have I been at adopting AI and using the new generation of tools? We have this really cool quiz that we'll put in the show notes that you can take. It takes just a couple of minutes to find out, but we've already started to find some really interesting things from some of our early respondents on this. Specifically, 79% of our respondents so far are still in the AI newbie category. So this is a category of people who have barely gotten AI into their workflows. And I think this is the norm. So don't feel like you're completely left behind if you haven't adopted AI. It's kind of interesting to see some of the adoption patterns that are emerging from this as well. The people who are being successful are finding some repeatable generation type activities, like generating code, generating docs, generating tests. Like they're getting success with those before trying to move on to other things within the software delivery life cycle. Because to be frank, we've seen quite a few of the categories within this quiz that nobody or practically nobody is using AI for it yet, even like in collaboration. Like AI just hasn't even shown up in those parts of their workflow yet. So if you want to know where you stand on this journey, head over to those show notes, take that quiz. It's really fun. It can teach you something about yourself and help you understand where you are. Well, so what's our next story, Andrew?