Shopify’s AI Phase Transition: 2026 Usage Explosion, Unlimited Opus-4.6 Token Budget, Tangle, Tangent, SimGym — with Mikhail Parakhin, Shopify CTO

**swyx** (0:04)
Okay, we're here in a studio, a remote studio with Mikhail Parakhin, CTO of Shopify. Welcome.

**Mikhail Parakhin** (0:08)
Thank you.

**swyx** (0:10)
I don't even know if I should introduce you as CTO of Shopify. I feel like you have many identities. You led the Bing ML team, I guess, or ads team. I don't know.
People variously refer you as the CEO or I don't know what the previous role of Microsoft was.

**Mikhail Parakhin** (0:29)
That was my previous role at Microsoft. I actually was the CEO of one of Microsoft's business units, which included, as we discussed, all the things that people like to laugh about, including Windows and Edge and Bing and ads and everything.

**swyx** (0:47)
Yeah.
What a wild time. You've obviously done a lot since you landed at Shopify. One of the reasons I reached out was because you started promoting more internal tooling, primarily Tangled, but also a lot of people have seen and adopted Tobi's QMD and obviously I think Shopify has always been leading in terms of engineering. I think it's just more recent that you guys have been more vocal about your AI adoption. Is that true?

**Mikhail Parakhin** (1:15)
Well, I think AI tools in general are fairly recent development.
Shopify, at this stage of its development, were developing AI in-house and building tools that use AI, and interfacing with the wider AI community are on the runaway trajectory. So it's just a natural by-product. We talk about it more also. Just even yesterday, Andrej Karpathy was famous in tweeting about some ways that you can organize your agents to store the data and then look up the data so that you don't have to research or lose context every time. And a little bit tongue-in-cheek, I tweeted that, hey, we've done it much earlier, and we even have different approaches, Tobi and I. Tobi, of course, is a big fan of QMD, and I'm more of a SQLite fan, but yeah, very similar things that we've already done here. The point is, yeah, we're a very dynamic, you know, explosively growing company, and we have to be at the forefront of AI adoption, obviously.

**swyx** (2:30)
Yeah, your team kindly prepared some slides, actually, that we were going to bring up on to the screen. I think I can screen share and then we can kind of go through some of the shocking stats that maybe put some numbers to what exactly is going on. So here we have an internal AI tool adoption chart. What are we looking at here?

**Mikhail Parakhin** (2:54)
Yeah, this is very interesting statistics. This is number of daily active workers. Think of DAO, basically, the active users of AI tool as a percentage of all the people in the company. And then different AI tools. And you could see two things here is that, one is the greenest total.
So, you could see that it approaches really 100% by now. It's hard not to do your job now without interacting deeply, at least, with one tool. You could see another interesting thing is, just as many people commented in December, was the phase transition when suddenly models got good enough that everything took off and started growing. It was, many people noticed that small improvements accumulated into this big change in December of the time frame. The other thing I would claim you could see is that CLI-based tools and tools that don't require you to look at the code becoming more popular. You could see various versions of Cloud code and Codex and Pi and the internal development tools taking off. Exactly.
Blue is our river, just internal agent for coding. Where tools that require ID, such as GitHub, Co-pilot, or Cursor, they're not exactly shrinking, but they're not growing as fast. Like a red line is the ID tool. So you could see that they're not experiencing as fast overgrown.

**swyx** (4:37)
As I understand it, basically every employee has their choice of choose whatever tool you use and then you're just doing a daily survey or something.

**Mikhail Parakhin** (4:47)
Exactly. The push is to get your job done, you can use any tool and we effectively fund unlimited tokens for everybody.
We do try to control the models that people use but from the bottom, not from the top. We basically say, hey, please don't use anything less than Opus 4.6. Some people end up using GPT 5.4 extra high, some people use Opus 4.6. There are some plus and minuses in going for a full 1 million context window versus not, but we try to discourage people from using anything less than that.

**swyx** (5:28)
Yeah, yeah. Got it. Got it. I mean, that's, you know, the next chart here, it really kind of shows the expansion in the sort of December 2025 reflection, right? That people are using a lot of tokens. I think it's also really interesting that no one was kind of abusing it in 2025 Like, it had, comparatively to this year, there was almost no growth.