Tobi Lütke: AI Agents, Better Decisions, and the Future of Work

**Tobi Lütke** (0:00)
Things need to be pruned. You cannot make things better and better by adding stuff. You can't, you must prune, you must rebuild, you must create an end for things.

**Shane Parrish** (0:16)
Tobi, welcome back.

**Tobi Lütke** (0:18)
Shane, it's so good to be back. I'm glad you're doing this again.

**Shane Parrish** (0:20)
How are you using AI internally in Shopify?

**Tobi Lütke** (0:23)
We find some ways for it to be supportive now. It's actually, look, when have we recorded last time?

**Shane Parrish** (0:30)
We recorded like two, three years ago.

**Tobi Lütke** (0:32)
Yeah, so 100 years of Internet.
Look, I'm 10 out of 10 nerd. I cannot bear the idea of somehow not being at the forefront of a technology shift. I live for these things. Anyone growing up reading sci-fi books wanted to live.
My take from sci-fi books I read was I wanted to live in that world. How can I accelerate us there?
Even in whatever minor steps, we can get there. Inside of Shopify, the amount of people I know who really write code is vanishingly small. Now, it still exists at the limits of complexity for sure, and obviously in the reviews and so on, and then state management of all things that seems to be remains to be the thing that's really the hardest to get right that people do by hand and then wipe the rest around it. Inside of Shopify, this is what things look like. Very few people are writing code directly. Everyone who does, does it deeply assisted by many agents. Very often, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 instances of them, all through either sub-agents or just different windows coordinating. We're pushing all engineering infrastructure towards absolute limits. I'm a student of computing history really, because I think it's actually mainline history, as it will be taught a thousand years from now looking backwards. But the main accomplishments of these years are going to be clearly the emergence of AI and the technological breakthroughs, and also the interconnectedness of the Internet, and all this kind of infrastructure we created. Those are the great works of our time. But where we started, as a young industry, we tend to not be seeped in tradition, or we mistrust the great lessons that have been found by the people, by the greats of our industry. In fact, we have the only industry in computing that doesn't even know its heroes. Imagine people in physics not knowing who...

**Shane Parrish** (2:29)
Richard Feynman?

**Tobi Lütke** (2:30)
Richard Feynman is actually... Like, he might even be too obscure, but like, I mean, I said Newton, Albert Einstein. But you go into computer science, it's like, who's you, Newton? And no one knows Alan Key and Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This matters, I think, because we discard great lessons and have to rediscover them over and over and over again. For instance, like, probably the best idea of all times in the earliest, earliest moments of operating this system design was file system. Like, if you look at the Apollo guidance computers, we didn't have file systems, right? Like memory, in fact, because of radiation space, was actually encoded as a rope with knots in it, either a knot or no knot for ones and zeros. And you had to pull through a thing to reboot strap the entire machine.
So the entire machine was one piece of software that ran. That was computing for a very, very long time. So until then, again, Dennis Ritchie really created this Unix file system, slash forward and, you know, bin user and these kind of things. Think about it. A file system is something that we have in office building too, right? We have a, you know, it has folders, they have files in it. This makes intuitive sense to everyone. We come from an inheritance here of deep stocco-morphism. We analogize the best parts of how we organize ourselves in the digital world. And then at some point we decided, okay, you know what's not something we need to do anymore? Stocco-morphism, as in like analogy to the real world. Honestly, funny enough, the last defender of this was probably Steve Jobs, who really, really, really pushed even the interfaces of the Mac and the iPhone to be, you know, like the notes app sort of had Markerfeld font and looked like a ring binder, right? And if you remember that version of iPhone, the moment he was out of the picture, everything became flat, right? And we lost sort of even shadows and verticality and so on. It looked potentially better design ages, but like we lost our analogy. Okay, so I think this was a mistake. So I think we need to get back. And therefore I like the concept of agents, because what is an application in the world of computing?