Shopify learns in public Slack

River is designed to not respond to direct messages, working only in public channels. Tobias Lütke runs Shopify's internal coding agent this way, explaining that it makes all conversations searchable and lets anyone inside Shopify jump in to add context or join a review.

In Lütke's #tobi_river channel, more than 100 people react to threads, add explanations, and help with reviews. Shopify compares this to the German Lehrwerkstatt (teaching workshop). The whole workplace becomes a classroom, enabling osmosis learning where everyone learns from each other without a separate curriculum or managers.

Simon Willison adds that this also reminds him of how early Midjourney operated around a public Discord channel, letting users learn by watching each other's prompts and experiments.