The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Parakhin: CLI AI tools outpace IDEs like Cursor at Shopify
“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, and you could see, yeah, various versions of Cloud Code and Codex and Pi and internal development tools taking off e…”
Parakhin: Liquid is the only genuinely competitive non-transformer architecture Shopify found
“That's why we at Shopify, when we tried multiple, and we constantly try multiple models, multiple companies, we found that for small, particularly with low latency applications, when you have low latency and or if you need longer context lengths, Liquid was th…”
Parakhin: Slower AI PR reviews actually save total deployment time
“It actually, in terms of the overall time to deploy, it's total time savings if you spend more time on a longer model, like, thinking for an hour, because then you don't have to spend all that time During testing and rolling, you know, rolling back the deploym…”
Parakhin: Increasing product image size usually tanks ecommerce sales
“Usually people's intuition here, by the way, is that I increase my images. I'll have more because they look nicer. You know, designers all look sparse and big images. Like, usually your sales tank, right?”
Parakhin: Daily AI tool adoption at Shopify approaches 100 percent
“So you could see that it approaches really a hundred percent by now. It's hard not to do your job now without interacting deeply, at least with one tool.”
Parakhin: Airflow is poorly suited for rapid ML experimentation compared to Tangle
“Airflow is great, but Airflow is more about you have something and you want to repeatedly run it in production on schedule. It's less about you as a team developing things and being able to share and you grabbing the standard pipeline and saying, hey, I want t…”
Parakhin: Simulating customers without historical data produces ungrounded agent responses
“If you don't have the historical data, All you can do is prompt agents in the vacuum, and they will do exactly what you prompt them to do.”
Parakhin: Shopify funds unlimited tokens and discourages models below Opus
“And we effectively fund unlimited tokens for everybody. We do try to control the models that people use, but from the bottom, not from top. Like we basically say, hey, please don't use anything less than Opus.”
Parakhin: No existing third-party AI PR review tool meets his standards
“I haven't found a good PR review tool that, that does what I think should be done”
Eskildsen: Elasticsearch Was the Most Difficult and Aggravating Database at Shopify
“The database that was the most difficult for me to scale during that time, and that was the most aggravating to be on call for, was Elasticsearch. It was very, very difficult to deal with, and I saw a lot of projects that were just being held back in their amb…”
Parakhin: Shopify uses large HSTU architecture to model merchant trajectories
“Internally we have this system. We talked about it briefly once at NeurIPS. We have a huge HSTU-based system that models the whole companies.”
Parakhin: Shopify runs a 300M parameter Liquid model under 30ms for search
“We run it at 30 milliseconds, a tiny model, like three hundred million parameters, In, but we run it in 30 milliseconds end to end for search when you type a query, and then we produce all the possible things with what you can mean by that query and some, you …”
Parakhin: Shopify built agent memory systems before Karpathy proposed them
“Just even yesterday, Andrej Karpathy was famous in tweeting about, oh, there's 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-che…”
Parakhin: Shopify increased search throughput 5x to 4,200 QPS via auto-research
“Our search recently we moved from, it's hard to win, quote, from 800 QPS to 4200 QPS with the same quality just by pure optimizations and not a research loop that kept Running and changing code in our index surf on the same number of machines, just increasing …”
Parakhin: Shopify aimed for 0.7 correlation between SimGym and real add-to-carts
“Internal goal was to hit 0.7 correlation with add to cart events, for example, like that, that if we run real A, B test experiment, that it should go and replicate same sort of success that, that humans had or lack thereof.”
Sands: Over 1M Shopify merchants and Salesforce joining ChatGPT checkout
“There's over one million Shopify merchants coming soon, including some really big ones like Glossier and Viore.
this week, Salesforce announced that they're also in”
Parakhin: AI token usage at Shopify skews heavily toward top percentiles
“And I would claim the super interesting part here is that you could see that the distribution becoming more and more skewed. The top percentiles grow faster. So that means the people in the top 10 percentile, they, their consumption grows faster than 75 and so…”
Parakhin: Shopify brought back Chinese Restaurant Processes for buyer clustering
“Recently we're looking at it, and we had to bring back CRPs, you know, Chinese restaurant process. It's a, like, way of aggregating and like naturally grow clustering across specifically to answer questions that like you were just posing on how, how if buyers …”
Eskildsen: Kardashian Sales on Shopify Peaked at 1 Million Requests per Second
“And a lot of that was really just the you know the Kardashians would drive very, very large amounts of data to Shopify as they were rotating through all the merge and building out their businesses. And we just needed to make sure we could handle that, right? A…”