Shopify's Tobi Lütke: 'We are all verification engineers now' as agents become the third customer
schwentker · x · 2026-10-18
A quote thread from an agents-focused event captures two key takes:
- Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO): "We are now all verification engineers. We are building harnesses, we are building acceptance tests" — engineers' job shifts from writing code to verifying it in the agent era.
- Arty Vohmincevs & Aaron Brown (Mercor): Agents "don't tire, don't sleep, don't ask, they just go," raising the question of who a platform is really designing for if agents are the third customer.
The thread's theme: when agents become independent users and payers, product logic, acceptance criteria, and the very definition of a customer all need rewriting.
More from coding & agent
- Anders Sandberg shares his most useful non-obvious AI agent use case — anderssandberg · 2026-10-18
- Anders Hejlsberg explains why the 10x-faster TypeScript compiler was rewritten in Go, not Rust — rseroter · 2026-10-18
- 16-Year-Old Open-Sources Tiny Agents: A Working Agent Harness in 103 Lines of Python — Public-Response8933 · 2026-10-18
- User says making agents auto-sweep coupons and promo codes cuts spending by 5-10% — menhguin · 2026-10-18
- T3 MCP Gateway adds webhook support for instant hosted-agent notifications — boundsj · 2026-10-18
- Ex-Cursor Engineer Demos Grok Bot Orchestration: 25 Bots as a Coordinated Team — soleio · 2026-10-18