VP of Machine Learning Engineering @Shopify | Building Agents | Bringing AI to entrepreneurs | Bush Pilot | Maple Syrup Producer settingnorth.com
Belwood, ON
- Tweets 725
- Following 27
- Followers 3,205
- Likes 37,559
Now launch @Shopify Sidekick from widgets on iOS! 🧵
10
15
89
19,031
RIP Gramp, you were my hero and biggest supporter - you had unconditional love for your family and everyone around you. Love you! You got on the Bill daily for the final time.
3
1
87
6,614
Sidekick now leverages Shopify.dev MCP server! After seeing impressive implementations in Claude Desktop and Cursor, you can now use it natively in Shopify. Currently query-only, but we're crafting a sleek GraphQL mutations UX that'll give you full confidence in changes before Sidekick executes them @ShopifyDev
11
13
89
24,230
You can now upload images in Sidekick. I love combining this with image gen to create gorgeous images with my product. Time to re-design my store with Horizon + product referenced image generations. It's incredible how far we've come in the last few years.
7
5
77
23,773
Sidekick is now available to ALL @Shopify merchants in ALL languages! Try it out and let me know what you think!
6
7
71
21,330
It seems @Shopify Sidekick got too useful for the real estate it had. #YouAskedWeListened! Now enjoy Sidekick on the Big Screen #AIMAX, #DolbyDigital coming to a theatre near you soon.
10
7
65
17,745
Looking forward to meeting folks at Toronto Tech Week tomorrow at the @Shopify tech talks. We are going to talk about Sidekick and LLM era evals. Sneak peak: it's more than just vibes.
5
43
3,206
Looking forward with chatting with folks about Sidekick at editions.dev on Friday afternoon!
4
34
1,682
I've been chatting a lot about evals for LLM systems and how to get away from "vibe evals" to statistically robust LLM as a Judge evaluations. Had an awesome chat with @andrewzigler from @DevInterrupted about @Shopify Sidekick and Vibe Entrepreneurship. 🧵
4
5
31
4,272
Launched my first assistant with the Maluuba team 13 years ago to the day. Been doing nothing but assistants ever since, continuing at @Shopify on Sidekick. Only difference is that what we built in 10 months in 2012 we can now build in 1 day. And I'm less awkward in photos.
1
25
1,245
Building Sidekick in the open means sharing the wins. Check out how merchants are actually using @Shopify Sidekick to get to first sale faster. This is why we build.
shopify.com/news/journey-to-…
1
2
27
1,656
Been excited about Sidekick being on mobile for a while. When using POS at a farmer's market, I often need to use admin and it pained me that I couldn't use Sidekick - until now!
And because we’re not slowing down, Sidekick is available in the @Shopify mobile app.
Merchants don’t just build from a desk, and now, your AI assistant moves with you.
3
1
26
2,995
Looking for internship working on cutting-edge agentic systems? Apply now!
🚀 SHOPIFY'S INTERNSHIP APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN!
- Canada Winter 2026 (bit.ly/3HFoUDW)
- USA Summer 2026 (bit.ly/3V4XZ7B)
Work on full time teams, ship to millions of merchants, using the _right_ models (no token budgets here😏)
Apps close Sep15 @ midnight ET.
2
22
2,299
Loved seeing everyone's reactions to the Editions launch yesterday! Which new feature has you most excited? What was missing? Have you had a chance to play with latest Sidekick version?
1
19
3,560
Come find me at the @Shopify booth at ICML this week.
1
19
1,486
Think we need to get @vlaurenlee in a floatplane next!
We opened up Editions.dev with this video. Probably one of my favorite days at work. @vlaurenlee
1
19
2,148
Had a great time meeting some incoming @Shopify interns, @UWaterloo students and recent grads last night! Keep on building.
Last night some of @ShopifyEng’s ML leaders and @Radicalvc co-hosted a dinner to connect with Waterloo builders in the AI/ML space.
The convos were wild! A reminder that we’re still on the frontier of AI, and there’s so much more to build.
Can’t wait for the next one ✨💚
Props to @Drewch for driving 😎
2
17
1,831
Hi from @shopify! Sidekick can analyze your store and use its built-in tools to suggest ways to improve sales. Stay tuned for more features and capabilities that will be rolling out soon because it’s going to keep improving.
13
1,011
A great prompt that I used recently to send an email/loyalty discount out to some customers who haven't ordered in a while:
"Show me my top 5 customers who make the biggest orders who haven't made an order in 3 months and draft an email to send them with a discount code for a loyalty offer"
1
13
1,263
Online shopping is transforming. Exciting times!
Shopify merchants will be able to sell directly in ChatGPT.
We’ve been working with @OpenAI for quite some time so people can search and buy products in chat, and it’s something we’ve had a hard time keeping quiet.
Rollout is coming very very soon.
1
13
745
I also wrote a @ShopifyEng Blog post on this topic: shopify.engineering/building…
2
1
12
943
Love building in Canada 🇨🇦 thank you @Shopify!
3
14
1,605
The right way to leverage LLMs is not to think about how can an LLM solve your task, but how can you change your task more closely aligned with the distribution of LLM training data (the internet).
11
832
Excited to share that Sidekick can now generate images! Merchants can create product visuals and hero images for storefronts without leaving Admin. More improvements coming soon. Let's see what you build!
2
11
508
Looking forward to chatting with everyone about Sidekick at @Shopify editions.dev. I want to hear from you all about your thoughts on Sidekick and how to best work together! See you at 3:40pm.
11
694
A great one that I did recently: "Show me my top 5 customers who make the biggest orders who haven't made an order in 3 months and draft an email to send them with a discount code for a loyalty offer"
2
11
661
Sidekick on Mobile + Tap to pay POS on @Shopify Mobile App has been a killer combo
9
833
RIP Gramp, you were my hero and biggest supporter - you had unconditional love for your family and everyone around you. Love you and will miss you. You got on the Bill daily for the final time.
We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of former Maple Leafs player, scout, and General Manager, Gerry McNamara. Gerry made an enduring impact on the organization, most notably by bringing Börje Salming to Toronto, helping pave the way for future generations of European players in the NHL. As General Manager, he continued to shape the franchise, including the selection of Wendel Clark as the first overall pick in the 1985 Entry Draft.
Our thoughts are with Gerry’s family and loved ones during this difficult time.
2
9
960
Sidekick improvements keep coming, and we aren't slowing down! If you are stuck on a task, share your screen with Sidekick and it can help guide you in real time!
We’ve made significant improvements to Sidekick's capabilities over the last six months, including multi-step reasoning and image generation.
Now, you can also use screen share with voice chat. Sidekick will respond out loud.
2
9
461
Quick video with AI speakers @railsworld introducing our talks and developing AI systems with Ruby. Come see our talk on Sidekick & LLM Evals at 3:45pm today! piped.video/i85-QD2stRU?si=8EsX…
1
1
9
3,810
Had a blast talking at @icmlconf 2025 this year in Vancouver talking about how you should be evaluating your agents in a robust manner. No more vibe testing!
In addition to the latest blog post, our talk at #ICML2025 is now live! 📺✨ Learn about the lessons & results behind building production-ready agentic systems: icml.cc/virtual/2025/46781
8
817
Talking with @tempor1s at ICML at 4:30pm on “Building Production Ready Agentic Systems: Architecture, LLM-based evals, and GRPO training”. See you there!
✨Want to know how we do it? Catch our ICML 2025 Expo Talk "Building Production Ready Agentic Systems: Architecture, LLM-based Evaluation, and GRPO Training" (onsite Monday, 4:30 PDT) to learn all about Sidekick. Preview it in action at shopify.com/magic#demo
8
980
Speaking about Prompt tuning for LLM Judges at @railsworld with Ghibli version of me Prompt Tuning @Shopify Sidekick's LLM Judge in the background. Showcasing the coveted Sidekick pin.
8
1,521
Selling @setting_north Maple Syrup and showing tools of the trade at a market in #Guelph today. Selling at markets is a lot easier with @Shopify POS… no hardware needed, just your cell phone.
7
462
Love seeing these deeper analysis queries for @Shopify Sidekick. Our methodology when adding tools to Sidekick is to build the lowest level tools like natural language to ShopQL or GraphQL).
This lets you and the model be unrestricted in your prompt. Incredible creativity!
This is a simple Shopify Sidekick prompt that allows you to identify which products actually drive repeat purchases.
----
"Analyze which products in my store actually drive repeat purchases.
For each product, show me:
Repeat purchase rate: What percentage of customers who buy this product come back to buy anything again?
Time to repurchase: How long does it take customers to make their second purchase after buying this product?
Lifetime value impact: What's the average LTV of customers whose first purchase was this product?
Cross-sell patterns: What do customers typically buy on their second purchase after buying this product? Retention curve:
How many customers make 3rd, 4th, and 5th purchases after starting with this product?
Rank my products by their ability to create repeat customers, not just by sales volume"
5
651
Fireside chat with @tobi and @UWaterlooPres at @UWaterloo! I agree that #Canada should celebrate wins more!
5
275
Had a great chat at #CanadianTechAtScale on how @Shopify is using AI across our products and teams.
"Vibe-prompting" relies on intuition to craft prompts, but there's a better way.
At #CanadianTechAtScale's keynote, @mmmandel @Drewch @JamesvYyz & Phil share how systematic evals transform gut-feel prompting into data-driven precision—building more reliable that lets you test changes quickly and ship with confidence. 🇨🇦
1
5
665
No one was talking about chat bots on search engines before @MParakhin. I’ll never forget that first meeting, the birth of Sydney. Still can’t believe we dove so deep into Maluuba’s GRU model that I had to get my laptop out.
1
4
103
You can also check out a talk I gave at ICML this year in Vancouver with @tempor1s "Building Production Ready Agentic Systems: Architecture, LLM-based Evaluations, and GRPO Training: icml.cc/virtual/2025/46781
4
267
Claude can be so dramatic. I just took a picture of a snapping turtle and asked how old it was, and now it’s a whole thing.
3
379
What is this? A shopping bag for ants?! The bag needs to be at least... three times bigger than this! 😂 Amazing nanoscale engineering work @ArgonK! @TheHackerFab x @UWaterloo. @Shopify
world’s smallest shopping bag?! tiny, but mighty.
shoutout @ArgonK from @TheHackerFab x @UWaterloo for putting Shopify on the 200 nanometer map.
(peep @Drewch + @_developit from @ShopifyEng nerding out over the set up 🤩)
4
456
Yes we are working on the story here for Sidekick. Agree that it's similar to admin search. Thanks for sharing!
1
4
108
it's really good at text, and decent at keeping the product image similar. Little underwhelmed at the creativity when not ghibli style. Purposely went with a simple prompt, thought it would have a better idea of what a good ad looks like (even with typo)
1
4
295
This should work, what was the query? This should have created the analytics query. We do actually want to take more action on help documents as well instead of just display it. In many other cases we do default to action (asking for user confirm first)
2
3
166
haha awesome. We did increase the size of what you can input into the text box just for you and the people on this thread. 💚💚
1
3
221
@AndrewDurot that is what we are working on from the UX side. Right now all these cursor demo's and stuff just run the MCP which just runs the query. But we would integrate it directly into admin so that the entire change it wants to make is reviewable first.
1
3
625
These are so awesome, keep them coming. I’m going to make an easier way for you to share these soon :)
1
3
189
Love using sidekick for analytics/trends. So nice to try to catch issues or poor trends, especially leading up to BFCM.
Use this prompt on @Shopify Sidekick to check if your 2025 sale strategies has worked (or hurt your margins)
-----------------------------------------------
THE PROMPT:
"Compare my AOV from [Sales Dates], 2025 to my typical AOV from the past 30 days excluding [Sales Dates]. Show me the dollar amounts and percentage difference."
YOUR ACTION PLAN:
AOV dropped 30%+?
→ Lower your free shipping bar for BFCM
(Your discounts are too aggressive)
Dropped under 15%?
→ Keep threshold where it is, go harder on discounts
(You've found the sweet spot)
Stayed the same?
→ You've got pricing power—maybe raise that threshold
(Your customers aren't price sensitive)
But don't believe me - go and test it before BFCM
This one metric shows your discount strategy effectiveness and it's direct correlation to your pricing power.
Save this for BFCM prep
2
559
Thanks! I’ll share with the team. Re: Sidekick, there is some early access testing happening with creating flows in sidekick, stay tuned :)
2
3
100
Weirdest password requirements ever from @Microsoft Store. Tried like 10 times to make a password, even @1Password auto gen passwords kept not meeting it. Had to put it in @AnthropicAI to get a password. Not the most secure but at least I have ms office for another 12 months.
4
3
685
Lol as a merchant I actually need this. Hired someone to do markets for me and still haven’t figured out how to get them access to POS only. Had to go whole day with them sharing my phone.
1
3
231
Sometimes the best way to use AI is to have a conversation with AI about how you can avoid using an LLM in production
1
6
380
Glad you think so! Doing analytics via sidekick has been a super high use case, it just makes it so much easier!!
1
2
68
Reminds me at Maluuba in 2011 building an agent and ASR returning “Call Sunday not funny” and then we did entity extraction, break into phonemes, break contact list into phonemes, and do search and alignment at phonetic level to turn the text into “Call Sanjay Nathwani”. We even opened sourced it after @Microsoft acquisition. microsoft.com/en-us/research….
Now the original Maluuba author of this joined us on Sidekick :)
2
557