Building Agents @Shopify | VP of Machine Learning Engineering | Bringing AI to entrepreneurs | Bush Pilot | Maple Syrup Producer settingnorth.com
Joined January 2010
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Apr 24
Every Sidekick decision comes back to one question: will this help more merchants successfully start and grow their businesses? Grateful to be on this journey with them.
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Jun 12
Let me know if you want to meet up in Seoul! So much going on at Shopify in this space. Let’s chat.
Jun 12
🇰🇷 Here’s what’s on deck for us @icmlconf in Seoul next month:
Our Expo Talk on how we distill LLMs into smaller, faster, and more accurate models than their teachers. A live demo of Tangent, our autonomous ML pipeline research agent. A workshop on the generative turn in search and rec at 81M shopper scale. And booth presentations from every ML team at Shopify.
Come see what we’re building. 👇🏻
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Jun 12
Looking forward to working with you!
Jun 12
joining @Shopify as an Applied ML Engineering Intern on the Sidekick team this fall, out of Toronto
Sidekick, led by @Drewch, is Shopify’s AI co-founder for merchants. couldn’t think of a better place to work on AI that helps millions of merchants build and grow their businesses
big thanks to @alspee for being incredibly kind and helpful throughout the process, and to @Drewch for the conversations that made this possible
time to ship
every hero needs a sidekick :)
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Andrew McNamara retweeted
Jun 5
Love the new Home page on @Shopify!
Sidekick is the most powerful, best-designed AI assistant out there. Putting it front and centre for merchants will dramatically increase their chances of success.
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Jun 10
Recently Shopify Flow introduced a version history page, but did you know that you can ask Sidekick about your versions, and even ask for a diff of what changed?
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Jun 3
the beauty of shopify is that it makes trying feel normal
i remember being 13, trying to start a clothing dropshipping store with my best friend. we had absolutely no idea what we were doing
but somehow it felt possible
wish we had sidekick then haha
Jun 2
Shopify launched to the public 20 years ago today
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Andrew McNamara retweeted
Jun 2
Shopify launched to the public 20 years ago today
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May 29
I'm on pat leave right now — and in the 2 hours I joined work yesterday for reviews, I was able to knock out 5 PRs for different small issues I found with some stuff we're building.
River has changed everything, and we're _just_ starting to see the fruits of that labour.
May 28
Recently @tobi shared the philosophy behind River, our Slack-native AI agent, and how it has become a teaching workshop for all of @Shopify.
Below River lies the Aquifer. Principal Engineers @burkelibbey & Javier Moreno share the engineering story of how River came to be, and the substrate it runs on:
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May 29
I’ve completed my New Year’s resolution 7 months early, I built a home gym. What will I do the rest of the year.
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May 27
“No one could employ me in Canada so I started my own business and that worked out” — @tobi
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May 27
Does anyone at toronto tech week homecoming have a wireless charger?
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May 18
Been having tons of success in our agents with what @AnthropicAI called the “advisor” tool.
May 18
I’ve had very good results running autoresearch with local qwen 3.6 26b model as long as I had a simple vibed pi “advisor” extension that allowed it to periodically ask GPT 5.5 for ideas. I think this direction has a lot of merit.
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May 16
a common joke around the Shopify office is that Sydney never died, just went to business school and become sidekick
May 16
Bing Sydney's dad (@MParakhin) is longer at Microsoft, they've lost the plot.
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May 16
Fun fact: all the Sydney infrastructure, data management was replaced with a different approach after I left, but the new direction didn’t pan out, so, it is being switched back. Theoretically will be easier to resurrect Sydney now, if it were deemed a good idea.
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Andrew McNamara retweeted
May 12
A very clear-eyed analysis of where AI-mediated commerce actually stands right now, based on early Shopify data. The part that I would claim is most interesting is not the headline conversion numbers, although those are striking. It's the journey compression pattern.
More than half of AI-referred sessions start directly on a product detail page, compared to 20% for organic search. Agents are essentially speedrunning the discovery and consideration phases inside conversations.
shopify.com/enterprise/blog/…
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