Agents in action
Shopify rebuilt its Shop app from React Native to native in 12 weeks with coding agents
Shopify moved the Shop app, which serves hundreds of millions of customers, from React Native to Swift and Kotlin. A core group of six engineers led the work, with coding agents doing much of the porting through a custom migration workflow.
What the agent did
- Started with a one-week test: one engineer and coding agents ported as much of the app as possible to SwiftUI
- Built the migration workflow as an extension for the Pi coding agent: subagents read the old source, wrote platform plans, implemented features and checked parity
- Tied each engineer approval to a hash of the plan, so any change to a plan voided its approval
- Gave agents a debugging tool, Tardis, to read live app events, logs and state and compare screenshots and analytics events with the old app
What it means for you
- Use the existing app as the spec: Shopify's follow-up tool Helix splits each screen into small checkpoints that must pass tests, a visual comparison and two adversarial code reviews.
- Run several agent sessions in separate worktrees, and keep build and test loops fast so each one gets quick feedback.
- Keep platform experts in review: Shopify says generated code could meet the requirements while adding duplication, drift or performance problems.
Why it matters
As reported by Shopify, session stability rose from 99.5%+ to 99.95%+, the Android build shrank by 109 MB and Android release builds got about 75% faster. Shopify is now reusing the approach on the Shopify app, which has more than 300 screens.
Results as reported by Shopify; the stability, size and build-time gains come from going native, and the posts give no engineer-hours or AI cost.
Source: Shopify Engineering
Every number on this page comes from the source. Our charts redraw those numbers; videos are embedded from the publisher.
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Agents in this story
| # | Agent | Gid Score | Downloads 7d | 7d | 30d | Stars | Latest release | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 |
PiEarendil Inc. (created by Mario Zechner) |
75 | 6.2M | up 5.4% | up 37.3% | 121K+212/day | 1.5.1yesterday | ||||
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