Andrew here, week 4.
Somewhere this week, a bot scanned your Shopify store looking for a reason to sue you.
That is not a metaphor. There's a cottage industry of law firms running automated scanners that crawl Shopify stores for accessibility violations, build a list, and mail the brand a five-figure demand letter. No warning shot. You find out when the letter hits your desk and your CFO asks how this happened on your watch.
So in June one of our data guys built a bot to beat their bot. It scans every client store every 24 hours, finds those same violations first, and fixes them before any letter shows up. The exact tool a law firm weaponizes against you, we turned into a shield. It took him a few days, not the two months a normal shop would have quoted.
That is the whole story of AI in Shopify development right now, and your agency has a reason to keep quiet about it.
For years the expensive part of a build was the typing. Someone sat down and wrote the code, line by line, and you paid for their hours. The entire agency model rests on that one assumption: hours are the product. Then AI started writing a solid first draft of most of it faster than a developer can describe the task.
We felt what that does to a team from the inside. We started calling our developers what they honestly are now: bricklayers. Skilled, fast, essential, and no longer the bottleneck. That is not an insult. It is a promotion for everyone who used to wait on them.
Because when the code gets that cheap to produce, the developer stops being the valuable person in the room. The valuable person is the architect. The one who decides what to build, in what order, and whether it will actually move profit per visitor. AI makes a bad plan faster. It does not make it right.
So here is the question to ask your current agency. If a machine now writes the first draft of the code, what exactly am I paying your developer's hourly rate for? If they bill you by the dev hour, you are paying architect prices for bricklaying, and you are trusting that whoever aims the AI knows where to point it.
We built our whole shop around that shift. The AI writes. A strategist decides. A quality inspector checks. You get eight roles instead of one pair of hands, and the plan is the product, not the hours.
We run an AI system we built alongside Cody Plofker, the CEO at Jones Road Beauty. We put the proof of what it builds, and what it lets brands stop paying for, in one place. See what we built with Cody →
— Andrew
P.S. The scanner was not the impressive part. The impressive part was knowing which problem to point it at first. That is the whole game now.