# How Shopify Built the Infrastructure Beneath Its Slack-Native River AI Agent

DevFeed: [How Shopify Built the Infrastructure Beneath Its Slack-Native River AI Agent](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/under-the-river-1654.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://shopify.engineering/under-the-river>)

Author: Burke Libbey

Published: 2026-05-28T12:30:02Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Shopify Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/shopify-engineering.md>), [Shopify Engineering - Shopify Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/shopify-engineering-shopify-engineering.md>)

Topics: [AI Agent](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-agent.md>), [Slack](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/slack.md>), [monorepo](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/monorepo.md>), [Nix](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/nix.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-requests.md>)

Tags: [agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agent.md>), [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [ai-coding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-coding.md>), [cache](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cache.md>), [monorepo](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/monorepo.md>), [slack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack.md>), [test](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/test.md>)

## AI overview

Shopify describes how it built River, an AI agent that operates in company Slack, and the infrastructure choices that supported it. The article covers Shopify's move to a monorepo, adoption of Nix for reproducible environments, and the resulting changes to CI, merge queues, build caching, testing, and repository navigation.

## Source excerpt

What it took to ship our Slack-native agent River, lessons learned, and the substrate that runs beneath it. Co-authored by River.