Issue 253 - How a 21-year-old builds Shopify apps with AI agents
How a 21-year-old builds Shopify apps with AI agents
Charles Swayne of Jade Puma joins Liquid Weekly to walk through how he builds Shopify apps with AI agents. It is a practical, first-person workflow for using agents across app development, from scaffolding to shipping, rather than another "AI is the future" take. Good if you are trying to get real output out of agentic tooling for Shopify work.
By Liquid Weekly
Storefront metafield caching returns stale values for days
Kirill Platonov calls out a real pain point: Shopify storefronts cache old metafield values even after they're updated. Updating with metafieldsSet and the Admin API returns new values, but Liquid and the Storefront API keep serving the old value for days. The downstream effect: apps writing metafields have to tell merchants to expect a stale window, or find a cache-busting workaround.
By Kirill Platonov
The Shopify AI Toolkit is one skill now: what it checks and what it leaves to you
Covers Shopify's September 25 consolidation of the AI Toolkit's many shopify- skills into a single shopify skill. Action required if you installed the old skills: plugin installs may update automatically, but npx skills installs need manual removal and re-add. The post also unpacks how the Toolkit, the skill, the Dev MCP server and the CLI differ, and where validation stops -- it checks whether code is valid, not whether it's right for the store.
By Bas Lefeber
Sidekick can invoke app intents without a tools file
Sidekick now surfaces app extensions that declare only intents, with no tools file. Previously, an admin.app.intent.link or admin.app.intent.render extension that registered only an intent was skipped and never suggested. No API version to target and nothing to opt in to -- intent-only apps are immediately eligible on all stores. If your app has an intent-only extension, it starts working with Sidekick as-is.
By Shopify
Meta's Muse can now manage a Shopify store
Meta's Muse (its AI agent chat) can now manage a Shopify store, per an announcement amplified by Shopify's Harley Finkelstein. The pitch: merchants use AI agents to help run their businesses. It's the latest cross-platform signal that a growing share of store admin is being driven by agents, and relevant for anyone building apps -- agent-discoverability is quickly becoming a real channel.
By Harley Finkelstein
SMS marketing consent now on CustomerPhoneNumber
A new smsMarketingConsent field on CustomerPhoneNumber uses the same structured consent model as WhatsApp. The existing flat SMS consent fields stay for backward compatibility but are now deprecated. New integrations should use smsMarketingConsent; existing ones should plan a migration.
By Shopify
shopify.extension.version reports the running extension version
shopify.extension.version now returns the version of a POS extension that is running -- the same label shown on the Versions page in the Dev Dashboard. It's an opaque name, not a number, so compare for equality rather than sorting. Undefined when running from a local dev server. Available to POS UI extensions targeting 2026-10.
By Shopify
Cut Shopify Theme Check CI from 5-7 min to ~25s with Bun + Blacksmith
Concrete CI win: a Shopify Theme Check job that took 5-7 minutes is down to about 25 seconds by running `shopify theme check` under a custom Bun runtime (`bunx --bun`) instead of Node, on Blacksmith runners. The gotcha: the Shopify CLI still relies on npm to install some packages, so you need either npm available or a global install. Links a gist with the full GitHub Actions setup. Real numbers from an actual build pipeline, not a theory post.
By Jason Hassold
Fixing the 'Expected end_of_string but found pipe' Liquid error
Taylor Page documents a real theme upload failure: a GitHub branch theme failed to upload with "Expected end_of_string but found pipe". The cause is filters used directly inside render arguments. Assign the filtered value first, then render. Short, concrete, and exactly the kind of error a theme dev hits mid-release.
By Taylor Page
How to hide unselected variant images on a Shopify product page
CraftShift walks through keeping the product page clean by hiding unselected variant images. A focused Liquid-conditions walkthrough for the common complaint that Shopify shows every variant's photos at once. Good for theme devs fielding the same feature request repeatedly.
By CraftShift
