In this special edition of the Liquid Weekly Podcast, hosts Karl Meisterheim and Taylor Page are joined by Eytan Seidman, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss the major announcements from Winter Editions '26.

Eytan reveals how Shopify is rewiring the platform to be fully AI-native, democratizing access to the Catalog MCP for building agentic shopping experiences, and introducing App Intents for Sidekick, allowing apps to register capabilities that Sidekick can invoke directly from merchant queries.

The group also dives deep into the "boring but powerful" platform updates, including massive improvements to Bulk Operations concurrency, advanced filtering and increased limits for Metaobjects, and the shift to server-side rendering for Shopify.dev.

Find Eytan Seidman Online

• LinkedIn:   / eytanseidman  
• Twitter (X):   / eytan  

Timestamps

00:00 Teaser: App Intents & Sidekick Capabilities

00:41 Intro & Welcome

01:24 Introducing Eytan Seidman, VP of Product at Shopify

02:51 High-Level Overview of Winter Editions '26 Updates

05:31 AI-Native Platform: Dev Assistant & MCP Server Updates

11:57 Technical Deep Dive: Shopify.dev moving to Server-Side Rendering (Remix)

16:38 Catalog MCP: Democratizing Agentic Shopping Experiences

23:39 App Intents for Sidekick: Registering Tools & Context

30:30 Merchant Control & Privacy in Sidekick Extensions

39:16 Boring Updates: Bulk Operations Improvements (Concurrency & Mutation Support)

42:40 Boring Updates: Metaobjects (Advanced Filtering & Increased Limits)

51:13 Eytan’s Top 3 Takeaways for Developers

54:20 Outro

Resources

• Shopify Editions: https://www.shopify.com/editions
• Metaobjects Documentation: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/cu...
• Bulk Operations API: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/usage/bu...
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://modelcontextprotocol.io/

Dev Changelog

The hosts and Eytan discuss the following updates from the Winter Editions '26 release: 

• AI-Native Dev Platform: The Dev Assistant and Dev MCP Server now cover the entire platform, including generating Checkout UI Extensions, modifying TOML files, and utilizing the latest Polaris components.
• Shopify.dev Server-Side Rendering: The documentation site has moved to server-side rendering (using Remix) to improve crawler access and performance for AI agents.
• Catalog MCP: Developers now have access to the full catalog of products across the merchant base (normalized and searchable) to build agentic shopping experiences.
• App Intents for Sidekick: Apps can now register "tools" and capabilities that Sidekick can invoke based on natural language merchant queries (e.g., "Show me my recent campaign stats").
• Bulk Operations Improvements:
• Now supports all mutations.
• Concurrency increased to allow up to 5 operations per API client per shop simultaneously.
• New query to check the status of all running bulk operations.
• Metaobject Enhancements:
• Advanced Filtering: Query metaobjects by value ranges on metafields (e.g., filter testimonials by date range).
• Increased Limits: Separate pools for apps—each app can create up to 128 definitions with up to 1 million entries each.