Try selling used Apple products which you can on any website or marketplace online, except Apple will contact Shopify and they will unpublish products without even telling you.

You used to be able to install custom Shopify apps on your own store, now they make you jump through hoops. Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store. Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up. I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.

Try selling Vape products or adult products and you’ll see you don’t really control the software. Selling used Apple products, vapes, and adult products is completely legal. Yes Stripe and PayPal can stop you from accepting payments for those products. But why is my business software doing the same?

Tobi Lutke is known to be an eccentric. I listened to an interview a few years ago. Clearly smart and forward thinking. He's also polarizing. He's very into optimize everything, systems thinking. Hard to say it's wrong but definitely comes off a bit cold.

I started scraping the Shopify status page every 5 minutes back in March of 2015 so I have more than 11 years of history.

This isn't the first outage and won't be the last but it's one of the most disruptive in recent memory.

X has always been a better source of outages than any official status site. It's either early, before there's anything official posted, or it's something the vendor doesn't consider worthy of an outage because it only affects a particular subset of customers.

Yup, and last week I brought down GitHub when I fell down and asked a friend to pull me up. At my weight, that was a bad pull request.

There's also much more to Shopify than just Ruby feature work. I've heard tales of their infrastructure and it seems like it would be very exciting for the right kind of person.

Never worked there, probably never will, but they have my respect for the things I have seen, read and heard.

i assume they are referring to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglaslaney/2025/04/09/selling...

"Employees must explain why AI can’t be used before asking for additional resources, like more staff or time. [...] Shopify is now factoring AI usage into performance reviews and peer evaluations."

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/2053630840458944849

Apparently not

The scientific method is generally to ask a question, and test it, before randomly collected evidence makes the obvious undeniable.

And even if it _was_ related to AI, they would not admit it. First course of action is to blame user/programmer error and then QA process error. You shall not blame the golden calf. I am half serious and half not. But I do recommend reading the book "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" in conjunction with my hyperbole.