Today, Chris explores Shopify Magic and other AI offerings with Mike Tamir, Distinguished ML Engineer and Head of Machine Learning, and Matt Colyer, Director of Product Management for Sidekick. They talk about how Shopify uses generative AI and LLMs to enhance their products, and they take a deeper dive into Sidekick, a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled commerce assistant that understands a merchant’s business (products, orders, customers) and has been trained to know all about Shopify.

With so many great programming languages having emerged in the last decade, many of them purpose-built, when and where does Go still make sense and how do you make the case for it at work?

We’re making some big Changelog changes in 2025, the previously featured Stanford study on ghost engineers doesn’t live up to the hype, Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repository into a simple text ingest of its codebase, Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyrd / Eventbrite & Matheus Lima warns us about six mistakes that new managers make.

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert join Adam and Jerod for a ShopTalk & Friends conversation on the viability of the web, making content, ads to support that content, Codepen’s future plans, books, side quests, and social networks devaluing links.

Gerhard Lazu joins the show to discuss how Ship It! started and why you might want a general purpose language for your CI/CD.

Back at React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Tom Occhino & Shruti Kapoor for more fascinating conversations.

Tom Occhino, a key figure in React’s history at Facebook (now Meta), reveals the origin story of React, which began when an ads engineer presented a revolutionary approach to web UI rendering. The discussion extends to React’s evolution through Next.js.

Then, Shruti Kapoor breaks down React 19’s major features, including React Server Components (RSC), the new compiler implementation, and enhanced APIs that promise to streamline development workflows.

Jerod is joined by Hack Clubber Acon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Latta and the Hack Club crew that’s incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff.

Kyutai, an open science research lab, made headlines over the summer when they released their real-time speech-to-speech AI assistant (beating OpenAI to market with their teased GPT-driven speech-to-speech functionality). Alex from Kyutai joins us in this episode to discuss the research lab, their recent Moshi models, and what might be coming next from the lab. Along the way we discuss small models and the AI ecosystem in France.

Alex Russell answers the question, “If not React, then what?” Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch’s Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple’s latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon’s O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare’s R2 competitor.

Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and closed systems. Finally, they explore new AI tools for meeting clones and AI-driven commerce, sparking a conversation about the balance between digital convenience and fostering genuine human connections.