Ilya Grigorik

High Performance Browser Networking @ hpbn.co: {on,off}line perf best practices at your fingertips!

@Principal_ADE Absolutely. No reason it can't or won't evolve and learn.. rivers shape their own paths and remodel continents.

@igrigorik Its definitely in the right direction, but we think some innovation can be done on the format so it feels more compounding rather than transitive

River is a transformative AI unlock @ Shopify. A perfect name too: life sustaining artery delivering nutrients (fixes, context, PRs), shaping shared context landscape, ..., enabling efficient knowledge transport.

@atomz_ai Different. Dreaming is synthesis and consolidation. River is an active and interactive partner for the dev.. and as Tobi highlights, engaging in public context.

is River similar to what Claude dreams are? seems releatable from the surface @igrigorik

@tamir_eden @Shopify Yup. You can search catalog of individual merchant, or across via global catalog.

@igrigorik So great to see the progress @igrigorik. Shopify Catalog is going to power the discovery for everything UCP @ @Shopify ?

Standards are words and talk is cheap. A standard's success is measured by adoption, which is earned by solving right problems, with the right primitives, and running code. Universal Commerce Protocol has been a rocket ship. We chiseled it out of decades of shared experience running the world's largest commerce and consumer platforms, and it struck a chord, pulling contributors and adoption from across the agentic ecosystem. Case in point, the 04-08 release packed a punch. We landed support for: catalog for product discovery, cart building, post-order operations, context & intent for personalization, trust signals, and eligibility claims. Today the 🚀 trajectory accelerates. We're welcoming @amazon, @Meta, @Microsoft, @salesforce, and @stripe to the UCP Tech Council 🎉, working alongside @Google, @Shopify, @Etsy, @Target, and @Wayfair. Combined, these platforms touch billions of users, millions of merchants, and trillions of dollars in annual transactions — all rallying behind UCP as the one open protocol for the agentic era. Tech Council update: newsfilecorp.com/release/294133…

@hunkybill All the gory details are on public display on GitHub. I think you'll find it shockingly collaborative and constructive -- truth seeking best design for each domain.

@igrigorik What happens when amazon or meta tells shopify they’re wrong, you’re wrong, we want to do this instead, not that? Does anyone try and pull rank? Who has contributed the most so far? Is it all a juicy soap opera, or boring? Is there a journalist covering the gory details?

@sundarpichai 🤜 🤛 ... all-star team UCP.

Extraordinary progress with UCP!

@VidsSrinivasan 🤜🤛 indeed! And yet more exciting work ahead!

@igrigorik Major milestone!

the Shopify AI Toolkit is here manage your store with your favorite agent Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, and more

Variety just spotlighted The Good American, my brother Alex Fazeli’s short film (still in production). An Iranian refugee in the US turned rideshare driver pulled into a high-stakes rescue. It's action that hits hard because it’s rooted in real struggles of belonging, identity, and doing what's right. This one feels urgent and timely. Proud doesn't say the half of it. variety.com/2026/film/colu…

@tamir_eden @liam_at_shopify Both. We will offer storefront (store scoped) catalog, and global catalog as UCP endpoints.

@igrigorik @liam_at_shopify @igrigorik this is great, does discovery runs over Shopify Catalog or storefront-mcp?

UCP 2026-04-08 is out 🎉 and it's a step function upgrade for agentic commerce 🦾 TL;DR: we've landed support for product discovery, cart building, personalization and eligibility claims across the full discovery→ cart→checkout journey, plus order tracking. UCP now covers the full purchase journey. 1/ 🔍 Catalog capability — enables product discovery via search query, lookup by ID, and get-product for fine-grained variant and option resolution. 2/ 🛒 Cart capability — enables basket building with live totals, discounts, and seamless handoff to checkout. Bonus: transport binding for embedded flows alongside MCP & REST. 3/ 🗒️ Order capability — new endpoint to retrieve order status by ID, complementing the existing webhook spec for real-time updates. 4/ 🙋 Context & intent fields — agents can now signal user intent and context so merchants can tailor results, offers, and experiences across catalog, cart, and checkout. 5/ 🔐 Signals — structured input for agents to pass authorization and abuse-prevention data to merchants. Trust negotiation, built into the protocol. 6/ 🪪 Eligibility claims — agents can assert verifiable claims (loyalty tier, membership, etc.) that merchants evaluate for conditional offers and discounts. 7/ ⚙️ And a *long* tail of other improvements: structured error model, request & response signing, version negotiation, disclosure messages for legal compliance, new delegation methods for embedded transport... the list goes on. Spec: ucp.dev/2026-04-08/spe… Changelog, for the curious: github.com/Universal-Comm… p.s. we're in the final stretch of polishing the Shopify implementation for all of the above - coming soon to every Shopify-powered storefront near you 😎. See shopify.dev/agents.

I'm completely convinced at this point that the "Command Palette" is a fundamental UI concept, and should be in all applications. It should also be a built in browser concept, there should be an API for websites to push items to the command palette ("new post", "muted words" etc)

@tamir_eden @Shopify You're not wrong 😄 But you're skimming the immense complexity of solving product discovery at scale. Catalog is a complex system, delivered as a gift wrapped API: x.com/igrigorik/stat… That's one of multiple critical lego pieces.

@Shopify 's MOAT, explained. TL;DR - Overview of movement towards agentic-commerce. It is not just merchant scale. It is not just checkout. It is not just ecosystem. It is the agility of the architecture. If you look at the diagram, the story is actually pretty simple: On the left is the traditional commerce flow: Products API → PDP → Cart & Checkout That is the world eCommerce teams already know well. Products are merchandised into listings, shoppers browse the storefront, and traffic flows into checkout. On the right is the new flow Shopify is enabling: Products API → Agentic Listing → Shopify Catalog → Agentic Storefront → Cart & Checkout This is the important move. Instead of rebuilding the stack from scratch, Shopify added a mapping layer from the traditional web listing into an agent-ready listing. That agentic listing then powers the Shopify Catalog, which can be surfaced through conversational interfaces and agentic storefronts. (@igrigorik & @tobi correct me if I'm wrong) And here is the real architectural advantage: Both paths still converge into the same Shopify cart and checkout. That means Shopify can let discovery evolve fast while keeping the transaction layer stable. New interfaces can emerge. New agentic channels can grow. New product selection behaviors can take shape. But the operational backbone stays the same. That is the moat. For eCommerce teams, this shift matters a lot. Your product listing is no longer just a webpage asset. It is becoming a performance surface for agents too. That means merchandising, marketing, and optimization teams need to care much more about: product structure, attributes, taxonomy, clarity, and how well a listing can match intent in conversation. Because in agentic commerce, if your product is not easy to understand and select, it may never even make it into the funnel. My take: Shopify’s edge in the agentic era is its architecture was flexible enough to add a new discovery layer without breaking everything underneath. That is how platforms move fast. Follow me if you wanna know what's next.

Christmas in April. No joke. 🎇

Design at Shopify is having a moment. A big moment! Incredible talent, and even stronger output. So we gave it a home: Shopify.design Come explore

Eyes on the (right) prize.