Yeah but there's a significant difference in the leader of a company shifting the goals, product, or market of a company in a top-down way and a leader attempting to shift the implementation details of goals in a top-down way. The former is the entire job of a CEO, the latter is micro-managing of the first order.
Yes, but the message from Shopify leadership is "it's part of your job to mess around with this stuff and see what works". Not "use AI at all costs".
The general feeling I'm getting is that using this AI stuff is important, but it's a learned skill, and we want as many people as possible to get familiar enough with it to have actual opinions.
That's one reading, and if that happens to be the correct reading then I agree it's unobjectionable. To me, though, making it part of a performance review process makes it closer to the "use AI at all costs" requirement than a request for devs to mess around with new technologies.
There was a 1-5 Likert scale self-rating on "leveraging AI" and a free-text box. I rambled about using claude code to help summarize my daily notes, cursor for implementation, using the chatgpt ui for broad questions (what happened to internal project X, how do I configure airflow again, etc.), then experiments with the find-the-right-table-for-you SQL generator. That seemed like about the level folks were going for.
There are some people who are really into it. The sql-generator's great for PMs; ops are experimenting with moderation triage. I personally have mixed feelings, but I'll futz with it on company time (and api $) to see if I can get it to do something useful. It'll mess up tensor alignment, but I can fix that.
So, yes, it was in the performance review. No, it wasn't a big deal. Yes, it seems to me like a reasonable nudge to get over the activation energy of learning to use the thing.
It's internal. But it's basically hooking up SQL code generation to the docs and schema of most of the tables in the data warehouse. I don't know the details, but probably also some extra stuff in the prompt to give a bit of context. It started as a few-days hack that then got momentum.
