Dev Interrupted

Dev Interrupted is the go-to podcast for software engineering leadership. Each week, hosts Andrew Zigler, Ben Lloyd Pearson, and Dan Lines sit down with industry experts to explore the strategies, struggles, and stories behind high-performing software teams. Paired with weekly industry news coverage, the conversations dive deep into the real challenges that define excellence in modern tech.

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Dev Interrupted

Forget vibe coding. Say hello to vibe entrepreneurship. | Shopify’s Andrew McNamara

August 26, 2025 • LinearB • Season 5 • Episode 34

First, there was vibe coding. Now, get ready for "vibe entrepreneurship."

Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Shopify, joins us to explain how his team is making this new era of business a reality. He shares the vision behind Shopify Sidekick, an AI co-founder designed to empower merchants by acting as their on-demand e-commerce expert. Drawing on his 16-year journey building AI assistants, Andrew reveals what it truly takes to create an AI tool that customers can trust with their livelihood.

He shares a critical insight from his applied research background: the hardest and most important part of building production-ready AI isn't the model, but the evaluation ("eval") system. Andrew breaks down Shopify's innovative approach of using an LLM-as-a-judge to measure how well they're fulfilling user goals, not just executing features. This conversation is a definitive guide to creating high-trust AI systems and offers a powerful glimpse into the future of commerce.

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