Prediction: The Shopify CEO's Pull Request Will Never Be Merged Nor Closed

Disclaimer This post is not intended as a criticism of Tobi. I think autoresearch is a cool idea and I like the fact that AI coding tools are giving more people the opportunity to code. I am critiquing the hype-based news coverage of this event and the public's lack of interest in primary sources. The Autoresearch PR The CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, recently made headlines by using the AI tool autoresearch to increase Liquid parsing speed by 53%. Turns out this was a case of "CEO Said A Thing!" journalism where no one checked the primary source and all nuance was lost. Some articles imply the code actually shipped and, well, works. Both false. I've dabbled in Liquid parsing myself, so I was compelled to read the code. Here's Tobi's actual pull request. It makes the code significantly less readable, partially because optimizations tend to be confusing, but mostly because the code quality is just bad. See lib/liquid/variable.rb if you enjoy the feeling of your eyes glazing over. On top…