Under the River (2026) - Shopify

This post details the development of Aquifer, a platform for running AI agents, and River, an AI agent profile on top of Aquifer. Aquifer provides a durable substrate for AI agent sessions, harnesses, and sandboxes, with a Postgres-backed append-only event log for session durability and disposable session cells. River is presented as a multiplayer, Slack-based agent that interacts with the monorepo, code, data warehouse, and production signals. The post highlights the 'agent-friendly ≈ human-friendly' principle and the 'local agents have a ceiling' problem, leading to the development of open, collaborative agent interactions. The platform supports interactive, automation, and batch modes using a shared session model and sandbox plane.