Shopify Canvas: Build Your Store Right Inside a Chat

Shopify has released Canvas, a service where an online store comes together right inside a chat with the AI agent Sidekick. The agent writes the theme code itself, makes edits on request, and immediately shows a finished page with animation and layouts that adapt to different screens. For now it only works on desktop, and third-party themes and apps are not part of this version.

A merchant no longer needs a developer to put a store together. The agent is built into the platform itself and works with its themes directly, rather than handing over code that someone then has to transfer by hand. It is essentially the same vibe coding, programming through a chat with AI, that Lovable and Replit offer, just baked into Shopify. The limits of this first version are serious. For a simple store I would give it a try, but I would not yet trust it with complex customization.