Introducing Roast

Shopify's Roast organizes AI work into defined steps that can alternate between ordinary code and model-driven decisions. Workflows live in configuration and prompt files, making their structure available for version control and testing. Shopify developed it after finding that broad, free-ranging prompts worked poorly across a large codebase.

Its workflow for adding Sorbet type annotations to test files, called Boba, gives a concrete example: fixed steps clean up the file and run Sorbet's automatic corrections, then a coding agent addresses remaining type errors and checks that tests pass. This gives developers explicit control over the procedure while retaining an adaptive step for problems that fixed rules do not resolve.