Shopify's engineering account describes an AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → platform built to preserve conversations when the processes doing the work disappear. River, its Slack-based AI agent, runs on Aquifer, which stores session history in a database (Postgres) separately from the agent's execution process and code workspace. When a session becomes active again, a fresh process can read that history and continue the conversation. This separates the lifetime of a task's recorded context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition → from the lifetime of a particular machine, which Shopify presents as what lets long-running, shared work continue without keeping every execution process alive.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
