One of the coolest announcements in the latest Shopify Editions Summer 2025 was the Sidekick vibe coming.
If you aren't familiar with Sidekick, it's your partner-in-business accessible through the Shopify store admin. You can now use it to answer business questions like why are the sales this month down or what product you should put on sale.
But the most valuable Sidekick use case, in my opinion, is his Liquid coding capabilities.
Sidekick as your in-house developer
Thanks to the recent AI developments, everyone can be a "developer." Vibe coding is an automatic code creation based on human prompts, and this is now available to all Shopify merchants, no matter which plan or theme they are using!
You can start playing with Sidekick by:
- Going to your Store admin > Online Store > Themes and opening any of your themes.
- If you are using the Horizon theme (or any other from the latest set, not Dawn, though), click on the plus icon to add a new block and select "Generate."
- If you are using any other theme, click on the Sidekick icon in the top-right corner.
- Describe what you would like to generate in the Sidekick chat. You can generate things like a "UGC section," "slider with recommended products," "hotspot section," etc. You can be really creative and ask for difficult elements – Sidekick will handle it!
- Once the block is generated, you can adjust its settings, rename it, or duplicate it to other pages.
I suggest starting to experience with Sidekick and trying to use it for some basic Liquid tasks. I was pleasantly surprised with its capabilities and outcomes.
You can also review your app stack and think about which apps you could possibly replace with generated blocks.
What's next: Tailored themes?
The obvious question is, where does this lead us? One way could be a fully tailored theme based on your industry and prompts.
The Sidekick vibe coding capabilities give more power to non-technical merchants and prove once again why Shopify is currently the best e-commerce platform for SMBs.
