Unveiling Roast: Simplifying Structured AI Workflows for 2025

Over the past year, Shopify’s Augmented Engineering Developer Experience team has developed and open-sourced Roast, a workflow orchestration framework designed to enhance developer productivity through structured AI workflows. Recognizing the challenges posed by complex coding tasks and non-determinism in AI, Roast helps manage AI agents by breaking down intricate prompts into manageable steps. It allows for interleaving AI activities with non-AI processes in a testable manner, ensuring reliability at scale. Built in Ruby but usable across programming languages, Roast utilizes YAML for configuration and enables version control. Its standout feature, the CodingAgent, integrates Claude Code for adaptive problem-solving within defined parameters. Real-world implementations within Shopify have led to significant improvements in test quality, type safety, and proactive issue monitoring. By fostering a community for sharing and contributing workflows, Roast aims to revolutionize how developers interact with AI in their work, imagining it as integral to modern development practices.

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