Shopify abandons React Native for Swift and Kotlin, rebuilding the Shop app in 12 weeks because agents made building twice cheaper than sharing one codebase

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Mustafa Ali's September 10 engineering post says "coding models have gotten dramatically better" enough that agents handle the implementation, translation, testing and review work that made cross-platform the obvious call in 2020. AI-generated code is gated through Helix, which forces each small slice through tests, visual verification, adversarial code review and human approval before proceeding. Shopify is winding down its React Native libraries: Skia is sponsored through end of 2026 then forked and renamed by William Candillon, FlashList (~2M weekly downloads) is looking for new stewards, and Restyle is archived.