Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke used AI to build his own MRI viewer

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently shared how he used AI to create software for an incredibly niche, but important, situation. His annual MRI scan comes on a USB stick, but requires commercial Windows software to open. Rather than hunt for that program, he ran Anthropic's Claude model directly on the MRI files and prompted it to build a web-based viewer.

The result, he said, looked 'way better.' With one more prompt, the tool even annotated the images with the findings from the scan. Lütke called this an example of 'reflexively' reaching for AI — training yourself to instinctively use it to build bespoke tools when off-the-shelf software falls short.

He wrote in a thread on X that got more than 7.5 million views. Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, said this type of experimentation takes more upfront time and requires challenging your assumptions about how things should be done.

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