TL;DR
Bartleby is a UX writing agent built on Shopify's content design standards that helps teams create clearer, more consistent product copy, which raises the quality floor while reducing reliance on writers for every draft.
Writing quality didn't scale with the product.

With limited writer-to-team ratios, content designers were stretched thin. Writers were pulled into reviews, edits, and copy requests, leaving little time for strategy.

Teams moved fast, but quality was inconsistent. People relied on intuition, outdated docs, or whatever examples they could find.

The result was predictable: unclear UX, more revisions, and growing dependency on writers to clean things up.

Born from a humble Google doc.

The first version of Bartleby wasn't a product. It was a prompt.

A shared Google Doc that helped people get closer to Shopify's voice — with recommended model settings, a grammar and mechanics section, and a style prompt anyone could use.

ChatGPT content design prompts document — change log and grammar section
ChatGPT content design prompts — contractions, capitalization, punctuation guidelines
Becoming Bartleby.

When agent functionality became available, the Google Doc prompt evolved.

What once took multiple steps — copying the style prompt, running content through, then re-running it through grammar and mechanics — collapsed into a single agent.

I named it Bartleby, and unlike its namesake, this one actually takes (most) requests. It can converse with users, pull from different content design sources, and fine-tune drafts to meet our content design standards in a single flow.

"I like what Bartleby [the way I want to call him Bartleby with my whole chest, is Busy] wrote there!" Marketing lead
"Bartleby is the hottest agent for merchant-facing admin copy" Engineering manager
"Bartleby is saving me hours on a weekly basis and making me a much better UX writer than I would be without them" Product designer
"Did you make sure the copy was Bartlebyed" Product manager
"How do we get more people using this? WHY ARE THEY NOT?" Product manager
"I interacted with Bartleby at least 10 times a week when projects are nearing the launch and it'd be nice to have someone to talk to without having to bug a human for small stuff" Product designer
Release into the wild.
7,000
unique sessions and counting since launch
70+
unique daily users querying for help
6th
most used agent out of 200+ at Shopify
7
days a week, every week, someone uses Bartleby

Bartleby made "pretty good" the baseline.

Teams could draft more clearly on their own, and content designers could focus less on fixing copy and more on shaping the system behind it.

Instead of starting from scratch, people started from something strong. And instead of relying on writers for every pass, they came with better drafts and clearer thinking.