Shopify is developing a new storefront theme designed to make website code easier for both human developers and AI agents to read and modify. The move marks a shift away from the company’s current JSON-heavy Horizon theme towards plain HTML combined with Shopify’s Liquid templating language, reflecting the view that clearer, more local code benefits automated tools and merchants alike.

The unnamed theme, being presented in developer forums as Horizon’s likely successor, has 93% fewer lines of code than Horizon and shows readable text files rather than long JSON configurations. Shopify says 20% of merchants now use its Sidekick AI assistant to edit themes, generating 25 million edits this year; existing Liquid themes will remain supported through a “forever API”.