How I use Claude Code to build custom, reusable Shopify sections that match the theme and hold up to standard.
Shopify themes have come a long way. If you have not built a store in a couple of years, the jump is hard to overstate. Themes like Horizon and Dawn ship with a deep library of sections covering pretty much every common layout you could want: image with text, multi-column features, featured collections, slideshows, FAQ accordions, and on it goes. For most stores, most of the time, that is genuinely all you need.
And then you hit the wall. There is always that one moment where what the client wants, or what the design calls for, does not map onto a single pre-built section. You end up bending an existing block into a shape it was never meant to hold, or stacking three sections to fake one. It works, sort of. But it is never quite right, and it is never quite reusable.
That is the gap I want to talk about, and how I have been closing it.
First, credit where it is due. Shopify's own AI, Sidekick, has become a properly useful tool. It lives in your admin, it knows your store data, and it will happily answer questions, build Flow automations, edit theme settings, and these days even spin up small admin apps from a prompt. If you run a store and you are not using it for the day to day, you are leaving time on the table.
But Sidekick is built around managing a store, not building one from scratch in code. It is anchored to the Shopify ecosystem and to backend operations. The moment you need a genuinely bespoke front-end section, something with its own Liquid, its own schema, and its own editable settings, it starts to run out of road. It is the right tool for a lot of jobs. This particular one is not it.
Which brings me to what has actually changed my workflow this year. Claude Code has quietly taken over a lot of my development work in 2026. It has only got more consistent as the months have gone on, and for real web build work it has become the agent I reach for first. Not for novelty, but because the output holds up. It understands context, it writes to a standard, and it does not fall apart the moment the task gets specific.
Here is something I run into all the time: a pricing table.
eCommerce themes almost never include one, and that makes sense. They are built around products, around getting a physical thing into a cart and out the door. But plenty of the businesses I build for are service based, and a service business needs to lay out its tiers clearly. Three columns, a price, a list of what is included, a call to action, maybe a "most popular" flag on the middle one. Standard stuff on most websites, oddly absent from most Shopify themes.
My process for adding one looks like this:
Then I let Claude Code build it.
The reason this works so well comes down to a few things:
It is not always perfect on the first pass. Sometimes it takes a few rounds of corrections to get the detail right. But the code I end up with is exactly what I needed, and it slots straight into the theme under sections/ with no drama.
That is the real shift for me this year. The pre-built sections get you most of the way, Sidekick handles the store, and when the theme runs out, Claude Code builds the bit that was missing, properly, and in a way I can reuse. The wall is still there. It just is not the problem it used to be.
Go well!
