October 2, 2026 · Ahmed · More by Ahmed
Sidekick Can Now Invoke Intent-Only App Extensions
Shopify's Sidekick now surfaces app extensions that declare only intents — and an unconfigured shopify.app.toml can fail your next deploy.
What changed
Shopify's September 28, 2026 changelog update expands which app extensions Sidekick — the AI assistant built into Shopify admin — can invoke. Before this change, an extension had to declare a tools file to be Sidekick-eligible. An admin.app.intent.link or admin.app.intent.render extension that registered only an intents block, with no tools file alongside it, was invisible to Sidekick no matter how well it was configured.
That's now fixed at the platform level: an extension is Sidekick-eligible the moment it declares tools, intents, or both. Nothing about the configuration format changed — the same intents targeting block you may already ship is now sufficient on its own, and it's recognized identically on both admin.app.intent.link and admin.app.intent.render targets.
Why this is live immediately, not optional
There's no feature preview, permission, or scope condition attached to this, and it isn't gated by API version — pinning an older version of the Admin API does not opt your app out. The change applies to every app on every store at once. If your app has at least one extension with an intents block and no tools file, that extension became Sidekick-visible the moment the change shipped.
That immediacy has a sharp edge. If your shopify.app.toml has no extensions_summary under [sidekick], your very next shopify app deploy fails validation, naming the missing field. Apps whose Sidekick extensions already declare tools are unaffected — they already required extensions_summary, so nothing changes for them. Apps with no Sidekick extensions at all aren't affected either.
The fix: extensions_summary
extensions_summary is a developer-written field in shopify.app.toml, distinct from the description field inside each shopify.extension.toml. Where a description explains what one specific extension does, extensions_summary is a single, consolidated summary of everything your app's Sidekick extensions can do — Sidekick uses it to decide whether to route a merchant's question to your app at all. It belongs under a [sidekick] section:
[sidekick]
extensions_summary = "Search, Create, and Edit Email and SMS campaigns"
The field has a 256-token limit, not a character limit, so there's more headroom than it first appears — but it still has to be specific. A good summary names the actions your extensions support (Search, Create, Edit) and the domain or entity types they cover, specific enough that Sidekick can match a merchant's question to your app rather than someone else's.
Before your next deploy: check every shopify.extension.toml for an intents-only block on admin.app.intent.link or admin.app.intent.render, add or confirm extensions_summary if you find one, then deploy to a development store and ask Sidekick a question matching your registered intent to confirm your app gets suggested.