I Benchmarked Shopify Magic Against a Custom Claude Agent — Here's What I Found

I spent a weekend wiring Claude directly into the Shopify Admin API to see how a custom agent compares to Shopify Magic on the tasks I actually run every week. This post is the benchmark — the code, the numbers, and the surprises. TL;DR: Magic wins on latency and zero-setup. A custom agent wins on everything that requires state, scheduling, or taking action . The gap is wider than I expected. The Setup I tested four real tasks I run on my Shopify store: Generate 50 product descriptions from titl