Decades of developmental genetic analyses have advanced our understanding of shoot patterning during maize ontogeny. Recent advances in genomics technologies now enable accelerated analyses of maize pattern formation at unprecedented scales. State-of-the-art technologies in single-cell genomics provide novel insight into the genetic and genomic mechanisms of maize shoot development. Embryos make shoot meristems and shoot meristems make all the organs in the adult shoot. Shoot patterning ultimately proceeds via the differentiation of individual stem cells and embryonic cells to comprise mature tissues and organs, such that scRNA-seq is an intuitive advance toward understanding the mechanisms of cell differentiation in the maize shoot. The use of scRNA-seq will begin to decipher the effects of cell position, cell signaling, cell lineage, and stochasticity on single-cell gene expression.