Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I’m currently building Forestwalk Labs, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
December 5, 2025
Last week I wrote an exploration of Ben Thompson’s recent question, “Why is the ChatGPT Mac app so good?” A lot of people on the internet, it turns out, do not agree with this premise!
Many folks have been having problems with ⌘C not copying text. Hacker News sees the app as “not good at all”, to the point that my post about it being better than the alternatives was flagged off the site. X doesn’t like it either.
Beyond the bugs I mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve recently been plagued with a ChatGPT Mac bug of my own, where every time I start a new chat, it will pre-fill the text field with the first input I used last time I started a new chat on Mac.
All of this led me to an informative post by one of OpenAI’s Mac developers, Stephan Casas:
nearly everyone who works on the ChatGPT macOS app has been stretched thin, and hard at work building Atlas.
[…]
i’m thankful that our users appreciate our decision to develop a native app just as much as i’m thankful for the heightened expectations they hold because we did so
Apparently he merged a fix this week for the copy-paste bug that has been plaguing many folks, which is promising.
Something implied in last week’s article that’s worth saying explicitly: although many good Mac apps are native, being native is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a great app.
While OpenAI is investing more in desktop apps than any other model labs, they have much to do before they can transcend “better than the alternatives” and achieve “great.”
November 30, 2025
Claude, Copilot, and making a good desktop app.
This year, even as Anthropic, Google, and others have challenged OpenAI’s model performance crown, ChatGPT’s lead as an end-user product has only solidified. On the Dithering podcast last week (paywalled), Ben Thompson called out an aspect of why this is: I need someone to write the definitive article on why...
5 min read →
October 31, 2025
Distraction management in intense times.
Building something new from 0 → 1 is hard, so it requires your full attention. Given that, a key part of creating a new product is limiting distractions – anything that pulls your attention away from finding product-market fit. There are a lot of things a founder can be distracted...
8 min read →
September 30, 2025
Zoom’s arc from hero to hulk.
In the olden days, video calls were hard. Circa 2012, if your next meeting was online, it was important to start the process 5-10 minutes early. The process, at that time, was some or all of the following incantations and rituals: Find the meeting URL Find the meeting passcode Download...
5 min read →
August 31, 2025
On the pros and cons of the indie path.
When I talk about building Forestwalk, people who’ve long known me are sometimes surprised that I’ve been using terms like “runway”, “venture-scale”, and other jargon more associated with the VC world than indie or lifestyle businesses. And indeed, I do have a secret to come clean about. You see, for...
3 min read →
July 31, 2025
On little things that get in the way.
I never was a Boy Scout. As a kid, I leaned heavily toward papers, screens, and other indoor pursuits. Despite this, I was always drawn to camping. Setting up in the forests of British Columbia for a few days, surrounded by trees and fresh air, always felt good. Worthwhile. Right....
4 min read →
June 30, 2025
On making use of large thinking models.
For a year, I’d been coding almost every day with Cursor and Claude Sonnet. Anthropic’s 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet each rightly earned their dominant place on the programming model charts: they were the least-bad coding models yet. In the earliest days of LLMs, there was tremendous interest in ever-larger model...
7 min read →
May 31, 2025
Some highlights and lowlights.
I think of presentation slides as having 3 main jobs: Emphasize key points, so people remember Break up complex concepts, so people learn Entertain, so people pay attention This calls for slides that are mostly images or very short phrases. A minority of slides justify designing something to match the...
5 min read →
April 30, 2025
How LLMs are making traditional apps feel broken.
First, there was the terminal. You typed text. Scrolling text came back. It was: Powerful Flexible for power users Easy to program But also, since it was centered around a blank input field, it was: Daunting Unintuitive Bad for selecting and manipulating stuff Fortunately, in the intervening decades our user...
8 min read →
April 19, 2025
Advance voting is now open for Canada’s federal election.
The last federal election was boring – but a lot has changed. The two largest parties have new leaders, and Canada’s largest trading partner has, uh, put new issues on voters’ minds.
While defense, energy independence, international relations, and democracy itself have hardly been core election issues of late, they’re now in play. You can check out CBC’s Election platform overview or Vote Compass, or the CTV’s Party Platform Tracker to get a recap of the parties’ platforms.
In terms of what to expect, there has been a fairly dramatic polling shift since Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the new US administration coming to power. According to polls, many voters who planned to vote for other parties – whether it was Conservatives, the progressive NDP, or the more obscure parties – are now planning to back the centre-left Liberals. Of course, only those who show up actually decide.
You can use 338Canada to see some guesses about what this might mean for your riding, or any strategic voting. Given the very large error bars on these projections though, it’s worth remembering that at the end of the day, you’re electing an MP to represent you – not the Prime Minister directly.
Making a plan to vote
- Sun April 20, Sat April 21: Remaining advance voting days
- Mon, Apr 28: Voting Day. Polls will be open until 9:30 for Eastern Time ridings, but only 7pm in Pacific time areas. Make a plan if you’re not advance voting.
March 31, 2025
The Nutri-Score, and a calculator for it.
Recently, I was in the grocery store with my kids, looking at granola bars. DAD can we have these in my lunches? My 8-year-old was waving a box of birthday-cake-flavored granola bars. Uh, birthday cake? Will that actually keep you full? Before I could read anything on the box, my...
5 min read →
February 28, 2025
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
In recent months, I’ve returned to writing code daily. It’s been a lot of fun. While I enjoy Swift, Python, and Ruby, we’ve been building in TypeScript lately since it’s a good fit for our latest project. After about a decade away from regularly writing JavaScript, it’s been fun to...
7 min read →