Hi, I’m Allen Pike. I’m currently building Powerplant, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
Vancouver Election Guide, 2026
Breaking down the parties vying for Vancouver Mayor and Council.
The Brains of the Operation
Simple steps toward a company brain.
Weighing the Business Case for Quality
On the economics of doing great work.
Link: The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform
This week’s discussion of the ChatGPT app and its move to Electron merits a link to my evergreen article The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform:
At the highest level, cross-platform UI technologies prioritize coordinated featurefulness over polished simplicity.
I’ve added a coda to that article about how coding agents actually strengthen the argument for Electron on large teams, at least for now.
The initial release of the new ChatGPT app has been clumsy – there’s a lot of work to do to get Electron ChatGPT (née Codex) as polished as it should be. But, like it or not, cross-platform code is the least-bad way to coordinate a massive team on a rapidly changing product.
How To (Not) Spend $10k/wk on Coding Agents
On too much of a good thing.
Link: Voice In, Visuals Out @ AI Engineering World’s Fair
This week’s AI Engineering World’s Fair just posted my talk on the agony and ecstasy of voice in, visuals out agents. It’s a challenge to get model responses that feel immediate, but when it works, it feels magical.
Link: Surprise! Pay $1000
My turn writing for the Forestwalk blog:
Now typically, when you try a SaaS product for free without a credit card, and you hit the limit, you get cut off. Also known as “disruption to your service”. Instead, we were invoiced $1000, which was immediately overdue.
Genuinely curious how common this practice is. Just because I was surprised by it, doesn’t mean it’s unheard of.
Link: Test Coverage Won’t Save You
Forestwalk’s CTO Jenn Cooper shares what she’s been learning about tests, after a couple years of increasingly coding with agents:
Most discussions about AI-native development jump from this problem – agents’ tendency to accumulate tech debt – directly to tests. … Tests verify that code does what it did before.
Whether what it did was even the right way to do it is a separate question.
She argues that while agents make it easy to have rigorous traditional test coverage, at best unit tests maintain local code cohesion. At worst, they can actually make it harder to improve what agents are worst at: the wider coherence of the entire codebase.
So far I’ve been impressed with how effective the broader automated checks she describes can be to guard against agentic nonsense.
Building for Voice In, Visuals Out
Flashes of brilliance, and the tyranny of latency.
We Can Do Hard Things
On getting uncomfortable.
The Rise of Transparency
Finding signal in the firehose.
Launch Now
On trading comfort for speed.