Hi, I'm Allen Pike. I’m currently building Forestwalk Labs, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.


Testing the Untestable

October 31, 2024

The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features.

I gave a talk version of this article at the first Infer meetup earlier this month. Let’s say you want to build an LLM-powered app. With a modern model and common-sense prompting, it’s easy to get a demo going with reasonable results. Of course, before going live, you test various...

9 min read →


Link: BC Votes

October 12, 2024

Voting is now open for BC’s election, which concludes in one week on Sat Oct 19.

I’ve done voting guides for Vancouver and Canada in the past, but I’ve never done a BC one since the decision here has traditionally been simple. There has long been two viable parties: one on the left, and one on the right. This continues, with no centrist party on the ticket and the Green Party unviable in almost every riding.

The main difference this time is that instead of the center-right BC Liberals, the NDP now faces the actually-right BC Conservative Party. While they might not have seemed electable only a few weeks ago, this recently-fringe party has been downplaying and walking back some of their more extreme statements in the hope of assuaging centrists who would have voted Liberal.

With such a close race between two very different choices, the outcome will ultimately come down to who turns up.

If you live in BC, make a plan to vote this week. Early voting continues on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with the final decision on Sat Oct 19.

Further reading:


Link: Infer, an AI Eng Meetup in Vancouver

October 2, 2024

Next week, we’ll be kicking off a new speaker series in Vancouver called Infer. The goal of the meetup is to bring together folks who are doing great AI engineering work, so we can learn from one another.

The format will be familiar to folks that have attended my previous meetups: two speakers, often one of whom will be visiting from out of town, with time to chat afterward. Events will happen roughly every two months, when we have compelling topics lined up.

If you’re building LLM-powered apps in Vancouver, you can subscribe to our event on Luma. There are still a few spots open for our first “beta” event on October 9th, and we’ll be hosting another during NeurIPS in December.

There’s something electric about getting smart people who are working in a rapidly-changing field in a room together. I recommend it.


Our Unevenly Distributed Future

September 30, 2024

How self-driving cars become mundane.

The future is weird. Last summer, while I was in San Francisco, a friend asked how I was getting back to my hotel. “An Uber, I guess,” I shrugged. His eyes lit up. “Have you tried the self-driving cars yet?” A couple taps on his phone and a few minutes...

3 min read →


Starting Forestwalk

August 16, 2024

A wild startup appears.

Last month, I started full-time on a new startup. It’s early days, but we’re having a lot of fun. A startup, fundamentally, is a search for a repeatable, scalable business model. You rapidly try things, run experiments, learn, and iterate your theories about how to build a useful product that...

2 min read →


Pushing the Frontier

July 31, 2024

If – and when – GPT-5 might eat your lunch

Lately I’ve been working with a lot of teams and founders that are building products on top of LLMs. It’s a lot of fun! To be an AI product engineer today is to constantly ask new questions that impact how you build products. Questions like: “Is there a way we...

5 min read →


Feeding the Baby

June 29, 2024

On accidentally becoming a CEO.

A lot of startups with first-time founders have unclear roles. When I started my first business, Steamclock’s co-founder Nigel was far more experienced, being ten years my senior. I’d assumed he would take a more CEO-like role, but other than that I’d put little thought into our positions. We were...

4 min read →


LLMs Aren’t Just “Trained On the Internet” Anymore

May 31, 2024

A path to continued model improvement.

I often see a misconception when people try to reason about the capability of LLMs, and in particular how much future improvement to expect. It’s frequently said that that LLMs are “trained on the internet,” and so they’ll always be bad at producing content that is rare on the web....

5 min read →


Link: Building Slack

May 6, 2024

Two of Slack’s original employees, Johnny Rodgers and Ali Rayl, have started writing a delightful newsletter/blog called Building Slack. There are some great passages already.

The clarity of the initial pitch from Stewart:

“You’ll know it’s working when you don’t have to use email at work any more.”

The very high bar for great customer support:

We turned around fixes and adjustments as quickly as we learned about them. We responded to each message personally — often directly from Stewart. This pattern and the fundamental respect that it demonstrated for our customers would become essential to Slack’s early success and eventual longevity.

The impact of Stewart’s famous “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” memo:

He encouraged us to take personal responsibility not just for the tasks we were assigned, but for our shared mission in the biggest sense. This was operationalized in the early days. We would say “Somebody doesn’t work here.” As in, “Somebody should fix the typing lag in the search input” or “Somebody should follow up with the teams that churned last week.” Nope. It’s our shared responsibility, and you need to do it yourself or chase things down to ensure it’s going to get done.

It’s great. Start at the beginning.


Sell First, or Build First?

April 30, 2024

An age-old startup question.

Recently I’ve been talking to potential customers about a product space I’ve been exploring. One thing I’ve wondered as I do this is, “At what point should we ask our first customers to pay?” Writing on how to develop a SaaS product tends to advocate one of two approaches: “Sell,...

7 min read →


Link: Steamclock’s Next Chapter

April 29, 2024

I wrote today about Nick Wilkinson taking the helm at Steamclock over on the company blog:

This year, it’s time for Nick to take the largest leadership role of all, as our Managing Director. With the support of our CTO Nigel, as well as the excellent Jenn Cooper and myself continuing on the Board, Nick’s going to keep doing what he’s been doing for some time: driving Steamclock forward, growing the culture we’ve built, and also putting his own spin on it.

This summer, I’ll share more about what I’m building next. For today, I’m feeling grateful for the team we’ve built at Steamclock, and the fact they’re still growing and iterating. ⭐


The Dangers of Curiosity

March 31, 2024

On the risk, and power, of wondering.

Legends have long warned about the dangers of curiosity. Curiosity led to a bargain with the devil for Faust. Pandora cursed all humanity when she opened a jar full of evils. And we all know what curiosity did to the cat. In unsafe environments, curiosity really can be dangerous. An...

3 min read →


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