Hi, I’m Allen Pike. I’m currently building Cedarloop, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
July 10, 2026
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.
June 30, 2026
On too much of a good thing.
Word on the street is that the cost of building software is going to zero. Zero? Sounds like a good deal! Over the last year, my co-founder and I have iteratively automated our coding loops. Each time better tools revealed a bottleneck, we’d address it. Agents would sometimes break things...
8 min read →
June 29, 2026
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.
June 9, 2026
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.
June 8, 2026
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.
May 31, 2026
Flashes of brilliance, and the tyranny of latency.
Recently, Andrej Karpathy argued that the ideal interaction pattern for AI models is voice in, visuals out: Audio is the human-preferred input to AIs, but vision is the preferred output from them. Around a ~third of our brains are a massively parallel processor dedicated to vision; it is the 10-lane...
7 min read →
April 30, 2026
On getting uncomfortable.
Years ago, back when I was leading a mobile dev team, my friend had an idea for a business. You see, back then the most frustrating thing about mobile dev was the final step: getting your app on actual phones. Builds, provisioning, and code signing made for a harrowing trial,...
3 min read →
March 31, 2026
Finding signal in the firehose.
Small companies are, by default, very transparent. When there are 4 people working in a room, you have a direct line of sight on what everybody else is doing, and why. Your docs, Slack channels, and repositories are open to everybody. When the CEO has an epiphany that changes everything,...
6 min read →
February 28, 2026
On trading comfort for speed.
Inside us are two wolves. One wolf wants to craft, polish and refine – make things of exceptional quality. The other wolf wants to move fast and get feedback now. The two wolves don’t always get along. For years, I’ve balanced this by working toward exceptional products but constantly collecting...
5 min read →
February 13, 2026
Maggie was already perhaps the best writer on the intersection of engineering and design, but now that she’s joined Github Next, she’s also extremely keyed in to where tools for coding are going. Her piece on Gas Town and orchestrating coding agents is sharp and worth reading in full.
As the pace of software development speeds up, we’ll feel the pressure intensify in other parts of the pipeline: thoughtful design, critical thinking, user research, planning and coordination within teams, deciding what to build, and whether it’s been built well.
The most valuable tools in this new world won’t be the ones that generate the most code fastest. They’ll be the ones that help us think more clearly, plan more carefully, and keep the quality bar high while everything accelerates around us.
We’ve known for a couple years now that faster coding will mean non-coding work will increasingly be a bottleneck, and now it’s happening. Deciding what to build – and whether it’s been built well – was already one of the most important tasks on a software team.
But in the face of tools that can add anything to your product, desirable or not, this judgement becomes the core of the work.
January 31, 2026
Or, getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code.
You always know it’s a good bug when your first reaction is, “How could this even happen?” The other day, I was refining the dashboard of a web app we’re working on – as you do – and I noticed it was taking forever to load. Like, it had been...
7 min read →
December 31, 2025
On browsers, local classifiers, and Roger Rabbit.
One of the interesting questions when designing AI-enabled software is, “What does search input mean?” This was once a simple question: if a user entered “squish” in a search box, it would of course return things that contained “squish”. Over time though, computers have improved to the point where a...
5 min read →