Hi, I’m Allen Pike. I’m currently building Cedarloop, hosting It Shipped That Way, and writing monthly about what I’m learning.
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.
Link: Maggie Appleton on Gas Town and Coding Agent Orchestration
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.
A Broken Heart
Or, getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code.