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