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.

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.

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →