Born West · #random

Random Weekly

May 31, 2026  ·  Most recent activity from #random

#random has been quiet since April 15 — no new posts in the last 6+ weeks. This edition covers the most recent batch of channel activity.

Top Story

Shopify just made every merchant's products buyable through a chat window

Millions of Shopify merchants in the US can now sell directly through ChatGPT conversations. Customers browse and buy without ever touching a traditional storefront. Achal flagged the announcement in early April — and it's hard to overstate what it means: the primary commerce interface is shifting from a webpage you design to a conversation you can't fully control. For a design-and-build agency, this is the table tilting. Product discovery, presentation, and trust-building now have to work in contexts where your UI doesn't exist. Shopify's been planning this — and now it's live.

Dev Workflow

GitHub ships Stacked PRs — big features in small, reviewable chunks

GitHub's native gh-stack extension (private beta, waitlist required) lets you break large changes into a chain of linked PRs that cascade rebases automatically. Research on 1.5M PRs found that 200–400 line PRs have 40% fewer defects and get approved 3× faster. Achal specifically called this out as interesting "for working with AI models to build large features but in a smaller chunked out manner" — which is exactly the pattern agentic engineering needs.

Vercel signals IPO readiness — AI agents are fueling the revenue surge

rauchg dropped a thread in mid-April on Vercel's trajectory: AI agent traffic is now a meaningful revenue driver, and the company is flagging IPO readiness. The platform bet on edge + AI-native deployment is paying off. Worth watching as a signal for where the web infrastructure market is heading.

AI Tools Drop

Adobe Acrobat Spaces takes on NotebookLM — and it's free

Kunal flagged Adobe's new Student Spaces: upload PDFs, docs, notes, and URLs, and get flashcards, mind maps, quizzes, and AI-generated podcasts back. Built with 500 students from Harvard, Berkeley, Brown. Adobe's move into learning-mode AI is notable — it's the same "throw documents at it, get structured knowledge back" pattern that's showing up everywhere. The design quality bar here matters for whoever builds these tools next.

OpenAI raised $122B and shipped GPT-5.5

The funding round and GPT-5.5 release landed in mid-April — faster, better at code and research, and now deeply integrated into Shopify's commerce layer (see above). OpenAI is also generating $2B/month in revenue and is on an IPO track. The model race is still compressing timelines on everything.

Build Philosophy

Vibe coding is for prototypes. Agentic engineering is for production.

Achal drew a clean line in early April that's worth keeping sharp as a team:

"Vibe coding = Prototypes / not for production. Agentic Engineering = reviewed production ready code which works and is safe."

— Achal, #random, April 2

The distinction matters more as clients start asking for AI-assisted builds. The output of vibe coding can look done while being fragile. The framing of "agentic engineering" — with review, safety, and production intent built in — is the posture Born West should be selling.

Claude Cowork roadmap: "one month at most"

Maury flagged an interview with Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg where the Cowork roadmap came up — with a "one month at most" signal on what's next. Given that Born West is already building inside Cowork and shipping skills, this is close to home. Whatever's shipping is likely to expand what's possible with scheduled tasks, artifacts, and agent workflows.

Around the Team

Kunal showed his AI challenge build

Kunal shared what he'd been building for the AI challenge — screenshots and a screen recording, 4 fire reactions and a star-struck. No public link yet, but clearly something the team was excited about. If you haven't seen it, ask him directly.

Xenia's Claude × Figma spec workflow is already saving time

Back in March, Xenia shared that she connected Claude Code to Figma via the open-source Figma Console MCP to auto-generate structured dev handoff docs — and built a custom Born West branded skill on top of it. She's tested it on two projects with strong output quality. If you're doing design-to-dev handoffs and haven't tried this flow yet, it's worth a look.

She attached a sample PDF and DOCX in the original Slack thread.

A train derailed 10 minutes from Achal's home. Everyone's fine.

Achal posted a video on March 30 — train came off the rails nearby, no injuries. Eight cold sweat reactions from the team. Glad it was just a close call.