Random Weekly — Born West

#random has been quiet since April 30. This edition covers the last active week — a heavy one, as it turns out.

Top Story

Stripe dropped 288 things and we barely had time to breathe

Stripe's annual Sessions conference landed on April 29 with 288 product launches — its biggest ever — and the headline is agentic commerce. Stripe now lets AI agents pay via Link's agent wallet, announced partnerships with Meta and Google to sell directly inside AI Mode and the Gemini app, and previewed Checkout Studio for building conversion-optimized flows in minutes. For anyone building agent-first products, Stripe just became the default payments layer.

"The thing we were talking about today — they can spend all my money now."

— Achal

stripe.com — Sessions 2026 recap

Big Moves

The Cook era ends. John Ternus is next.

On April 20, Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO after nearly 15 years — adding $3.65 trillion in market value to the company since Steve Jobs handed him the keys in 2011. John Ternus, the SVP of Hardware Engineering who greenlit Apple Silicon and oversaw the M-series chips, takes the chair on September 1. The September product event — iPhone 18, iPhone Fold, a new Siri — will be his first public moment as CEO.

npr.org — Tim Cook steps down

AI Models

OpenAI's image model can now think

ChatGPT Images 2.0 launched April 21 with native reasoning built in — the first image model with "thinking" capabilities in its architecture. It generates print-ready layouts, accurate charts, multilingual menus, and lets you direct camera angle and perspective with plain language. Within 12 hours of release it claimed the top spot on Image Arena by the largest margin ever recorded. The reasoning mode is paywalled for now.

openai.com — ChatGPT Images 2.0

Claude Cowork went GA around the same time

Anthropic moved Cowork from research preview to general availability in late April, with Maury flagging it on the 10th: "The Claude Cowork roadmap is one month — at most." He was right. Anthropic reported that Cowork's early adoption outpaced Claude Code's comparable launch window, which makes sense given the much wider non-technical audience it's targeting.

Claude Cowork GA announcement

How We Work

Vibe coding vs. agentic engineering

Achal put a clean line on something the industry keeps blurring. Vibe coding is for prototypes — fast, messy, disposable. Agentic engineering is reviewed, production-ready code that actually works and is safe to ship. The distinction matters more as AI-assisted development becomes the norm and the quality bar for "it works" rises.

GitHub Stacked PRs for AI-assisted big features

Achal flagged GitHub's Stacked PRs feature as "very interesting especially for big features or working with AI models to build large features in a smaller, chunked-out manner." Stacked PRs let you break large features into sequential, reviewable layers — which maps well to how agent-driven development tends to work anyway.

github.github.com — Stacked PRs

Design & Build

Shopify DotDev is officially an AI-native platform play

Kunal shared the DotDev site back in April when tickets went live. The conference happened July 21–22 in Toronto, and it landed as Shopify's most opinionated statement yet: the platform is moving from storefront host to AI-native commerce operating system. Claude Code and Cursor now get full Shopify platform docs via MCP. The Catalog API is generally available to search billions of products. B2B got ACH payments and a 2,048-variant ceiling removed. The theme: serve both human shoppers and AI agents equally.

dotdev.shopify.com

Quick Hits

Xenia walked through her Claude Code + Figma MCP workflow for automated design specs — Claude crawls frames and components directly, generates structured spec pages, and a custom Born West skill re-styles output to match brand guidelines. The output on two projects was strong.

damnlines.com — Achal's find: a live restaurant wait-time tool for parts of NYC. Early, but a clean example of useful local data made accessible.

Philadelphia courts banned all smart AI eyeglasses starting Monday April 28 — first court-level restriction on consumer AI wearables in the US. And so it begins.

Rishav shared 1Password's passkey unlock — a good reminder that authentication UX is shifting fast and clients building login flows should be planning for passkeys by default.

Marcin's JIRA post (with the crying reactions) won the week in terms of team energy. Some things never change.