Adam Argyle Web developer, designer and educator with more than 15 years in front-end architecture, design systems and teaching.

“Shopify did it again this past seven days: took a humongous piece of corporate paid enterprise software and said, not using you anymore, we built it ourselves.”

Whiskey Web and Whatnot · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

Talking about Slack versus newer agent-chat tools, Adam Argyle says his employer had just replaced another big paid enterprise product with something built in-house. It fits the idea that cheap AI coding is eroding enterprise SaaS.

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Transcript

Whiskey Web and Whatnot Around 54:09 into the episode

Adam Argyle

No.

Robbie Wagner

But they have to because everyone is like, I won't work here. Like, we got to have Slack. It's crazy.

Adam Argyle

Oh, man. I like them and hate them both the same. I don't have an affinity to one over the other. Yeah, seriously. But Shopify did do it. And I can't say exactly what, but Shopify did it again this past seven days, took a humongous piece of corporate paid enterprise software and said, not using you anymore. We built it ourselves. And that would be about the fourth time I've seen him do that in the past year.

Robbie Wagner

Oh, yeah. That's wild. This reminds me. Okay. So we've talked about this, I think, where it was like we were using GitHub Copilot, right? And then they were like, it's Wednesday at 2 p.m. Turned off. And you're like, wait, everyone's in the middle of their workday. What do you mean? Just turned…

Adam Argyle

Wait, I want to, I want to premise something. My Pi usage of Claude and Astra. So my Pi usage of Opus and Astra is poorer and more expensive than if you just use the Codex CLI. I haven't used Open Code as much, but I'm of the current. Opinion that the harnesses built for the models are superior to…

Robbie Wagner

It's like how Apple builds hardware and software. It's like that's how they work well. They know the strengths

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“I'm of the current opinion that the harnesses built for the models are superior to the agnostic harnesses that allow multiple models. I went back to Pi and I doubled my cost and did not increase my productivity at all. However, using Codex CLI, specifically with Astra, is superior to Pi using Astra.” — Adam Argyle, Whiskey Web and Whatnot

“Before slop, there was spaghetti code. We're all out here saying 'your code is spaghetti, my code is lean.' I'm pretty sure your code is spaghetti too. You just felt really good about it the night you wrote it. Give it a month. Look back at what you wrote later, and you almost always think, what was I thinking?” — Adam Argyle, Whiskey Web and Whatnot