co-founder @BornWestInc
Toronto, Ontario
Joined July 2007
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- Following394
- Followers691
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Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Day 25/
We are doubling all usage limits for all Pro 100/200/500 tiers and Business Premium, effective today.
We heard your kind feedback and won’t be reducing usage limits for Pro 200, so your Work and Codex usage will stay the same. We’re also going to continue offering extended limits for dots for now, and usage of your dot will still continue to be separate from your default usage.
And we'll of course also keep shipping better models and other efficiency improvements that increase your effective usage over time.
The new touch screen MacBooks dropped today, and even though I’m not looking forward to adding fingerprints to my display, this feels like a stronger case for iPhone Mirroring to allow for all iOS apps to just work on the Mac, even if the developer intended it or not. Interesting move @Apple
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Your team is already using AI. Can you see how?
By answering 16 short questions across product, operations, team, and data, you'll receive a tailored breakdown of your team's profile, maturity levels, and top priority risk.
Selecting "not sure" is completely fine—it highlights key visibility gaps, which often provide the most valuable takeaways.
Take the assessment here: bornwest.com/ai/?utm_source=…
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Even G2 just got a major AI upgrade.
Version 2.4.0 makes your Even G2 more intelligent, personalized, and useful:
• Knowledge Base (Beta)
• Even AI 2.0
• Conversate Pro Mode (Beta)
Here's the rundown: 🧵
Probably because customers tell us exactly what they want, and the team is a harder guessing and culture game. @bornwestinc
Okay, Dessa is insane. block.xyz/dessa
Grok @bot is probably the least AI sounding AI. More natural and nuanced than all the others. And with research mixed in, it’s been a heavy hitter.
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
@cretech New York 2026 👋
The Born West team is heading to CRETECH New York this week.
We build digital products and systems for partners who want to go from an ambitious idea to working software. We’re curious what problems the people running buildings and portfolios are trying to solve right now.
If you’re there, come say hi. See you in New York.
#CREtech #PropTech #CRE #CRETech2026 #BornWest
@raz0r @sazwqa
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
We turned Dither Labs into a Figma plugin. We took the code from our Lovable web app, gave it to Codex, and built the plugin remotely from a phone.
Now our team can select an image, apply a dither effect, and keep designing without leaving Figma.
Try it for free→ ditherlabs.bornwest.ai/
#BornWest #FigmaPlugin
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
How does an iOS developer at Born West use Codex?
Sarthak Pattanayak starts by giving it the symptoms, logs, screenshots, and expected behavior, then traces what’s happening before changing the code.
From there, he uses the same context to make the change, test it, and document what happened. Tasks that used to mean hours of searching and context switching often turn into one focused investigation and a small, verified change.
If you're building something and want a team that works this way, book a 20-minute product fit call at bornwest.com/#schedule-a-fre…
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Our CPO @raz0r gave an AI agent access to his inbox and calendar. Never told it to manage his schedule.
It moved a meeting on its own, correctly, when an email asked to reschedule. Access isn't authorization. We wrote about who decides what AI does on our behalf. Linked below
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with Astra, and I think I’ve figured out where it really shines.
It’s not really a brainstorming partner for me. But as a coding partner and someone actually implementing the work, it’s incredibly good.
It’s precise. Fast. It follows instructions really well. It generally stays within the constraints you give it and doesn’t wander off into endless loops trying to rethink everything.
Where I’ve struggled with it is more open-ended thinking.
If I ask it to explore a product idea, come up with different directions, or think about how something could be differentiated, it tends to stay pretty close to the obvious ideas. You don’t get a lot of those unexpected jumps that change how you’re thinking about the problem.
So I’ve started thinking about Astra less as a creative collaborator and more as a really strong implementation partner.
It might not be the thing that helps you figure out what to build.
But once you know what you want, it is very, very good at helping you actually build it.
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Where do you draw the line: pay for the right fit, or build it yourself because nothing out there actually fits how you work?
We talked through this on our latest roundtable. Read it here: bornwest.com/articles/cheape…
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
Physical AI gets pitched like a robotics problem: better sensors, faster actuators, smarter motion planning. All of this skips the part that is actually hard.
On a foot-scanning app we built, the model was never what slowed us down. Getting a phone camera to measure a physical foot accurately enough to trust the output for a real product decision was. That work doesn't show up in a pitch deck, and it's most of the project.
Any software that touches the physical world has to be honest about where the real world is messier than the demo. Calibration is the unglamorous part nobody pitches, and it's the part that decides whether the thing actually works.
Got something similar you're stuck on? Let's talk, or ask us about a 6-week sprint.
Learn more: bornwest.com/6-week-sprint
unlimited free-tier Luna starting tomorrow is the bigger deal here than the Sol upgrade
Achal Aggarwal retweeted
De-risking an AI product doesn't start with a bigger model, it starts with a smaller scope. We keep the first version of any AI feature narrow enough that a person can still catch every mistake it makes, then widen scope only as trust in the system actually earns it.
Guardrails and evals aren't a compliance step tacked onto the end. They're the same discipline as writing tests, and teams that skip them find out why in production instead of in a sprint review.