# Nick Haroldsen | The Need For Speed By: Justin Abrams Published: 2026-09-25 Two designers who became engineers, comparing notes on what engineering even is now. In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Nick Haroldsen, founder of Nth Powered and a twenty year veteran of UI design and development. They met arguing about AI on LinkedIn. Both started in design. Both moved to code because they hated being removed from the building of the thing. Both now spend their days getting agents to produce output their teams can actually trust. We get into: - Why the bottleneck was never intelligence and is now trust - Killing line by line code review, and what replaces it - Gherkin tests, plain English, and reviewing the plan instead of the diff - Why spec driven development spirals when one decision pivots - Skills that are proprietary to your codebase and will never be in a model - Catching a code smell by looking at a button, not the source - Why more sub agents kept producing the same result slower - The sorcerer apprentice setup, and where orchestration stops paying - Cheap model plus expensive reviewer, and how the savings disappear - A memory layer for the factory, so knowledge stops walking out with the engineer Connect with Nick: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/graphnick/ Nth Powered: https://www.nthpowered.com ──────────────────────────────── LISTEN ON ALL PLATFORMS Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1V4SjmlnG2sntDnck8UrGW Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/strictly-from-nowhere-a-podcast-experiment-by-cause/id1804380172 iHeart Radio https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-strictly-from-nowhere-a-po-315649122/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWAstEyCK6YsKVTTRsQr37w SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon http://patreon.com/StrictlyFromNowhere CONNECT WITH US LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/strictly-from-nowhere Website https://strictlyfromnowhere.com ──────────────────────────────── FOLLOW JUSTIN ABRAMS | @cuzzinjustin LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cuzzinjustin/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cuzzinjustin/ X https://x.com/cuzzinjustin TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@cuzzinjustin Facebook https://www.facebook.com/cuzzinjustin24 Website https://www.cuzzinjustin.com ──────────────────────────────── FOLLOW MIKE RISPOLI | @mike_rispoli_cto LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rispoli-cto/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mike_rispoli_cto/ X https://x.com/michael_rispoli TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@mike_rispoli Website https://michaelrispoli.com/ ──────────────────────────────── CAUSE OF A KIND | @causeofakind Website https://www.causeofakind.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/cause-of-a-kind Instagram https://www.instagram.com/causeofakind/ X https://x.com/causeofakind TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@causeofakind Newsletter Signup http://eepurl.com/gcc-yj Newsletter Archive https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=847ea1526d6523a41ef1eb5a5&id=48d53e9627 ──────────────────────────────── OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS CodeDojo https://github.com/Cause-of-a-Kind/code-dojo-core OCR Ruby GEM https://activestorage-ocr-demo.fly.dev/ ──────────────────────────────── COMMUNITY INITIATIVES Long Island Technologists https://www.longislandtechnologists.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/long-island-technologists-networking https://www.instagram.com/longislandtechnologists/ ──────────────────────────────── We Build Products, Because We Want Them To Exist https://coakstudio.com ──────────────────────────────── Brought to you by Cause of a Kind A boutique software development and startup studio from Long Island, New York Stand up. Show up. Build. Canonical URL: https://www.causeofakind.com/strictly-from-nowhere/nick-haroldsen-on-the-need-for-speed