Pieces is the first Long-Term Memory AI for developers, capturing and preserving up to nine months of context across your entire workflow. Pieces quickly evolved from a single desktop application into a comprehensive ecosystem spanning IDE plugins, browser extensions, and collaboration tools. As they grew, they needed authentication that could scale effortlessly across every user touchpoint. Here’s how Descope helped Pieces unify identity while freeing their team to focus on what matters most: revolutionizing developer productivity.
About Pieces
Pieces is an AI-powered productivity platform that captures, enriches, and resurfaces information across the entire development workflow. The platform uses finely tuned language models to understand context from diverse sources, whether that’s snippets from VS Code, a Slack thread, or docs in Chrome. Pieces provides intelligent assistance where devs need it most without disrupting or slowing down their unique processes.
Founded by developers who understand the frustration of context switching and siloed information, Pieces creates a unified knowledgebase that travels with developers across all their tools.
The need for dev-friendly authentication
As Pieces grew from one desktop application into a full-fledged developer ecosystem, they recognized the mounting need for developer-focused authentication at scale. Their platform had evolved to include:
Desktop app: Built with Flutter, serving as the core hub for the Pieces experience
Browser extension: Bringing Pieces functionality directly into Chrome
IDE plugins: Native integrations for VS Code and Cursor that required seamless authentication
Future B2B offerings: Growing towards team collaboration meant filling their need for enterprise SSO
Their existing implementation from a legacy CIAM vendor had become a real pain. They faced a trifecta of challenges:
In-house developer time drain: Implementing new authentication features like SSO for their planned move upmarket would take extensive custom engineering, which would be better spent working on their core product
Vendor’s poor documentation and support: Their existing vendor had a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to identity that made it difficult for Pieces to implement the specific flows their budding ecosystem needed
Rising costs from existing provider: As the Pieces userbase grew, the existing vendor’s pricing model became increasingly prohibitive with rising fees and costly add-ons
A major issue for Pieces was the direction their old auth provider had taken at the strategic level. Instead of the provider investing in customer-facing auth, most development resources went toward a product focused on legacy enterprise IAM—something that Pieces wasn’t benefitting from.
Pieces Brian Powell, VP of Engineering at Pieces, said:
"We needed a better provider who would actually pay attention to the platform and not just muscle people around. With the flexibility of the social auth, passkeys, everything Descope has—it was an easy drop-in for our authentication flow. ”
The Descope experience
Pieces discovered that Descope could provide the unified authentication layer they needed while dramatically reducing implementation complexity and overhead. The proof of concept took just a few days, with the team at Pieces able to implement their entire solution independently.
Pieces praised several key features that allowed their developers to take a direct approach without wasting precious engineering resources:
Self-service SSO: Descope’s guided SSO configuration allows enterprise customers to onboard themselves without requiring hands-on support from Pieces
Unified auth across apps: One auth system that could seamlessly handle their desktop app, browser extension, and IDE plugins using dev-focused options like GitHub login
Dev-friendly docs: Clear, specific guidance that addressed their exact use cases rather than generic auth concepts
Enterprise-ready authorization: Easy-to-implement RBAC with a clear path to fine-grained authorization (FGA) for their planned team features
The migration from Pieces’ previous CIAM vendor proved satisfyingly smooth. After overcoming some user export hurdles from the previous CIAM vendor, the Pieces team created a migration script leveraging Descope’s accessible documentation, successfully moving their user base to the new solution with zero downtime.
Brian Powell, VP of Engineering, said:
"We stood up the example code Descope provided, and everything hooked right in. Once we made the decision to cut over, it was pretty much seamless.”
From legacy limitations toward a passwordless future
After fully transitioning from their legacy provider, Pieces saw immediate benefits across their product ecosystem. Users were able to authenticate once and access Pieces functionality wherever they were working: in their IDE, browser, or desktop app. The passwordless authentication options (email OTP and social login with Google/GitHub) aligned perfectly with the developer audience’s security expectations.
However, the real transformation came in how Descope freed up the Pieces team to accelerate their own product roadmap:
Implementation took just one month with a single developer managing the Descope integration
The newfound auth flexibility (ability to easily add new social login providers, roll out new methods like passkeys) gave Pieces a better platform to launch monetization
With authentication running smoothly, Pieces launched their first paid tier
Brian Powell, VP of Engineering, said:
"It’s going really well. We’re seeing up to 500 new users each day inside the product, and Descope has scaled up perfectly for us.”
For Pieces, Descope turned auth from a bottleneck into an onboarding engine. Descope authentication now provides a stable foundation to begin deploying B2B features—instead of wasting limited dev cycles on building infrastructure. As Pieces continues to grow and transform the landscape of dev productivity with AI, they know Descope will seamlessly scale alongside their ambitions.
Descope is a flexible, drag & drop CIAM platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, identity orchestration, and fraud prevention.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
