Allen Pike

Made some updates to 2026’s Vancouver Election Guide based on feedback and the latest polling. This is the last week to vote! allenpike.com/2026/2026-va...

Vancouver Election Guide, 2026 edition: 56 Council candidates, 9 parties, and 1 pragmatic attempt to help people make their vote count. allenpike.com/2026/2026-va...

Telling agents to fix mistakes they made isn’t satisfying. Having them help ensure future agents won’t make the same mistakes is much moreso

Scaling coding agents across teams requires strong guidelines (what does good code look like) and guardrails (rejecting bad code). Fast system-1 models like Jev are a big opportunity for faster, cheaper, and more plentiful guardrails.

If you want trains that can run every 75 seconds, all you need to do is automate! Otherwise you get merge conflicts, which are annoying for code, but worse for trains

YouTube's parental controls have, for now, deterred our children from getting up at 6am to watch brainrot on the TV. Feature request: A checkbox to block all content that samples "Industrial Samples & Impacts by Bluezone" aka the Vine Boom. Also screaming

Cool thing about letting agents see the prompts that created the work: they can help fix recurring mistakes (e.g. over-verbose UI copy) by checking how humans are reprimanding the bots. All three of us had been pushing back on this mistake, but hadn't yet improved our shared AGENTS file to fix it.

With macOS 27, we’ve refined the experience from top to bottom, while still making sure to keep classic experiences that users have come to expect from their Mac

The Brains of the Operation: Some simple steps toward creating a "company brain", and avoiding AI psychosis along the way. allenpike.com/2026/the-bra...

As you create more projects to manage your agents, you might find yourself quickly kicking off tasks in different projects. Thankfully ChatGPT née Codex has a keyboard shortcut for this frequently-used switcher – invoked using just two hands and, optionally, an eyeroll

The joy of a high-quality physical volume knob is the first notch, which must make a satisfying “thock” as you turn the device on. Thanks @aresluna.org for calling attention to what we can learn from the history as we strive to make great stuff unsung.aresluna.org/the-first-no...

On the latest It Shipped That Way, Impeccable creator Paul Bakaus shares lessons learned turning a coding harness into a design harness, building ambitious agent skills, fighting slop, and the death of design handoffs. www.itshipped.fm/episodes/36

Weighing the Business Case for Quality: On making a career out of doing things well. allenpike.com/2026/finding...

It's worth having coding agents attach demo videos to their PRs. (It's worth doing this as a human too, but we're kinda lazy) forestwalk.ai/blog/coding-...

With all due respect Google Maps, this is important. I'm going to have to ask you to try harder

The persistent gravity of cross platform code, 2026 edition: allenpike.com/2026/gravity...

Claude Fable is useful as a thinking tool for decisions. But I’m going to be honest here, because you deserve the load-bearing quiet part said out loud: it tries too hard to sound deep.

Now, I’m sure these new butterfly refreshers are delicious. I’m gonna try them like everybody else. But I’m not sure how I feel about Starbucks selling drinks made from insects

How To (Not) Spend $10k/wk on Coding Agents: Some lessons learned on our adventure toward software factories. allenpike.com/2026/how-to-...

I should have known that 20 minutes early was *not* early enough to line up for Paul Bakaus’ Impeccable skills workshop at AIE World’s Fair

“Stop! Who would refresh the Flight Status of Death must swipe me with fingers three, ere the other side he see.” The United app is less bad than most, but there’s a reason people love Flighty

I don't use Safari often, but after downloading an invoice from my cell carrier, this delightfully ancient fossil popped up out of nowhere. I couldn't quite bring myself to "Allow" and see what account Safari thought it'd found

Could I possibly nerd-snipe anyone into polishing something like this non-modal update flow into an official UI for Sparkle? weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/04/28/u...

When you try a SaaS for free, no credit card required, what do you expect to happen when you hit the usage limit? Maybe a warning email about being cut off, then suspension? Or perhaps, a warning email about being cut off... then a $1000 invoice? forestwalk.ai/blog/surpris...

Jenn Cooper, Forestwalk's CTO, writes about the limitations of traditional test coverage – it won't stop coding agents from devolving your codebase into an incoherent funhouse. forestwalk.ai/blog/test-co...

Building for Voice In, Visuals Out: flashes of brilliance, and the tyranny of latency. allenpike.com/2026/voice-i...

A clip from this morning's daily huddle. It's always fun when your own tool does something you didn't realize it could do! (I'll allow myself to feel proud for one day. I'll resume insisting it needs to be 10x better tomorrow.)

Google's AI Overview: always here to let you what people are best known for

I'm busy coding and don't have time for macOS' whining about RAM! Can somebody who's good with computers help me figure out which app is causing problems here

We Can Do Hard Things: On the considerable benefits of ambition. allenpike.com/2026/we-can-...

It's annoying when you're in a meeting, and somebody describes a bug really well. So you're like, "We should file an issue with what you just said" – but then have to actually type all that stuff out. Like an animal. So now Cedarloop will do it for you.

Today's Claude Design launch addresses the fact that chat loops suck for iterating, exploring, and polishing visual spaces by adding first-class support for knobs, dials, and other exploration controls. Goodbye "try making the cities bigger, maybe 30% bigger?", hello generative knobs and sliders. ⭐️

The Rise of Transparency: How tooling improvements will pull company cultures to be more open, and make better use of the firehose. allenpike.com/2026/the-ris...

RVSPs are now open for the next Infer Vancouver meetup. We have engineers coming from WealthSimple, Cresta, and Gumloop to share things they've learned building with LLMs. Thursday, Apr 9 – spots tend to fill up fast. luma.com/4i1dyhyf

Launch Now: On putting things in front of people, early and often. allenpike.com/2026/launch-...

I claimed in 2022 that there wasn't a mathematically pure way to solve a particular graph problem, but have now added an addendum: I'm happy to report that a ML researcher at Tiktok has proven me wrong! 🧮 allenpike.com/2022/how-to-...

A Broken Heart: Getting a 100x speedup by changing one dumb line of code allenpike.com/2026/a-broke...

Despite the challenges, it's exciting to imagine that 2026 could be the year where AI becomes able to complete multi-day tasks, perform useful household robotics work, or even produce working CSS layouts where only part of the screen scrolls

It's a common pattern to make users type "DELETE", or even the name of what they're deleting, for irreversible delete actions. This forces them to think before potentially deleting something critical. Intercom takes this to a new level, forcing you to consider: "Should I be the one deleting this?"

A Box of Many Inputs: On browser address bars, local AI, and Roger Rabbit. allenpike.com/2025/a-box-o...