UX Entropy: How products like Zoom can bloat from hero to hulk. allenpike.com/2025/ux-entr...

Building Something Big: On the pros and cons of the indie path. allenpike.com/2025/buildin...

Cursor's UI is nicer than using Claude Code in a terminal, but one helpful thing about Claude is that you can script hooks. For example, with an agent going on each screen, you can have Claude chime where it needs review or approval – panned left for the left screen, or right for the right. 🔊

If you're getting weird behaviour from ChatGPT 5, check "What traits should ChatGPT have?" under Customize ChatGPT. I had this prompt there to help 4o be more critical, but they trained GPT-5 to be more critical by default, so the prompt pushed it into overcaffeinated paranoia.

Getting Tied Up: On little things that get in the way. allenpike.com/2025/getting...

Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent: Some perks and pitfalls of building with large thinking models. allenpike.com/2025/coding-...

I almost deleted this notification without thinking, but stopped to read it in a different light. When you have a lot left to do, it's easy to miss the little moments that represent that you're making progress. So here's to that. 🍻

Supposedly Meta was withholding WhatsApp and Instagram for iPad to get some App Store policy change. They've just announced both, the week before WWDC, trumpeting Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil support – implying that they got what they wanted. I wonder if we'll be able to tell what they got? 🤔

Figma Slides is a Beautiful Disaster: The best and the worst of an interesting new tool. allenpike.com/2025/figma-s...

Libraries often have private, internal API surfaces that must not be depended on. It is important to name these dangerous APIs in an alarming way. This ensures that any consumers of your library will be embarrassed when they inevitably use them anyway

In two weeks OpenAI has added Instacart's CEO, the Windsurf staff, and Sir Jony Ive himself to their team. If they can continue this pace, OpenAI may eventually amass the talent necessary to overcome the ultimate product challenge: designing a reasonable model selection UI

Super VanJS is here. On May 15th, we celebrate JavaScript in style. Get ready for amazing talks from top speakers: - Allen Pike: JavaScript Frameworks SOTU – Fatigue Strikes Back - Shawn McKay: Untangling a large codebase - @jasnell.me : What Node.js Compatibility Really Means

Every developer has a story. What's yours? Whether you’re a seasoned speaker or stepping on stage for the first time, our CFP is open. Speakers get a conf ticket, travel & hotel covered, support, and a few fun surprises. Plus, you'll be speaking to one of the most welcoming audiences around.

The video from our last Infer meetup is now up. It features David Hariri and Kosta Djukic from Ada Support, sharing lessons learned serving 4 billion interactions (and counting) with AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSmQ...

I was invited to share what I've been learning about UX patterns for non-chat AI products at the Vancouver AI Meetup last week, and the video is already up ⭐️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRqB...

Post-Chat UI: Delightful and humane patterns for the next generation of apps. allenpike.com/2025/post-ch...

A Score for Snacks: The trouble with snacks, the Nutri-Score, and a calculator for it.

The Periodic Table of Elements, according to GPT-4o's new, smarter image generation

JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back: Why we still have so many JS frameworks, and why maybe – maybe – we have enough now?

Initial impressions of GPT-4.5 is that it's noticeably more “personable” – easier to prompt into behaving more idiosyncratically and less like a wikipedia page. I've put a little 4.5-powered "product research agent" in the corner of forestwalk.ai if you're curious how this can feel in practice.

Remaining RVSPs are now open for next Tue 4's Infer Vancouver event, featuring lessons learned scaling LLMs from the team at Ada, and detecting social engineering from Ian MacKinnon: lu.ma/brrgkhgv

Local chain Save-On-Foods has new in-store flyers promoting their Canadian ownership. Where else can you fill your cart with pumpkin-sized apples, giant jars of demented pasta sauce, lettuce bigger than your cart, and a bunch of mysterious crimson… mush? And don't forget their patented “BEEFY DAIRY”

Our next Infer Vancouver event is in 3 weeks, featuring Ada's @dhariri.com and Stingray's @imackinn.bsky.social – two founders working on the forefront of building with LLMs. lu.ma/brrgkhgv

The @swyx.io talk from the NeurIPS Infer Vancouver is now live! He shares an overview of the state of AI engineering, gives a demo of realtime AI APIs, and answers folks’ burning questions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx_0...

The Era of Tab Continuation: A delightful new UX pattern for productivity apps.

ChatGPT advanced voice mode is helpful for talking you through stretches! It can suggest different positions, explain the muscles involved, and give tips on technique. Just be aware that if have it describe lying down or getting on your knees, the response might be deemed too spicy

On a day to day basis, founders typically focus on what's immediately ahead – the daily process of moving the business forward. This can make it easy to lose sight of what you've achieved. For example, according to LinkedIn, we have achieved a YoY growth rate exceeding two billion percent

It's a new year, and you know what that means: time to confirm your website is still readable in Netscape® Navigator 4

An Unreasonable Amount of Time: A method for doing the impossible.

While we'll need to wait until Feb to see how much better OpenAI o3 will do on subjective tasks, it's interesting to see this huge jump on performance on the ARC-AGI benchmark (akin to an IQ test). It's a good sign when a benchmark's originator announces a new, harder benchmark along with your score

Useful point from @guo.bsky.social at Latent Space Live: don't underestimate unmet demand for better tools. Most people can't use, say, Photoshop, so the market for creative tools can seem capped. But 10x how many people can do creative work, and latent demand appears.

On the limits of phone-based LLMs, this is a fun passage from @simonwillison.net about running, for the first time, a GPT-4-class model locally on a Mac. (For context, the Apple Intelligence models use roughly 3GB.) https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-33-70b/

Remaining RSVPs are now open and going fast for next Tuesday's Infer Vancouver event, featuring @swyx.io, @natolambert.bsky.social, and @samjulien.com. 🏞️

Had a brief 2h30m chat with @gruber.foo about Apple Intelligence, the Pixelmator acquisition, the latest and greatest LLMs, Siri and ChatGPT, and duck butts.

Your regularly scheduled reminder that any result you get from AI will always be a guess. If you *can* calculate or compute the answer, you probably should; it will be faster, cheaper, and far more accurate. But some problems you *can't* really calculate or compute -- in which case, guess away.

It's Good for Apple, and Okay for You: On what iOS 18.2 is bringing, Apple Intelligence's tiered strategy, and cursed faces.

The modern web stack is amazing – in the way that a giraffe is. As it evolved from simplicity to majesty, some details became deranged, like how its vocal nerve goes all the way down the neck, under the heart, then back up again. But as a whole system, it works, and it's miraculous. Giraffes, man.

The day after Infer, on Wed Dec 11, @swyx.io is hosting a one-day mini-conf called Latent Space Live. Worthwhile for any folks building on LLMs who will be in Vancouver that week. lu.ma/LSLIVE?tk=rC...

The first wave of tickets for the NeurIPS edition of Infer Vancouver are gone, but there’ll be another wave of tickets released next Tue Dec 3. If you're eager to join then mark your calendars!

It's fascinating how with each iteration of advanced aerospace, math, and manufacturing, the design slowly converges to “make a peregrine falcon” (Bird not to scale)

Bluesky needs to add that Threads feature where you can post "hey algorithm, show me more posts about startups, design, llms, typescript, cereal, and that arcane show on netflix" and then it'll fill your feed with truncated contextless posts that are statistically proven to make you feel confused

The first wave of tickets are now up for the NeurIPS edition of Infer Vancouver. In just three weeks (Tue 10) we'll be featuring talks by @swyx.io and @natolambert.bsky.social lu.ma/g7wmzk04

Xcode's generative tooling for Swift might be anemic compared to what Cursor can do for Python or TypeScript, but at least it's entertaining

A friend said iOS Image Playgrounds are an upgrade over Memoji, which is true. I wanted to convey “🤔 hmm”, and that is indeed the feeling evoked

Apple Intelligence’s Image Playground “Illustration” style in iOS 18.2b is a wild journey

Every line of code you ship eventually needs maintenance. Assumptions break, the world evolves, users change. Recently, this would have been a useful hint: “Are you REALLY from Anguilla and not Austria?” Now it's a tiny warning flag: “This product might be under-maintained.”

Testing the Untestable: The four phases of automated evals for LLM-powered features. allenpike.com/2024/testing...

While it may never be achieved, by gathering the brightest minds of our generation, frontier AI labs hope to one day crack the monumental problem of naming new models "After extensive analysis of what we should call the model after 3.5, we have decided to go with 3.5 (new)."

Our Unevenly Distributed Future: On the joy of Waymos, and the weirdness of living in the present when you've seen what's coming. https://allenpike.com/2024/distribution-of-the-future

I recently started full-time on a new venture, working on tooling for product teams that are applying LLMs – initially around evals and testing. We don’t have much to share yet, but here’s a little intro on what we’re up to. 🌳 allenpike.com/2024/forestw...