iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 28/09/2026

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

Flow chart of noticing a polish issue, asking an agent if it violates the documented guidelines, then either using that to spin a fix OR amend the guidelines.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 19/09/2026

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.

A post showing an engineer who has made fast model-driven lints out of their AGENTS.md using Jev.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 15/09/2026

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 08/09/2026

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.

An analysis quotes all three team members' efforts to get their agents to stop making the same mistake, and notes that individuals' agents were stashing divergent unshared memories to try and stop

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 04/09/2026

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

A screenshot of macOS 27 Settings. A search for "icloud" has turned up no results, because of course

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 14/08/2026

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

ChatGPT offers that the shortcut for changing the project is Option Shift Command O.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 12/07/2026

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

A screenshot of a Google Maps search for beer in the city, which has somehow returned "Google Maps can't find beer"

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/07/2026

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

Starbucks poster featuring their new “butterfly” refreshers

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 30/06/2026

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 28/06/2026

“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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 22/06/2026

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 07/05/2026

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.)

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 05/05/2026

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

Google explains that Kelsey Grammer is best known for playing Beast from X-Men

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 05/05/2026

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

macOS claims I have run out of application memory, even though 1Password is only using 323MB, Calendar is using 182MB, and Cursor is only using 88,100 MB.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 20/04/2026

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.

Image of somebody saying, "Okay let's just close the linear issue about the squirrel thing." and a confirmation that Cedarloop has closed the issue about "Add squirrel animation to homepage".

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 17/04/2026

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. ⭐️

Claude Design has generated a tweaks control panel for a rich UI that's being designed.

Claude Design's "Knobs" panel, which wires in controls for things like font size, weight, etc but fascinatingly also has a generative "Add a control for..." field.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 31/03/2026

Aw, I miss you too 💕

A dishwasher app claims that it… misses me?

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/03/2026

When Apple Intelligence first rolled out in 2024, I had to turn off the Priority Notifications feature because of poor reasoning. But trying it now, after all the advancements we’ve seen since then, you can see they’ve really dialed in what is urgent

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 29/01/2026

As systems include more layers of AI, it gets difficult to intuit why they behave as they do. For example, why is one of the Google results for “allen pike" the Wikipedia page for director Spike Jonze? Zero people searching for Allen Pike are looking for info on Spike Jonze!

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 13/01/2026

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 delete confirmation dialog that forces you to type your OWN full name to confirm deletion.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 06/11/2025

Finally tried gpt-5-mini on some tasks, hoping at "minimal" reasoning it would be faster than claude-haiku-4.5 or gpt-4.1-mini. Nope. Two other teams said 5-mini is so slow and unreliable that they can't use it either. Apparently "4 lightning bolts" means "takes 5-10s to process 200 tokens" 💫

OpenAI rates gpt-5-mini 4 lightning bolts in speed

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 23/10/2025

While the AWS team has resolved the severe us-east-1 outages, reading this post-mortem makes one thing clear: they are still suffering from a critical shortage of paragraph breaks

The most important part of this post-mortem is crammed into a dense paragraph as long as a giraffe's vocal cord

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 08/08/2025

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.

ChatGPT trait hint: "You don't need to compliment me. Adopt the tone of critical thinking, and be willing to revisit and question assumptions. Push me or challenge me to do better. When something might not be true, equivocate - for example, use phrases like “might be” or “is probably”, or mention relevant tradeoffs. In voice mode, speak quickly."

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 25/06/2025

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. 🍻

A notification that says, for issue "Deploy prod server", that jenn changed the issue status to Done.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 22/05/2025

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

A github issue titled "Incompatible with React 19 due to use of __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED". It is not clear fom the issue if the offender was fired

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 21/05/2025

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

A screenshot of ChatGPT with 7 different LLMs shoved in a dropdown, each with complex tradeoffs summarized in a handful of words.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 05/05/2025

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...

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 25/03/2025

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 13/02/2025

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”

An AI slop poster with a demented shopping cart and a callout about “BEEFY DAIRY”

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 28/01/2025

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

ChatGPT says "Sure, let’s break it down step by step. First, lie on your back on the floor. Then, bend your knees" then is interrupted by an error: "Content flagged."

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 16/01/2025

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

A panel that claims Forestwalk has grown 2^31 percentage points over the last year

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 02/01/2025

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 20/12/2024

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 11/12/2024

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.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 09/12/2024

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.) simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-…

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 28/11/2024

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.

A console error showing a failure to find a route for a long chaotic string, which seems to be the contents of some CSS turned into a URL for some godforsaken reason

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 23/11/2024

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)

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 18/11/2024

I asked Cursor this of an active file as a joke, and the answer was... great

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 18/11/2024

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

Xcode generative autocomplete insults RealityKit's documentation quality.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 15/11/2024

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

A cross-eyed man looking into the once with a deformed hand

A man with a creepy moustache and a 7 fingered hand

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 13/11/2024

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

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 08/11/2024

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.”

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 22/10/2024

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)."

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 25/05/2023

Every news app should have Artifact’s “Mark as Clickbait” feature.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 23/05/2023

“This church you’re starting, how holy is it going to be?” “Nothing too unusual, I was just thinking it would be a

A church behind its sign, titled “Standard Holiness Church”

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 02/05/2023

My popular tweets were mostly sarcastic commentary on the tech news du jour, but I did make this timeless shitpost in 2015

Cats seem unpredictable until you realize their primary goal in life is to be on top of warm things.

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