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 · 17/09/2026

Yes I saw the email – I use Bear for my blog post first drafts, so curious to check it out!

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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 · 13/09/2026

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

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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 · 01/09/2026

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...

allenpike.com

The Brains of the Operation

Simple steps toward a company brain.

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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 · 08/08/2026

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...

unsung.aresluna.org

The first notch is magical – Unsung

A blog about software craft and quality

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 05/08/2026

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

itshipped.fm

It Shipped That Way – Amplifying Human Intent, with Impeccable Creator Paul Bakaus

Impeccable creator Paul Bakaus shares lessons learned turning a coding harness into a design harness, building ambitious agent skills, getting compelling design from AI, keeping up with slop, and…

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/08/2026

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

allenpike.com

Weighing the Business Case for Quality

On the economics of doing great work.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 14/07/2026

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-...

forestwalk.ai

Coding Agents Gotta Attach Demo Videos

The least a coding agent can do is show its work.

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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 · 11/07/2026

Agreed that as users we shouldn’t cut them slack for janky products. My point is that their way to a not-janky product, at their scale and speed, is necessarily cross platform

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 10/07/2026

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

allenpike.com

The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform - Allen Pike

July 10, 2026 • 1 min read

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 02/07/2026

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.

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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 · 01/07/2026

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

allenpike.com

How To (Not) Spend $10k/wk on Coding Agents

On too much of a good thing.

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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 · 29/06/2026

It’s cool that they made a thumbnail for the video, but a shame that they’ve blocked the majestic SVG penguin with my big head

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 29/06/2026

It's fun to talk to an agent and have it respond with rich visuals – but building low-latency experiences like this is a pain in the ass. In my AI Engineering World's Fair talk, I share some of the joy and suffering from our work on this problem. m.youtube.com/watch?v=65X0...

m.youtube.com

Voice In, Visuals Out: The Agony and the Ecstasy - Allen Pike, Forestwalk Labs

The latest AI models have made it possible to go past text-based chats, and build what Andrej Karpathy argues is the pinnacle of AI UX: voice-in, visuals-out. In this talk, Forestwalk Labs…

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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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Reposted by Allen Pike

Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 17/06/2026

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...

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 09/06/2026

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...

forestwalk.ai

Surprise! Pay $1000

What's the right behaviour when "try for free" ends?

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 08/06/2026

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...

forestwalk.ai

Test Coverage Won't Save You

On protecting agent-written codebases from incoherence.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/06/2026

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

allenpike.com

Building for Voice In, Visuals Out

Flashes of brilliance, and the tyranny of latency.

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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 · 06/05/2026

Ah that would have been interesting, I should have done! I was using their new Cursor 3 agents window. I don’t *think* it was in worktree mode, but Cursor does kind of push them in the new workflow, so it’s possible I was by accident.

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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 played with Chrome's vertical tabs a little. I'd miss Arc's "Tidy tabs" button (group tabs by topic with one-click to close each group), showing my open PRs at the top, and easy shortcut to hide the tabs (for screen recordings, etc). Also Arc kinda feels nicer?

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

Yeah, I thought 7GB was a lot for one app to use, but then Cursor was like "hold my beer"

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

I tried to go Arcless for a few months but kept missing it. I thought it was abandonware but apparently the CEO of Atlassian still uses it so..?

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

Yeah this week’s version has been a mess, orphaning processes, glitching out, etc. Something went real wrong over there

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

Actually I think you’re right – I pasted the entire Library of Congress archive in there this morning

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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 · 01/05/2026

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

allenpike.com

We Can Do Hard Things

On getting uncomfortable.

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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 · 10/04/2026

I would have said I was just gesturing, but the evidence looks compelling

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/04/2026

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...

allenpike.com

The Rise of Transparency

Finding signal in the firehose.

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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 · 27/03/2026

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

luma.com

Infer: Tools, Voice, and Coding · Luma

Our next Infer AI event will feature developers from three very cool growth-stage companies: WealthSimple, Cresta, and Gumloop. Each will share some lessons…

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 05/03/2026

Right?! “Here is ChatGPT’s imagination of what our food might look like” is a red flag. Nobody was using stock photos on their menus before? 🤔 Or were they

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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 · 01/03/2026

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

allenpike.com

Launch Now

On trading comfort for speed.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 26/02/2026

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-...

allenpike.com

How Two Spies Closes Cities

A little story about iterative experimentation.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 12/02/2026

Thanks, Dave! I just added an addendum with info a couple of folks from Google have sent in about the bug.

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Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 01/02/2026

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

allenpike.com

A Broken Heart

Or, getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code.

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