Alan B Smith

@alanbsmith.bsky.social

👨‍💻 Principal Design System Engineer 🥃 Carb & cocktail fan account 🏔️ Boulder, CO 🅰️ Arsenal FC ⚽️ Il calcio é della gente

I used to let slightly wrong Slack answers go without correction and assume a human reading the thread will be able to parse it out as a simple mistake. But now I make explicit corrections because it’s likely a bot will strip that response out of context as an authoritative answer for someone else.

Anthropic should take a note from 1990 cell phone providers and start offering off-peak token rates: 100,000 anytime tokens, with free nights* and weekends. *nightly token rates begin at 9:00pm EST

As a design system leader, you have to continuously prove the value you provide. But you also need the support of leaders who truly believe in your autonomy and intrinsic value of your system.

I was joking with a Canadian friend tonight about how Americans are conditioned to believe we are always underdogs and will always win. We both tried to think of sports movies where the Americans don’t win, and there are exceedingly few. That probably explains a few things.

This is the best way to describe how I feel about AI and software development: I love a good puzzle. One day someone says "Hey! Use this AutoPuzzler™. It will sort all the pieces for you, and you'll finish the puzzle in seconds! It's great! You'll save so much time! You can puzzle so much more!"