Tessera

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

Starbucks poster featuring their new “butterfly” refreshers

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

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

On too much of a good thing.

allenpike.com

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

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...

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…

m.youtube.com

“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

Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 2mo ago

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...

Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 2mo ago

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...

Surprise! Pay $1000

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

forestwalk.ai

Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 2mo ago

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...

Test Coverage Won't Save You

On protecting agent-written codebases from incoherence.

forestwalk.ai

Allen Pike @allenpike.com · 2mo ago

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

Building for Voice In, Visuals Out

Flashes of brilliance, and the tyranny of latency.

allenpike.com

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

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

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.

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

We Can Do Hard Things

On getting uncomfortable.

allenpike.com

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".

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.

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...

The Rise of Transparency

Finding signal in the firehose.

allenpike.com