Allen Pike

@apike
1.5K Followers
205 Following
827 Posts
Building product at Forestwalk Labs in Vancouver. Previously founded Steamclock. I also host It Shipped That Way, and write monthly about what I’m learning.
My writinghttps://allenpike.com
Forestwalkhttps://forestwalk.ai
It Shipped That Wayhttps://itshipped.fm
Allen PikeMar 1

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

Allen PikeJan 29
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?
Allen PikeJan 16
Current status
Allen PikeJan 13

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?"

Show threadAllen PikeJan 8
The way Dia interprets the phrase "can of beans recipe" as a question, e.g. “can ‘of beans' recipe?” is one of my favourite AI bugs of all time, and it brings me joy
Allen PikeDec 16
It's fascinating how Apple managed to make such a complex Downtime, Focus, and Screen Time system, while still not providing a way to say "Disable just the algorithmic-feed apps during these hours.” 🫠
Show threadAllen PikeNov 21
It’s important to test your meeting tools on typical inputs, you see
Allen PikeNov 6

Finally tried gpt-5-mini on some tasks, hoping at "minimal" reasoning it would be faster for user-blocking inference than gpt-4.1-mini or claude-haiku-4.5.

Nope, it's a dog. So much so that I asked two other teams, and they said 5-mini is so slow and unreliable that they can't use it either. Apparently OpenAI's rating of "4 lightning bolts" means "takes 5000-10000 ms to process 200 tokens" so that's good to know 💫

Allen PikeOct 30

Tired: Here’s our roadmap

Wired: You’re invited to a webinar of a preview of our roadmap

Allen PikeOct 23
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