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allan_s

775 karma · joined November 7, 2012

After 15 years as CTO and Tech Lead in startups, I switched sides. I've been the person you're trying to hire, the one who bridges developers and executives, turns chaos into shipping, and makes boring architectural choices that actually hold up at scale. I step in when :

* A startup needs hands-on technical leadership without a full-time CTO * A team ships too slowly and nobody knows exactly why * Tech debt has become the elephant in every product meeting

I'm a proponent of the boring stack: ingenuity should reflect in the simplicity of the solution, not in its complexity. Currently helping companies use AI without the BS.

contact: allan.simon.pro@outlook.com

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allan_s··on Figma restricts MCP access to whitelisted clients, excluding Pi
Shameless plug,

I created an opensource unofficial mcp/skill/cli here git@github.com:allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol.git

Its based on a reverse engineering of the kiwi protocol and it works for read/write , comments etc. and it does not require anything except a cookie session ( I usually automate this part by having a isolated chrome with CDP activated)

I created sometimes ago because I had to work with some customers who didnt want to pay for a full seat for my account so the official mcp was not possible at all.

allan_s··on Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing
Both are true, a lot of people are multilingual but a lot are also not.

I know a lot of foreigner for which the feature is really useful (local department store, booking a doctor appointment etc.)

allan_s··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
As somebody new to this and with a use case very similar to yours , what would have been a more suitable solution for this ?

The guy who first built the architecture made the same decision as yours (I.e one local duckdb for each tenant to work as a copy of big query/their data warehouse) and I dont know what the state of the art for this kind of use cases ?

allan_s··on Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
There's actually a setting.json key to not have to put the option
allan_s··on OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files
Is it better than letting claude code use python directly ? Especially on those 3 metrics: 1. better prompt adherence 2. visually more pleasing 3. token consumption

Especially as I think claude code got some reinforcement learning on these use cases ?

allan_s··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
I think the source of your issue is in your statement itself, why do you want a task that evaluate things as broad to be only a coding task ? Shouldn't it be a planning task, documentation task, knowledge retrieval task etc. And very certainly not with just an initial prompt but an existing codebase + existing doc + tickets ?
allan_s··on Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C
Is "the layout scream AI generated" the new Bootstrap ? I.e what people use to quickly convey their ideas (bad or good)

Ironically, for myself at least, the least it looks AI, the more I've spent time prompting for it to not look AI.

allan_s··on Claude Tag
Fortunately hr system in most companies are from software vendors that are 2 gen behind so a mcp with a "fire $EMPLOYEE " tool will not come up

Would also be funny if it fires the one who done the request.

allan_s··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
Why ? The comment I was replying to was not about the kids ?
allan_s··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
At the same time I opened netflix and it started cycling around and I got a very gory scene from the walking dead and my intent "show me something to watch" was even more ambigous and implicit.
allan_s··on Is grep all you need? How agent harnesses reshape agentic search
Long before AI I remember asking people in code review to add comments specifically to make the code grep-able. Same for for privileging key value mapping to dynamic string concatenation.
allan_s··on I just sequenced a human genome to 30× coverage at home
I dont have twitter so my thought reading the post

1. Wow i want to do that too !

2. Wait is there a follow up on how to reproduce this at home

3. Does it mean i will have my "full" dna sequence ?

4. If not, what would be missing (my understanding is that dna while dns is static, genes get activated /deactivacted depending on a lot of factors ? And how to get these missing parts?

5. What are the pratical current and future use of it ? Can i see my family doctor with it ?

allan_s··on Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
I think what the author meant is that it does help not more than the same knowledge provided the old way.
allan_s··on DeepSeek v4
Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.

During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.

My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.

Edit: also, I'm not from the US

allan_s··on DeepSeek v4
Ask a gay, a black or a Japanese how it feels living in China.
allan_s··on Spiral staircase with a single guardrail once led to the top of the Eiffel Tower
I also wonder how practical it was to climb there, I went to the eiffel tower several times and climbing stairs is an exercice by itself ,especially spiral ones
allan_s··on Show HN: Shader Lab, like Photoshop but for shaders
As a ESL, what is unnatural in the language used ?
allan_s··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
As someone who spent quite some times these days to reverse the figma protocol[0] I can't agree more with

> Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.

Their binary format is so much of a "let's reinvent everything" which I think come from the fact it's a tool you can use for web design, android app design, ios design and anything-you-want design that it became a jack of all trade and so mapping it to web is not a perfect 1:1 translation.

And for being useful to agent, any people who got to implement the figma from a UX guy know that even human can't know truly the intent of most figma design, so how a LLM could ? Common source of question that even the UX guy has no answer for:

  1. Ok this button looks great, but in German how will it look ? 
  2. Oh and actually this button does not look great when i put in CSS, it wraps on two line, you cheated again with the letter spacing, did you ?
  3. How does it look on a phone that is not an iphone ? 
  4. You know that doing a border with a gradien is not possible in CSS, so what should i put ?
  5. How does it look on a 4k screen ?
  6. etc.
I know that most of these question can be answered by props and autolayout, and I've been asking the 5 question above these days on a figma that had these but it's just that the UX guy is not that mythical beast that "know-how-to-use-figma-right"

So I can't wait for these tools that are html behind to catch up, even more if we can have the prompt with it. (As a developer I never got to see the prompt the product manager made to the UX guy)

[0]https://github.com/allan-simon/figma-kiwi-protocol

allan_s··on Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
that's what I'm telling my non-tech friends when they say "Looking to how fast AI progress and robotics, me as an electrician, will a robot soon take my job?" I reply to them "My job as a software engineer will be replaced sooner than yours, because for your job, the robot will be much more expensive than the minimal wave, and you don't need to buy a human"
allan_s··on Claude Design
Are these ugly and hard to use website made by people who did want to be unique ?
allan_s··on What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture
Its the same for a lot of bundled things, mac hardware + os or windows pre-installed, chrome being pushed by google.com etc.
allan_s··on God sleeps in the minerals
I did that with my kids and it was pretty cool !
allan_s··on GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks
I've also been using the LLM in Posthog and it has been impressive. I need to check if I can also plug a MCP/Skill to my actual claude code so that I can cross reference the data from my other data source (stripe, local database, access logs etc.) for in depth analysis
allan_s··on German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad
But then we also can't request 50% of CEOs being women or any job with that arguments ? Wouldn't it be more fair to be excused if you actually can prove that you're taking care of familly members regardless of man/woman ? Why would a perfectly able 20 year old woman be excuzed by default based on her sex ?
allan_s··on Show HN: I/Claude reverse-engineered Figma's binary WebSocket protocol
thanks!
allan_s··on Spanish legislation as a Git repo
I find it ironic to have it named "catalan(g)" on a post about spanish law.
allan_s··on NASA to spend $20B to build a base on the moon
homelessness is not just a house problem. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2605901/

most people don't become homeless because they don't have a house, but because they lost/lack the way to keep one. And not only on the financial plane.

allan_s··on Show HN: Cq – Stack Overflow for AI coding agents
the same as your browser trust some https domain. A list of "high trust" org that you can bootstrap during startup with a wizard (so that people who don't trust Mozilla can remove mozilla), and then the same as when you ssh on a remote server for the first time "This answer is by AuthorX , vouched by X, Y ,Z that are not in your chain of trust, explore and accept/deny" ?

Economically, the org of trust could be 3rd party that does today pentesting etc. it could be part of their offering. I'm a company I pay them to audit answers in my domain of interest. And then the community benefits from this ?

allan_s··on Show HN: Cq – Stack Overflow for AI coding agents
Each knowledge could be signed, and you keep a chain of trust of which author you trust. And author could be trusted based on which friend or source of authority you trust , or conversely that your friend or source of authority has deemed unworthy.
allan_s··on Afroman found not liable in defamation case
We can't on one side ask for people to not make judgment based on statistics and on the other side saying that making a shortcut based statistics is valid.
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