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Pixelflips

Pixelflips

@pixelflips.com

pixelflips - flippin' ideas into creative and clean web and interface designs while keeping a focus on web standards.

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Pine MCP: A Case Study

Pine MCP is a server that lets AI coding tools read Pine, Kajabi's design system. Instead of guessing at components, an agent can look up the real ones, get Pine's rules before it starts and check what it wrote against them. I started it in June 2025 and co-maintain it with a teammate. The biggest...

Pine: A Case Study

Pine is Kajabi's design system. It's a library of web components that don't care which framework a page is built in, sitting on top of design tokens and an icon library, with docs written for people and AI tools. It's run by a small core team, and honestly, that shaped most of the decisions behind...

Paying Down Skill Debt

Every engineer knows the deal with technical debt. You take a shortcut to ship something today, and you pay for it later. The interest compounds quietly until one day a simple change takes a week, and nobody remembers why. I think I've been taking on a different kind of debt. The job got bigger Like...

What I use to design, build, and write. I'll keep this current as things change. Inspired by uses.tech. Hardware MacBook Pro 14" (M5). Does everything I need and stays quiet doing it. Two LG ultrawide monitors. Once you get used to the extra room, it's hard to go back. NuPhy Air75. A low-profile mechanical keyboard...

The Roots at Blue Note

I haven't seen The Roots live since I lived in Berlin many years ago. That sentence covers more time than I want to think about. So when I heard they were coming to the Blue Note in LA, I immediately knew I wanted to attend. The band and the venue did not disappoint. Watching Black...

Find Me in the Atmosphere

This weekend, I wired my website into the AT Protocol. It took an afternoon and one stubbornly old config file, and now my writing lives on the network itself. The short version: Bluesky rolled out support for Standard.site, a set of shared lexicons that let long-form writing live on the AT Protocol itself. In plain...

"It's interesting how AI is good at the things I don’t understand, but is somehow dogshit at the things I’m good at..." - Anonymous

AI fills the gaps. Just not at depth

Last month, a Cloudflare engineer used AI to rebuild a major open-source project in under a week. Cost about $1,100. It shipped to production. Around the same time, a different Cloudflare team used AI to fork another project and silently stripped out the security protections the original maintainers had spent years adding. That also shipped....

When the Autocomplete Changes Its Mind

Tailwind usage is at an all-time high. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic dropped 40% over two years. AI didn't kill Tailwind. AI now picks Tailwind. Every prompt. Every team. Without anyone choosing. And the moment it picks something else, every codebase built on top of that decision is on its own. "75% of the...

Unregulated, Unaccountable, Unchecked

Everyone's arguing about which AI tool writes the best code or generates the best images. Meanwhile, the companies building these systems are racing to ship faster, raise more, and consolidate more power than any tech cycle before them. And a small group of researchers, journalists, and engineers have been trying to get your attention about...

It’s Friday. We’re Tired.

It's 4 pm on a Friday. I've approved my last PR of the week. I've reviewed more code today than I wrote. I got a lot done, or at least, the dashboard says I did. But I'm sitting here, and I can't think straight. Not in the dramatic, existential-crisis way. Just... tired. A kind of...