# Allen Zhou

> Notes, writing, projects, and ideas from Allen. Essays on building agents, AI tooling, developer infrastructure, and shipping products at Vercel.

For agents: every writing post is available as raw markdown at
`https://allenzhou.me/w/<slug>.md` or by sending `Accept: text/markdown` to
the rendered URL. A markdown sitemap is at https://allenzhou.me/sitemap.md, a
concatenated dump of every post is at https://allenzhou.me/llms-full.txt, and an
agent-facing skill file with install/config/usage examples is at
https://allenzhou.me/AGENTS.md.

## In progress

- [Agent readiness](https://allenzhou.me/w/agent-readiness.md): Half your readers are not human anymore. What it actually takes to make a site that an LLM can parse: an llms.txt index, an llms-full.txt single-file dump, .md alternates for every post, Accept-header content negotiation, and the small handful of metadata details that make all of it discoverable.
- [Docs](https://allenzhou.me/w/docs.md): A 0-to-expert tour of how Vercel does docs. Half of it is the writing discipline pulled from the internal docs handbook (planning, content types, style, rules, quality checklist, AI policy). The other half is the system that serves it: a microfrontend that stitches independent apps into one domain at the edge, a packaged docs runtime, and a Next.js 16 cache-components app that uses MDX files as routes.
- [Picking a React stack](https://allenzhou.me/w/react-stack.md): Next.js, React with Vite, TanStack Start, SWR, and TanStack React Query: what each one actually does, the code that uses them, what building the Vercel dashboard or the Vercel docs would look like with each, and a field note on the data-at-the-top vs data-at-the-leaf decision that high-profile teams are actually making in 2026.
- [Tests](https://allenzhou.me/w/tests.md): Property testing, simulation, the four-tier model, and mechanical structural enforcement: what tests look like at Vercel today across Ash, vercel-site, and vercel-docs, what is excellent, and where the next frontier lives.
- [Dashboard](https://allenzhou.me/w/dashboard.md): A great dashboard is the human-readable view of a control plane that also has an API, a CLI, and an MCP server, and the design choices that make it good are mostly about the seams between those surfaces.
- [Work at Vercel](https://allenzhou.me/w/vercel.md): Things I have shipped, launched, and written at Vercel.
- [MCP vs CLI vs Plugins](https://allenzhou.me/w/mcp-vs-cli-vs-plugins.md): Three layers (protocol, execution, knowledge) and which one to ship for your tools.
- [MCP servers](https://allenzhou.me/w/mcp.md): How to build incredible MCP servers, the clients that make them sing, and the contract between them.
## Backlog

- [Compaction](https://allenzhou.me/w/compaction.md): Here’s how to preserve context when agent conversations get long.
- [How I Use AGENTS.md](https://allenzhou.me/w/how-i-use-agents-md.md): Here’s how I use AGENTS.md to keep coding agents aligned.
- [How I Use Skills](https://allenzhou.me/w/how-i-use-skills.md): Here’s how I use skills to make agents more consistent and useful.
- [My Stack](https://allenzhou.me/w/my-stack.md): Here's where I'm currently most productive.
- [Tool Execution](https://allenzhou.me/w/tool-execution.md): Here’s how to design reliable tool execution for agents.