Lawrence Jones

Hahahaha no it is ok, though I will accept a poorly done sketch to keep you entertained while in A&E.

This sucks though hope you’re alrigjt

Will you be providing a visual essay on this experience?

I expect pretty well now 😂

Feels this is very much the intention for this guy though.

I expect many people using these tools are ok with the trade-off that it’s a house of cards given the alternative was they wouldn’t have been able to build it themselves otherwise.

Hahahaha yep he’s gonna find a pistol squat way too easy 😂 I see now why you found it annoying.

Pistols were what my rowing coach would make you do to prove you weren’t injured if you had a leg issue and were trying to get in the boat anyway. Good luck if your knee is bust!

Hahaha is your partner perhaps an ex rower

A lot of this is ankle flexion! Even prior to doing proper training I could happily pistol because I have a lot of flexibility in my ankles.

Your partner may be genetically advantaged, though I’m sure the training didn’t hurt.

I think impressive? It’s one of the best examples of how you can build a platform on top of these tools that has its own inherent value.

Huge amount of effort to build and run GH and well worth it as an ROI for most companies. Feels like an ecosystem triumph in some ways.

Yeah, the number of times I see people online say “AI is just cheap trick” is astounding to me.

Expect this means the majority of people haven’t yet been exposed to newer AI powered products. Makes me think the investment thesis into AI right now is more rational than it seems.

That is a real shame, we’d have loved to have you!

The support is always appreciated though. Hoping we’ll have the people to help us support more platforms soon also 🤞

Hahaha, it turns out it’s much cheaper to make your engineers 20% more effective than it is to hire 20% more eng!

I mean, we’re doing both and would triple the team tomorrow if hiring could support it, but for now giving everyone unlimited AI spend is just one of the ways we can try going faster.

One of my coworkers blogged about how we’ve been using Claude code at work which you may find interesting.

We have ~25 eng using it daily so have been keen to find patterns to improve our usage.

incident.io/blog/shippin...

Yeah, that advice reflects how impactful the initial plan can be. Same reason helping it build a plan that exactly matches what you want can make a big difference to output.

Confess I’m just running Opus now, but that’s less ok if you’re employer isn’t paying the bill 😂

The plan can be made way quicker than the changes so feedback loop is much more fun, you don’t have to wait minutes to find out it’s done something stupid.

Also were you on Sonnet 4 or Opus? Opus is noticeably better, though it is 10x as expensive.

Are you familiar with plan mode? You activate it by shift+tab’ing in your Claude code session.

I’d advise doing this always. You give instructions, then you carefully review the plan and make changes there, which means you fix half the issues before it even writes any code.

Thought it was worth saying as we’re able to drop small tickets directly into Claude code and it does a good job of solving it. Took some investment before it worked but being able to do that is crazy, wouldn’t suggest any eng team sleep on it.

It works really well in our codebase nowadays, but that’s with Claude Code and only after we moved all our eng docs into the codebase so the models can read them.

Until then most of the code you got would be unworkable, but now it’s much closer to what I’d write myself for most things.

Squeaky clean

The amount of Lime bike green I can see in the London naked cycle photos is making me reconsider ebiking as a social good

Yeah we’ve been doing this recently for catching bad error handling practices or fixing small things like “all UIs should use sentence case labels”

It’s really great for that type of thing!

Otoh, AI is a great tool to audit their codebase for several of the actions suggested in the post mortem.

Can easily find and fix unsafe nil pointer checks in the service control binary using AI tools nowadays.

Was fun changing our Old Street billboard to focus on eng hiring last Friday.

Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!

Optimizing LLM prompts for low latency | Building with AI When the time taken to execute a prompt becomes an issue, these strategies can optimize response latency without impacting prompt behaviour.

Wrote up a journey of optimising an LLM prompt for latency, reducing the time from 11s to just 2s by being careful with tokens.

Loads of lessons here for people working with AI!

incident.io/building-wit...

incident.io incident.io is an all-in-one incident management platform unifying on-call scheduling, real-time incident response, and integrated status pages – helping teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtim...

Equally though, it’s right on the edge of being ‘too designed’.

I’m proud of the result, but engineers reading the posts will see our design team helped put the pages together, which can trigger people.

Hard balance, even when you care a lot about getting it right.

incident.io/building-wit...

I think we do an ok job of this at incident? Not perfect, but decent.

The AI microsite we launched recently is a good example: content is straight from eng, very behind the scenes, there is no marketing in it.

It’s really hard to preserve the tone of early stage company blogs as you grow.

You have competing pressure of:
- Marketing blog posts which detract from eng
- Increasingly high bar for ‘polish’
- Fear of saying the wrong thing

Which combine to be a hostile environment for solid tech writing.

…we are!

Both for product engineering roles in general, but also for AI engineering roles if that’s what you want for the next chapter in your career.

Message me on here if you’re interested. This job is the most fun I’ve had in my career, I can’t recommend it enough.

Note from the team about our work, and a callout that we are hiring!

One nice touch is the “Note from the team” with all our faces on the signature.

I think it really captures how the team feels, from our ‘win together’ mindset to the pride we take in our work.

I’ve attached a copy with a big “WE’RE HIRING” message because…

incident.io incident.io is an all-in-one incident management platform unifying on-call scheduling, real-time incident response, and integrated status pages – helping teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtim...

Yesterday we launched a microsite of stories from our AI team.

To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.

I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.

incident.io/building-wit...

It is very good, well worth a read