i will not be attending the Hasan Piker school walkout

Have been speaking with a load of companies adopting AI and there are some clear trends emerging. Written up my thoughts and predictions for those also trying to think ahead! incident.io/blog/eng-in-...

It's really funny that now AI apps exist we've somehow retconned hand-written code as being 'organic'

There is a great book called Checklist Manifesto which is about how aviation and medicine adopted checklists to improve safety. I’ve found it super useful as an SRE building runbooks, but turns out it applies to AI too. blog.lawrencejones.dev/building-ai-...

Quite sad that /r/programming immediately removed one of our posts on optimising a Go scheduling algorithm because it mentions using Claude in the process. As AI makes human writing a rare find this feels like conflicting priorities. incident.io/blog/whos-on...

We upgraded AI SRE to use Opus 4.7 yesterday after running a bunch of benchmarks against various incidents to check how it performs. For anyone looking at a similar upgrade, some takeaways…

It is upsetting that we literally have our own status page product and yet when I type ‘status’ into chrome the first suggestion is Anthropic 😭

Am speaking at ai.engineer Europe this Friday on "Fighting AI with AI" about how we use AI tooling internally at @incident.io to manage the complexity of building AI SRE. It's at 12:20pm in Fleming on the Coding Agents track for anyone who is around!

Don’t get this? Anthropic margin on inference is about 40% from various sources. Mostly aimed at @greybunny.bsky.social (original thread is locked) what makes you think this isn’t full price, whatever that means?

I spent 2 months learning about quantization and am extremely proud of the post I've written about it. I think these are some of the nicest visuals I've ever made, and I love how this compression technique invented in 1898 is being used on the bleeding edge in 2026. ngrok.com/blog/quantiz...

Taking my first proper holiday in a year, very excited to let work stress fade away. Kinda curious how long it's going to take for my system to calm down but cannot happen fast enough.

I wrote about Kat.

It’s upsetting how much working with AI destroys the nirvana of working on trains

The 16k tokens/second is interesting to me after I spent an entire day on Opus 4.6 fast mode the other week. Fast mode totally changed how I was working. The whole ‘multiple worktrees’ thing is irrelevant when the model moves much faster.

Opus 4.6 on fast mode is like… shit, I am for the first time worried about what I’m billing my employer 😭

Finding it hard to distinguish between ‘AI fatigue’ that is due to using AI tools vs building AI into products. The latter is very different. Fatigue here is due to insane levels of competitive pressure and working on products that are complex with a fairly nascent tech, where it’s genuine R&D.

Been thinking about this a lot since Rory shared it in our channel.

Well this explains our bill

Someone described working with AI as learning how to feed a pet alien machine and I feel this a lot. Working on our AI SRE product and you really do need to get a sense of what it likes, what it doesn’t, how it falls over. Trying many small things one after another until it makes happier noises.

It's insane and entirely predictable that the child safety act in the UK has led to Imgur being banned, which directly limits the ability of UK citizens to see some of the images coming out of Iran.

Have written a 2025 recap of my last year at incident.io including highlights such as the "Swedish prison" where we worked leading up to Sev0, and lessons from growing the AI team from 3 -> 18. It's been a hell of a year, lots of memories. blog.lawrencejones.dev/2025/

Support for education is incredibly important to me. So to celebrate the holidays I'm running a fundraiser until Jan 1st. I'll take a 30-minute call with anyone who donates $50 to one of these educational non-profits. I'm kicking things off by donating $500 to Girls Who Code.

All the way to Waterloo station “we’ve done so well this year, on time, got everything, can get a nice seat on train” Arrive and immediately realise I’ve left the entire 10 person cheese board in the fridge. Now travelling back home with all my bags 😭

So much goes into this. For any internal tool nerds, we’ve written a bunch about what we’ve had to build here: incident.io/building-wit...

Had a great time chatting about how we’ve been building AI SRE at @incident.io with @wparad.bsky.social If you’re working on AI systems or incident response, I’d hope this is a worthwhile listen!

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

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!

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...

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's been great fun sharing our approach to AI with Gergely, born out of the last year hitting our heads against AI. This is an awesome article that I'd encourage anyone building systems with generative AI to read! Thank you for the feature!

8 years ago Chris and I dealt with a horrible Postgres incident where RAID array battery failure was an extremely painful red herring. Good to see he’s back in the game after all that time. These disks must really be something!

Sometimes I wonder how many burritos a week is too many burritos

How is this a thing

I have a package that’s been stuck in customs for a week. Is there anything more irritating than a fedex tracker giving you zero info and saying “ETA Tuesday 11th 11am” when it’s now the next week 😂

Crazy to me that people can say this when ChatGPT/Claude/etc have hundreds of millions of daily active users. I have not once ever had a use for a blockchain payment. All my colleagues use AI daily. What is making people so resistant to seeing this?

Was playing with some CI build time improvements yesterday and booting big old machines is something I will always enjoy. 96 cores go brrrrrr

The average AI product experience is bad right now, and it’s because teams haven’t figured it out how to build with these tools yet. Building a prototype is 10% of the effort. The rest of the journey is uncharted waters and can be a real struggle. blog.lawrencejones.dev/ai-mvp/

Gotten into the habit of getting AI to check my code piece-by-piece as I build systems. Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed. Can't recommend this enough!

This was a fun chat about how we're building an AI incident responder, which: - Checks your Grafana dashboards - Looks at recent PRs - Finds past incidents like this one And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂

It’s really important to remember when anyone speaks about DOGE that this is the person leading it. Just keep that in mind when the next tech bro says how ‘excited’ they are about the mission. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

We've got a new game at work "Cold Case Mysteries" where people submit a picture of their fridge and then we all guess who it is. I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.

Kinda weird to see Zuck aping the behavior that lost Elon tens of millions of Twitter users. Makes me wonder what and how strong the incentive has to be for him to do something so actively against the top-line business interest.

Keep making eye contact with this weirdo across my desk and it’s kinda freaking me out

I just remembered a fun SRE interview we used to run where we’d break a VM in several ways and share an ssh session with the candidate to pair on fixing it. Lots of how we’d break the machine are no longer relevant today. Crazy how fast this stuff moves on.

Is the only issue I have with BlueSky: certain parts have extremely strong group-think. This is automating looking at the first few hits on Google nothing about it is ‘privacy breaching’ but because it’s AI and on X everyone wants to pile in.

Guys this whole 12 day thing is a terrible idea, this tree was emotionally load bearing 😭

Folks need to understand this. Pornhub is absolutely in the right here. They are blocking states who require this because they don't want to be responsible for your PI data! They do not NEED that info to provide their service, so collecting and maintaining it is inherently privacy violating!

I wrote some reflections on 2024 focusing on my experience at incident and everything that went by. Now the third year I’ve done this, hoping to make it a tradition. blog.lawrencejones.dev/2024/

I pushed all my git history into Gemini earlier, everything for the last year, then asked it to categorise PRs against themes. Eventually I got a graph of what I've been working on and when across the year. I've wanted to do this for years, cool how easy it is now.

This was a great listen. Loved the take on “one big text box” being the lazy access into LLMs pending us finding better UX and the implications of custom AI tutors for kids is kinda crazy.