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.

I've maintained a vimrc for about 13 years. A better engineer would have removed things in that time, but I did not. Since then s/Vim/Neovim/, and s/vimscript/Lua/, which had put me off a full rebuild. Turns out for the price of a light hazing, Claude can upgrade the whole settings file for me!

Got a cool new meat thermometer that’s fully Bluetooth for Christmas so decided to try it out today. M&S only had a thin rib eye so it’s quite overkill but here we go!

At home unpacking after Christmas and trying to setup an AirTag I’ve been gifted for my keys. Finding myself getting weirdly emotional as I realise I should move my keys to the Apple keyring, abandoning the one I’ve used for the last ten years. How on earth have I got attached to a keyring.

Been looking forward to this for months, got a back catalogue of papers waiting for it to arrive! Really hoping it meets expectations🤞

My family dog stands here for extended periods of time slow cooking herself, refusing to move away. I expect having a fire each night is her favourite part of Christmas.

This is, from my experience, definitely a thing. It takes time to become proficient in how to use and instruct LLMs. And it’s very easy to non-actively practice where you use these tools but don’t actually get better at them.

This is savage and I appreciate the creativity that went into this, even if it makes me cry a bit

My Slack iOS app has become unusably slow recently, keyboard lag of about 5s at times. No idea if this was the iOS upgrade or the Slack app that’s done it, infuriating though.

Barbican is having a TV renaissance recently; Slow Horses, The Agency, The Day of the Jackel Seems brutalist architecture is like catnip for gritty TV crime directors. Kinda dig it.

Rhys turning up in this ridiculous inflatable Santa costume was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. Trying to fit down a bank of desks and taking the whole stack of notebooks, pens, and keyboards with him was great.

Really excited about this. It’s probably the first time you can properly tell your CEO they don’t need to be in the call, just follow the updates. Would be great to remove that pressure from responders!

It’s wild that I never write database migrations or domain models by hand anymore, I load a tech spec into Claude and have it generate them for me. Totally different workflow from just a few months ago.

I’ve just been told I’m 5 days behind on my advent calendar and this is a good representation of my state of mind this month 😂