Lawrence Jones

Lawrence Jones

@lawrencejones.dev

Engineer at https://incident.io/. Previously @GoCardless | Writes at http://blog.lawrencejones.dev | @lawrjones on Twitter

756 followers633 following702 posts

Pinned

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...

incident.ioincident.ioincident.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...

Wrote about how MCPs and skills are implemented in agent harnesses and how skills can help consolidate many specialised agents into one. This is a write-up of a “skills and MCPs 101” we’ve had several times at incident while building this into our harness. blog.lawrencejones.dev/demystifying...

blog.lawrencejones.devDemystifying skills and MCPsThe AI ecosystem can be really confusing: Agents, MCPs, skills, plugins, everything is an overloaded term and a fuzzy concept. This is an explanation of how these constructs work in plain terms, usefu...

It’s aimed at engineers who passively consume these technologies and want a plain explanation of how they work in practice, so they can use them better.

In all seriousness AI is crazy good at this. For established interfaces you can clean room your way into a vendored library that covers all your use cases. We’ve done this a few times at work and it takes about a day of someone’s time and few hundred dollars of tokens.

Eris ⌬@eriskii.net

YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BROUGHT TO YOU BY ANTHROPIC™

Lawrence Jones reposted

This blog post from @incident.io absolutely rips. - Great technical detail - Solving a real problem - Leveraging open-source projects I wasn't familiar with but am now super curious Excellent writing and great to promote the rigour they put into system fundamentals ❤️ incident.io/blog/we-turn...

incident.ioWe turned off Pub/Sub and nobody noticed | Blog | incident.ioOur entire event-driven platform ran through a single message broker, which made it a single point of failure. So we added a second one. This is the story of building an event load balancer, the queue...

100% the worst thing about the UK heatwave is my router crapping out. I had my suspicions but seeing Claude tell me it's probably overheating has really ended me.

Having a funny thought that people’s aversion to perfectly constructed LLM prose will be what happens when plastic surgery and gene modifications go universally mainstream

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-...

blog.lawrencejones.devBuilding AI skills like checklistsFirst-draft AI skills are usually broken in ways the author can't see. A walk through how I built our daily AI spend report skill, with iteration discipline borrowed from Atul Gawande's Checklist Mani...

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...

incident.ioWho's on call? How Claude helped us calculate this 2,500x faster | Blog | incident.ioA look at how on-call schedules work, and how we made rendering them 2,500× faster — through profiling, smarter algorithms, and some Claude.

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…

View full thread

3. Models are already smart enough: this model is obviously better and does improve our performance, but we only saw an uplift of 75% -> 81% accuracy on a dataset of 'hard' incidents.

This is what we'd expect given previous upgrades, and is candidly quite comforting: No matter how good the model gets, it's the harness that's going to get us into the high 90%+ accuracy, raw intelligence isn't going to solve this problem for us!

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…

1. Token usage was marginally increased: 4.7 uses a different tokeniser that will produce more tokens for the same content, which impacts costs. In practice we only saw 5-10% more usage, so pretty minor.

2. Effort levels have 'inflated': replacing 4.6 for 4.7 lead to a decrease in performance for us when using the same effort levels. We had a collection of medium effort 4.6 which only started performing better when we moved to xhigh on 4.7.

Lawrence Jones reposted

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...

ngrok.comQuantization from the ground up | ngrok blogA complete guide to what quantization is, how it works, and how it's used to compress large language models

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.

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.

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.

When I go to e.g. dinners with tech execs and senior ICs this is the fatigue you see. People who’ve been pushing themselves for what they thought would be 6-12 months but has since become 2+ years of a grind. It’s not that AI isn’t exciting and fun to work with, the pressure is just very high.

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/

blog.lawrencejones.devLooking back at 2025The year AI SRE arrived. 1,152 PRs, a team that grew from 3 to 18, and the hardest I've ever worked. From betting on tooling in January to shipping a product that makes customers say

Lawrence Jones reposted

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...

incident.ioBuilding with AI | incident.ioBehind the scenes: Building an AI incident responder
Kristian Glass@doismellburning.bsky.social

At @incident.io SEV0 watching @lawrencejones.dev show some of the internals of their AI SRE The product itself looks absolutely fantastic and incredibly powerful But the other thing that is a joy to see is the sheer quality of internal tooling they’ve built to learn and improve and monitor 😍

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!

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...

incident.ioincident.ioincident.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...

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…

…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.

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!

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Staff engineer @lawrencejones.dev has been building impressive AI tooling systems for closer to a year - and, naturally, using AI coding tools as well. His take on vibe coding: "Vibes-driven-development inevitably becomes just bad vibes." From: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...

And if you want to read more about what our AI team have been up to, we’ve created a microsite for exactly those stories. It covers everything from prompt optimisations, speculative execution or build-vs-buy. incident.io/building-wit...

incident.ioincident.ioincident.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...

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!

Sinjo@sinjo.dev

Turns out modern disks are really fast when you put them with the rest of the computer instead of stranding them across a network. PlanetScale Metal does just that, is already in use for serious workloads, and is available to everyone today. planetscale.com/blog/announc...