James Cowling

@convex CTO. Dropbox storage designer. Consensus protocol author. Motorcycle mechanic. Closet Australian. MIT systems researcher turned database shill.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Anyone have benchmark rec for agentic dev on architecturally difficult eng projects, not just coding tasks? We'd like to improve our benchmarks for @convex vs other stacks but the more open the better.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Practice safe vibing with scoped deployment keys

[Nicolas Ettlin ✨ @nicolapps]

@Dayhaysoos @convex Hi Nick! We just shipped deploy keys with custom permissions. These let you ensure your agent only has access to safe actions.

You can create a deploy key from your deployment settings (https://t.co/ElQFNm5Frp)

[Nicolas Ettlin ✨ @nicolapps]

I just added the full Convex CLI docs to the Convex docs website.

You might not be reading docs in 2026, but your agent definitely does!

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@huntjordan22 as a C-level executive I would like to take credit for @huntjordan22’s work

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@josevalerio @benjamin_ACD Think of all those nullable fields that could just have an ad in them

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Well we finally got around to fixing this. We no longer invalidate and rerun active subscriptions when you push new code to @convex.

Next steps: pre-warm the cache before releasing new versions, then allow safely running two versions of code simultaneously so an agent can benchmark performance before finishing a release.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

This showed up on my desk. A lot of systems wisdom at the fortune cookie factory

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

We care a lot about Convex being the best platform for codegen but what's been really exciting is the emergence of excellent codegen platforms built on Convex too. Give @boxesdotdev a spin, even if you're using one of those other backends ;)

[Nick Bushak @nbushak]

I’m excited to share what @drewregitsky and I have been working on over the past few months: @boxesdotdev! If you're coding with Claude Code or Codex, it's time to move your development from localhost into the cloud. 1/11

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@existentializzm Where’s the dislike button?

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

AI continuing to drive business efficiencies

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

A lot of our customers don't know how to architect a backend, which is what we're here for. Then there are customers like @TownAI who really *do* know how to do this work, yet the best thing they can do for business is just focus all their energy on a great product.

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

Honestly could not have been this product so well and so quickly without @convex. It's made it SO MUCH easier to build a delightful UX that's safe and performant without having to worry nearly as much about sync'ing data, endpoint security, scalability. Most importantly a big thank you to the whole team prepping us for the launch today and the spike in traffic. Excited to continue to build Town together!

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Huge huge fan of this team and was really exciting to see their product come together. One of our favorite Convex customers. Massive congrats for the launch. Go check out Town.

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you.

We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction.

Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents.

We think that’s backwards.

The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you.

Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so.

All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time.

Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@existentializzm Who owns the bike with the mismatched gas tank that totally looks like he crashed it in front of his coworker? 😅

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Infra is hard to design and build, which is why almost everyone outsources it. Even Convex uses AWS despite having built billion-dollar bare metal infra before. It's not currently vibe-codable and would be a waste of time for most businesses to do so anyway.

[Aaron Boodman @aboodman]

I realize you’re just frustrated but please believe me when I tell you that basically nothing is a piece of core sw infrastructure takes 5h to develop and test and ship.

The reason you like tp is *because* they’ve repeatedly chosen to put the time into things and do them right. The choice to not ship the 5h vibecoded cancellation, repeated across the entire product, is what creates the feeling of quality and reliability you value.

Should there have been this feature earlier? Maybe, not a regular user so can’t comment on whether I’d expect it at current stage of development.

But building these things is very very hard and roadmap tradeoffs are not made any easier by AI. Please consider showing a little grace for a small company that is doing something difficult.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@zeeg 4.7 is still performing better than 4.8 on Convex development

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

@man7iss Don't mention the island

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

Come hang with this wonderful group of people at Systems Distributed

[TigerBeetle @TigerBeetleDB]

The full house of speakers for Systems Distributed '26:

Andrew Kelley
@axboe
@gh_spin
@jamesacowling
@heidiann360
Ram Alagappan
@AishwaryaGanlat
@zooko
Hillel Wayne
Margaret Holzmann
@DominikTornow
@jorandirkgreef

Join us! July 27-28 in Boston.

[James Cowling @jamesacowling]

You can really easily work on a bunch of simultaneous dev deployments for your Convex project, locally or in the cloud, move them between projects, etc. We improved the ergonomics around this a lot. Your agent is probably going to be into this.

[Nicolas Ettlin ✨ @nicolapps]

In the next version of Convex

We show more clearly the deployment you’re using! Nice to have when working on multiple deployments at the same time