Thomas

Semi-Amateur Crocodile Wrangler | Product @ CloudZero | Creator of | KD5TE

[Sam Lambert @samlambert]

I agree that you have to work insanely hard to build a successful startup. Shut up and do the work though instead of talking yourself hard on a podcast.

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@aarondfrancis Patiently waiting for a linux version :)

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

I want all of this too. I think this is also an interesting time to recognize that this isn't a vibe-code lift. In order to accomplish this, it will take a ton of great engineers empowered by AI to make great decisions. Not AI with a /goal.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I have a draft blog post swirling around this exact topic (but not refined enough to publish yet). I think the key thing is I (personally) don't want a NEW GitHub. I want GitHub to be better.

For example:

- GitHub issues should be as beautiful and good as Linear
- GitHub PRs should be as good as Graphite
- GitHub Git infra should be as fast/minimal as Pierre
- GitHub wikis should be more like Notion
- GitHub discussions & shouldn't exist (multiple "better issue" providers including Linear show why)
- etc.

I'm not saying to clone those full companies outright, but their core product, arguably the core features, aren't even 2% as good as those external products. Maybe aim for 10% to start.

There's the "oh no there's so much tech debt" argument. And I'm sure GH is on an absolutely mountain of tech debt. That's why in my prior twoots I've argued to just make them separate products to start only for agility reasons, unapologetically do not integrate with "old github." Net net startups beat encumbants all the time for reasons.

That's just a product/technical POV though. GitHub also has a huge PR/marketing problem. They talk through corp speak, their marketing pages (e.g. the dot com) speaks to multiple personas confusingly, they have no singular visionary to look up or trust, they have nobody who makes the outward community feel seen.

There's so much more here...

I think for the human side, GitHub already has what it needs to be really, really, really good. It really feels like they just like fearless vision, and the courage/power to say "fuck you" to a whole lot of things that are distracting them.

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@rushing_andrei Huge fan - daily driver on a framework and a gaming computer I repurposed. Hugely productive

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@nikitabier Took me a month to get through - was finally approved this past week. Apple called yesterday though and gave me some pointers. They also mentioned they’re way behind right now.

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@jshchnz @sentry How are you guys managing your costs around that?? I’m over at CloudZero and we’re trying to help wrangle all this!

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@iamdavidhill @T_Zahil @opencode Yeep…my fault lol. I went to the docs and couldn’t find it and assumed it was behind a private preview - that’s on me!

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@iamdavidhill @T_Zahil @opencode How does one get access to this?! Absolutely asking for myself..

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@sama Could we get the API team to fix the usage API so we can help your customers see what they're spending money on? It'll help them spend more over time if they can see where it's going!

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@dhh Did you have to do anything special on the install for the G14? I had issues where the wifi card in mine wouldn't work - and no drivers that were offered

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@dhh Agree with this 100% - what's wild to me is that none of them seem to work reliably....is this an open market to make something better? Or is it the world's way of telling us we need to just saw stuff it to home automation nonsense?

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

I have an appointment with @optimum to fix my Internet in the morning, they sent a really cool text saying their advanced troubleshooting department might be able to fix it - they called, and it was the same unplug replug dance. So, really great idea, not great execution.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

I'm so happy the GraphQL psyop is over

[Akshay @typeangled]

If you are a Rails (or Laravel) developer and not studying Fizzy’s source code, especially @bitsweat and @jorgemanru ‘s PRs, you are missing out on a ton of excellent learning opportunities.

It’s a gift that keeps giving, the deeper you go. And having all that git history available is chef’s kiss 👌

[Jared Palmer @jaredpalmer]

I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of any new files in the root directory until our representatives can figure out what is going on

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

I cannot express this enough. I let this theory run a company I started into the ground.

[DHH @dhh]

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

Love the concept, what do the customers think of the autonomous agent though? Most times when I run into these they just reference documentation and close out despite being a legitimate issue.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Timeline of agents at Vercel:

① Support agent
Processing 70%+ tickets autonomously

② v0
Now at 6.4 app generations per second

③ Code Review
52% of the time it spots PR defects humans & other tools missed

④ Lead agent
Triages all inbound contact sales form submissions

�� Data analyst agent
You can @​d0 on our Slack and query our warehouse in natural language

We’ve learned a lot building these & others, and continue to open source our learnings and agent architectures:

[Branko @brankopetric00]

Kubernetes migration almost killed our startup.

Where we were:
- 8 EC2 instances
- Ansible for deploys
- Boring but working
- $1200/month AWS bill

Why we migrated:
- New investor wanted 'cloud-native'
- Engineers wanted K8s experience
- Competitors were using it
- Seemed like the future

6 months later:
- 3 engineers spending full-time on K8s
- AWS bill at $4500/month
- Deploys took longer than before
- More outages, not fewer
- Product development stalled

We rolled back:
- Moved to ECS Fargate
- 2 week migration
- Back to $1800/month
- Engineers back on features

K8s is amazing for scale. We weren't at scale. Technology should solve problems you actually have.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Learn to ship. Shipping is a skill distinct from coding. Shipping is designing, coding, QAing, story-telling, teaching, marketing, selling, pivoting, iterating…

It used to be that coding dominated in importance because of coding ability scarcity. AI will push you to go further.

[Thomas @tomsengineering]

@mitchellh So I'm thinking a little small minded here, but this obviously opens the door to having a really cool remote management tool. But could this enable a full neovim env in the browser that just works? What is it you see this really unlocking that I'm not thinking about?