striking to go to a European conference and visit my hometown and every single old/new acquaintance asks the same first question “wait you want to live in and invest [your time/future] into the US?! Now?!??”
Anselm Eickhoff
@anselm.io
Thinking about code & design. Play is the only humane form of work. Founder of @garden.co - creator of Citybound & @jazz.tools
you know how the best marketing is saying the exact words your users say when describing your product to friends? this apparently includes the users’ LLMs now: “I’d describe Jazz as a replicated application state machine disguised as a pleasant relational database.” (contd.)
Wrapped up @localfirstconf.com in a summery Berlin beer garden yesterday. Always a special crowd to me because it’s where @jazz.tools got born 2 years ago. And where else can you hang out with Martin Kleppmann, Dan Ingalls and people who only use Mistral models at the same place?
People have been yapping about Malleable Software forever now. I think we’re finally actually entering its golden age - loving the “medley of demos” around Patchwork by @pvh.ca and @inkandswitch.com at @localfirstconf.com
Lost a lot of respect for Kelley today. I think it’s simultaneously true that 1) OSS owes you nothing 2) slop is bad 3) devtool maintainers should have service attitude First, you should be very mistrustful of your own “you’re holding it wrong” statements. (contd.)
I’ve always felt more European than German, and more “of the Internet” than any real place I’m still a visitor of the USA (working on it), but this is the first place where I truly get to be myself. The first place that I want to help build. Today I’m coming out as American 🇺🇸
TLDR
Anselm Eickhoff@anselm.io · last mo.For his master's thesis, @siidorow.dev interviewed me about how @jazz.tools fits into the landscape of sync engines and local-first DBs. Now that it's published (congrats!) I can say that it is *the* most rigorous & precisely categorized overview of our field! PDF: aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/c...
For his master's thesis, @siidorow.dev interviewed me about how @jazz.tools fits into the landscape of sync engines and local-first DBs. Now that it's published (congrats!) I can say that it is *the* most rigorous & precisely categorized overview of our field! PDF: aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/c...
Fable @ high reasoning for hard questions & architecture & review + GPT 5.5 @ low reasoning for smart and fast implementation is an insane combo
I’ve found my personal reason to believe LLMs are intelligent: I’m (hand)writing a comprehensive spec for all of @jazz.tools and have Codex point out contradictions and gaps.
LLMs make it easier to both: - write less rigorous software - write more rigorous software than before. Both are valuable. It’s a fatal mistake to be confused about which mode you want to be in.
I wish people spent as much time imagining post scarcity in detail as they spend imagining doom. First you have to imagine it
Excellent post. As I find myself working more intensely than ever in my life, I take no pride in this. It is mainly the result of poor planning and hesitant decision making. The results don’t speak for themselves yet. I am striving to do more sane things, not more insane things x.com/willmanidis...
Will Manidis (@WillManidis) on X
On Grindslop
x.com
the way I tell the agent “fix CI” instead of writing provably correct software in the first place Dijkstra would smoke me on sight
Prediction: it’ll be normal to share your agent sessions with your colleagues. At the worst companies this will fuel the most toxic kind of micromanagement and impostor syndrome. At the best companies this will allow unprecedented sharing of implicit know-how + shipping speed.
After almost exclusively using Waymo for months I took a bunch of Ubers again recently (traveling/in a rush) and 70% of the rides sucked. - 3 drivers who do not understand regen breaking or don’t give a shit, resulting in sickening chaos speed changes for no reason (contd)
This tracks with everything I’ve seen. Nontechnical people and fresh programmers do not struggle with coding but with setup and deployment!! This has been true pre LLMs and is even more true now. x.com/grinich/sta...
Eventually, AI will prove “too useful to be hated” to the masses. In the meantime, early adopters can prove two extremely valuable things: 1) having a head start on the skill of working with AI 2) proving independence from prevalent ideology For women, 2) should count x2 x.com/visakanv/st...
Inventing a new social mannerism that lets you fork an IRL conversation three turns back
Every time someone swears on a different LLM model than me I find out that they have a different style of using it. Coding has always been a craft. Tool choices are famously tribal. But I think we’ll see an even clearer emergence of different “working styles” that people master
Beyond goblins, gpt 5.5 in codex is also just a poetic little quirk chungus. The phrases it invents during debugging make for a great album track list: 1. Chasing vibes in the fog 2. Yesterday’s ghost 3. The elephant in the hallway 4. Sneaky little liar 5. Reluctant morsels (contd.)
Building @jazz.tools v2 in public, Ep 3 Main learning: ground your LLMs in your concrete problem, build jigs, religiously optimize code iteration speed. The last couple days were more perf work, driven by a specific target that a commercial use case gave us.
Always cultivate your knowledge uncles. Yesterday I met a friend who wants to get into mech-interp and philosophy of AI. Which made me very happy because I have a great armchair interest in it, but know nothing about it.
Fluid migrations are one of the most novel features of @jazz.tools v2. Inspired by @inkandswitch.com’s Cambria paper, they re-imagine migrations: - not a stop-the-world global mutation - but bidirectional lenses (mappings) - translating between a pair of schema versions - that can be chained
Joe@joeinn.es · 3mo agoOne cool thing we're doing at @jazz.tools is reimagining migrations. Instead of migrating your data, you tell clients how to read it, inspired by @inkandswitch.com's Cambria paper. Last week I built this interactive diagram to show how it works. Check it out in our docs: jazz.tools/docs/schemas...
As promised, yapping more on @jazz.tools After launching the v2 alpha at React Miami our focus has been polish and perf, and there is a lot to do. Often, refactoring and nailing down semantics go hand in hand with performance.
My talk from @sync_conf 2025 is ready! Check it out to learn how: 1) CRDTs + cryptographic permissions work 2) @jazz.tools is now a general-purpose database 3) our unique Jazz Cloud infra compares to - traditional stacks - other sync engines - Durable Objects www.youtube.com/watch?v=wils...
Anselm Eickhoff (Jazz) - Oops, my sync engine has become a database
YouTube video by Local-First Conf
youtube.com