James Cowling

@jamescowling.dev

@convex.dev co-founder/CTO. Dropbox storage designer. Distributed systems researcher at MIT. Bad motorcycle mechanic. Database shill.

Convex Chef supports Gemini 2.5 Pro! It's sometimes too verbose and occasionally forgets to call tools but produces way better UIs and seems able to build more fully-featured apps than Claude. Try it out!

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Remember when a beta label actually meant something then Gmail was beta for half a decade and ruined it for everyone? We just took a bunch of @convex.dev features out of beta. What's the point of long-term beta if customers depend on it already?

Your coding agent talking directly to your production database sounds sketchy as hell... unless it's via an MCP server on a db that supports sandboxed code execution, in which case it sounds cool af.

Sujay Jayakar@sujayakar.bsky.social · last yr.

@convex.dev now has an MCP server! the cursor AI agent can now list project's schema and API, read data from tables, and call functions. it's insane how good it is at gluing tool calls together. here's an example of it building a histogram of a message lengths in a chat app.

We launched Fullstack-Bench yesterday to test autonomous agent performance on fullstack coding tasks. Starting with Convex, FastAPI, Supabase but more backends to come. stack.convex.dev/introducing-... Three design patterns stood out at producing high quality code with minimal interventions: 🧵

Introducing Fullstack-Bench

Coding agents can do more autonomously when they write code that has tight, automatic feedback loops; use systems that express everything in standard,...

stack.convex.dev

Do you like TypeScript? Do you like databases? Do you like neither but just want to build apps using regular old functions? My @db.cs.cmu.edu talk on TypeScript Stored Procedures for app developers is online now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpgV...

Andy Pavlo@andypavlo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Do you hate SQL and wish it would just die? Or do you love SQL and wish it ran faster? If you answered 'yes' to either question then join our Spring 2025 @db.cs.cmu.edu Seminar Series: SQL or Death? Mondays @ 4:30pm via Zoom. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2025/

SQL or Death? Spring 2025 Seminar Series
Carnegie Mellon Database Group

We just launched self-hosted @convex.dev! We open sourced last year but realized the code was open but not so useful on its own. This time we've included the Convex dashboard, bindings for Postgres, SQLite (and MySQL v. soon), packaged up in a docker container ready for real use

CMU Databases talk streaming live 4:30EST Monday. Come learn how every good idea you have was already invented by someone in the 80s and why we should be running typescript functions in our databases. db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

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Andy Pavlo@andypavlo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Do you hate SQL and wish it would just die? Or do you love SQL and wish it ran faster? If you answered 'yes' to either question then join our Spring 2025 @db.cs.cmu.edu Seminar Series: SQL or Death? Mondays @ 4:30pm via Zoom. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2025/

SQL or Death? Spring 2025 Seminar Series
Carnegie Mellon Database Group

I used AI to write a script to help me write AI evals to help AI write Convex code. Very meta 💡Each step uses RAG from previous evals Flow: 1. 🧑‍💻oneliner -> 🤖 task description -> 🧑‍💻 audit 2. 🤖 answer ->🧑‍💻 audit 3. 🤖 tests for answer ->🧑‍💻 audit 🔗 to evals 👀 & my script in 🧵

GitHub - get-convex/convex-evals

Contribute to get-convex/convex-evals development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

A good design principle is APIs that look cheap should be cheap and APIs that are expensive should look expensive. One mistake we made in an old version of Dropbox was that directory moves looked cheap (drag a folder) but were expensive on the server (update metadata for every file in the tree).

If you want to get good building systems and databases you should go work for a bigger company or a startup with serious infra demands. It's hard to develop excellence thinking about scale, correctness and architecture in an environment where these aren't critical to the business

It's easy to roll your eyes at Company Values but hopefully you actually value *something*. A good set of values can have a huge enduring impact on decision-making at a company. I wrote a guide on the process I follow for picking values at a company stack.convex.dev/company-values

Company Values that Matter

A good set of values can be critically important in establishing a team that stands for something. This post outlines why company values are important...

stack.convex.dev