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...

Demystifying skills and MCPs

The 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...

blog.lawrencejones.dev

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@isolyth.dev · last wk.

YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BROUGHT TO YOU BY ANTHROPIC™

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...

We turned off Pub/Sub and nobody noticed | Blog | incident.io

Our 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...

incident.io

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

i will not be attending the Hasan Piker school walkout

Have been speaking with a load of companies adopting AI and there are some clear trends emerging. Written up my thoughts and predictions for those also trying to think ahead! incident.io/blog/eng-in-...

Engineering teams in 2027 | Blog | incident.io

A forward look at where engineering teams are heading with AI, based on conversations with design partners who are visibly six-to-twelve months ahead of the average. Tailored code agents, MCP gateways...

incident.io

It's really funny that now AI apps exist we've somehow retconned hand-written code as being 'organic'

the fool@agnoster.net · 4mo ago

This is an astrology app

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-...

Building AI skills like checklists

First-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...

blog.lawrencejones.dev

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...

Who's on call? How Claude helped us calculate this 2,500x faster | Blog | incident.io

A look at how on-call schedules work, and how we made rendering them 2,500× faster — through profiling, smarter algorithms, and some Claude.

incident.io

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…

It is upsetting that we literally have our own status page product and yet when I type ‘status’ into chrome the first suggestion is Anthropic 😭

Am speaking at ai.engineer Europe this Friday on "Fighting AI with AI" about how we use AI tooling internally at @incident.io to manage the complexity of building AI SRE. It's at 12:20pm in Fleming on the Coding Agents track for anyone who is around!

Don’t get this? Anthropic margin on inference is about 40% from various sources. Mostly aimed at @greybunny.bsky.social (original thread is locked) what makes you think this isn’t full price, whatever that means?

Just Some Grey Bunny@greybunny.bsky.social · 5mo ago

It's hilarious that you think you're paying full price.

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...

Quantization from the ground up | ngrok blog

A complete guide to what quantization is, how it works, and how it's used to compress large language models

ngrok.com

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.

I wrote about Kat.

Kat.

benhiiv.beehiiv.com

It’s upsetting how much working with AI destroys the nirvana of working on trains

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.

Opus 4.6 on fast mode is like… shit, I am for the first time worried about what I’m billing my employer 😭

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.

Been thinking about this a lot since Rory shared it in our channel.

Well this explains our bill

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/

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...

Building with AI | incident.io

Behind the scenes: Building an AI incident responder

incident.io

Kristian Glass@doismellburning.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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!

Adventures In DevOps@adventuresindevops.bsky.social · 11mo ago

The latest episode is out! Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks with @lawrencejones.dev from @incident.io . adventuresindevops.com/episodes/202...