Lawrence Jones
@lawrencejones.dev
Engineer at https://incident.io/. Previously @GoCardless | Writes at http://blog.lawrencejones.dev | @lawrjones on Twitter
Pinned
Lawrence Jones
@lawrencejones.dev
· Mar 26
incident.io
incident.io is an all-in-one incident management platform unifying on-call scheduling, real-time incident response, and integrated status pages – helping teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtim...
incident.io
Yesterday we launched a microsite of stories from our AI team.
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
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...
incident.io/building-wit...
October 23, 2025 at 12:43 PM
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...
incident.io/building-wit...
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!
If you’re working on AI systems or incident response, I’d hope this is a worthwhile listen!
The latest episode is out!
Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks with @lawrencejones.dev from @incident.io .
adventuresindevops.com/episodes/202...
Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks with @lawrencejones.dev from @incident.io .
adventuresindevops.com/episodes/202...
Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks | Adventures in DevOps
Lawrence Jones reveals just how incident.io is automatically diagnosing production issues, talks about everything from running customer code on virtual machines to creating one-time runbooks for any i...
adventuresindevops.com
October 19, 2025 at 8:26 PM
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!
If you’re working on AI systems or incident response, I’d hope this is a worthwhile listen!
The amount of Lime bike green I can see in the London naked cycle photos is making me reconsider ebiking as a social good
June 15, 2025 at 11:08 AM
The amount of Lime bike green I can see in the London naked cycle photos is making me reconsider ebiking as a social good
Was fun changing our Old Street billboard to focus on eng hiring last Friday.
Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!
Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!
May 12, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Was fun changing our Old Street billboard to focus on eng hiring last Friday.
Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!
Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!
Wrote up a journey of optimising an LLM prompt for latency, reducing the time from 11s to just 2s by being careful with tokens.
Loads of lessons here for people working with AI!
incident.io/building-wit...
Loads of lessons here for people working with AI!
incident.io/building-wit...
Optimizing LLM prompts for low latency | Building with AI
When the time taken to execute a prompt becomes an issue, these strategies can optimize response latency without impacting prompt behaviour.
incident.io
April 8, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Wrote up a journey of optimising an LLM prompt for latency, reducing the time from 11s to just 2s by being careful with tokens.
Loads of lessons here for people working with AI!
incident.io/building-wit...
Loads of lessons here for people working with AI!
incident.io/building-wit...
Yesterday we launched a microsite of stories from our AI team.
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
incident.io
incident.io is an all-in-one incident management platform unifying on-call scheduling, real-time incident response, and integrated status pages – helping teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtim...
incident.io
March 26, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Yesterday we launched a microsite of stories from our AI team.
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
To my knowledge, it’s the best repository of genuinely useful AI engineering content on the internet to date.
I’m so proud of the team for this and can’t thank our designers enough for how amazing it looks.
incident.io/building-wit...
It's been great fun sharing our approach to AI with Gergely, born out of the last year hitting our heads against AI.
This is an awesome article that I'd encourage anyone building systems with generative AI to read!
Thank you for the feature!
This is an awesome article that I'd encourage anyone building systems with generative AI to read!
Thank you for the feature!
Staff engineer @lawrencejones.dev has been building impressive AI tooling systems for closer to a year - and, naturally, using AI coding tools as well.
His take on vibe coding:
"Vibes-driven-development inevitably becomes just bad vibes."
From: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...
His take on vibe coding:
"Vibes-driven-development inevitably becomes just bad vibes."
From: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...
March 25, 2025 at 6:26 PM
It's been great fun sharing our approach to AI with Gergely, born out of the last year hitting our heads against AI.
This is an awesome article that I'd encourage anyone building systems with generative AI to read!
Thank you for the feature!
This is an awesome article that I'd encourage anyone building systems with generative AI to read!
Thank you for the feature!
8 years ago Chris and I dealt with a horrible Postgres incident where RAID array battery failure was an extremely painful red herring.
Good to see he’s back in the game after all that time. These disks must really be something!
Good to see he’s back in the game after all that time. These disks must really be something!
Turns out modern disks are really fast when you put them with the rest of the computer instead of stranding them across a network.
PlanetScale Metal does just that, is already in use for serious workloads, and is available to everyone today.
planetscale.com/blog/announc...
PlanetScale Metal does just that, is already in use for serious workloads, and is available to everyone today.
planetscale.com/blog/announc...
Announcing PlanetScale Metal — PlanetScale
Database goes brrrrrrrrrrr.
planetscale.com
March 11, 2025 at 4:54 PM
8 years ago Chris and I dealt with a horrible Postgres incident where RAID array battery failure was an extremely painful red herring.
Good to see he’s back in the game after all that time. These disks must really be something!
Good to see he’s back in the game after all that time. These disks must really be something!
Sometimes I wonder how many burritos a week is too many burritos
March 2, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Sometimes I wonder how many burritos a week is too many burritos
How is this a thing
February 22, 2025 at 2:25 PM
How is this a thing
I have a package that’s been stuck in customs for a week.
Is there anything more irritating than a fedex tracker giving you zero info and saying “ETA Tuesday 11th 11am” when it’s now the next week 😂
Is there anything more irritating than a fedex tracker giving you zero info and saying “ETA Tuesday 11th 11am” when it’s now the next week 😂
February 18, 2025 at 11:57 AM
I have a package that’s been stuck in customs for a week.
Is there anything more irritating than a fedex tracker giving you zero info and saying “ETA Tuesday 11th 11am” when it’s now the next week 😂
Is there anything more irritating than a fedex tracker giving you zero info and saying “ETA Tuesday 11th 11am” when it’s now the next week 😂
Crazy to me that people can say this when ChatGPT/Claude/etc have hundreds of millions of daily active users.
I have not once ever had a use for a blockchain payment. All my colleagues use AI daily.
What is making people so resistant to seeing this?
I have not once ever had a use for a blockchain payment. All my colleagues use AI daily.
What is making people so resistant to seeing this?
I can promise you AI is a grift. It's not to say someday we won't figure out how to make artificial intelligence, but LLMs are basically just blockchain 2.0. With blockchain most serious companies saw how useless the technology was and didn't bother. But with AI they couldn't due to uncertainty. 1/2
February 16, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Crazy to me that people can say this when ChatGPT/Claude/etc have hundreds of millions of daily active users.
I have not once ever had a use for a blockchain payment. All my colleagues use AI daily.
What is making people so resistant to seeing this?
I have not once ever had a use for a blockchain payment. All my colleagues use AI daily.
What is making people so resistant to seeing this?
Was playing with some CI build time improvements yesterday and booting big old machines is something I will always enjoy.
96 cores go brrrrrr
96 cores go brrrrrr
February 13, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Was playing with some CI build time improvements yesterday and booting big old machines is something I will always enjoy.
96 cores go brrrrrr
96 cores go brrrrrr
The average AI product experience is bad right now, and it’s because teams haven’t figured it out how to build with these tools yet.
Building a prototype is 10% of the effort. The rest of the journey is uncharted waters and can be a real struggle.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/ai-mvp/
Building a prototype is 10% of the effort. The rest of the journey is uncharted waters and can be a real struggle.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/ai-mvp/
Beyond the AI MVP: What it really takes
The gap between demo-ready AI products and production-grade systems is much larger than most realise. This post explains the four stages of AI product maturity, what tooling you actually need to build...
blog.lawrencejones.dev
February 2, 2025 at 10:50 AM
The average AI product experience is bad right now, and it’s because teams haven’t figured it out how to build with these tools yet.
Building a prototype is 10% of the effort. The rest of the journey is uncharted waters and can be a real struggle.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/ai-mvp/
Building a prototype is 10% of the effort. The rest of the journey is uncharted waters and can be a real struggle.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/ai-mvp/
Gotten into the habit of getting AI to check my code piece-by-piece as I build systems.
Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed.
Can't recommend this enough!
Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed.
Can't recommend this enough!
January 27, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Gotten into the habit of getting AI to check my code piece-by-piece as I build systems.
Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed.
Can't recommend this enough!
Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed.
Can't recommend this enough!
This was a fun chat about how we're building an AI incident responder, which:
- Checks your Grafana dashboards
- Looks at recent PRs
- Finds past incidents like this one
And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂
- Checks your Grafana dashboards
- Looks at recent PRs
- Finds past incidents like this one
And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂
January 23, 2025 at 4:44 PM
This was a fun chat about how we're building an AI incident responder, which:
- Checks your Grafana dashboards
- Looks at recent PRs
- Finds past incidents like this one
And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂
- Checks your Grafana dashboards
- Looks at recent PRs
- Finds past incidents like this one
And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂
It’s really important to remember when anyone speaks about DOGE that this is the person leading it.
Just keep that in mind when the next tech bro says how ‘excited’ they are about the mission.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Just keep that in mind when the next tech bro says how ‘excited’ they are about the mission.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally
Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump
www.theguardian.com
January 20, 2025 at 9:53 PM
It’s really important to remember when anyone speaks about DOGE that this is the person leading it.
Just keep that in mind when the next tech bro says how ‘excited’ they are about the mission.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Just keep that in mind when the next tech bro says how ‘excited’ they are about the mission.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
We've got a new game at work "Cold Case Mysteries" where people submit a picture of their fridge and then we all guess who it is.
I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.
I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.
January 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM
We've got a new game at work "Cold Case Mysteries" where people submit a picture of their fridge and then we all guess who it is.
I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.
I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.
Kinda weird to see Zuck aping the behavior that lost Elon tens of millions of Twitter users.
Makes me wonder what and how strong the incentive has to be for him to do something so actively against the top-line business interest.
Makes me wonder what and how strong the incentive has to be for him to do something so actively against the top-line business interest.
January 13, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Kinda weird to see Zuck aping the behavior that lost Elon tens of millions of Twitter users.
Makes me wonder what and how strong the incentive has to be for him to do something so actively against the top-line business interest.
Makes me wonder what and how strong the incentive has to be for him to do something so actively against the top-line business interest.
Keep making eye contact with this weirdo across my desk and it’s kinda freaking me out
January 10, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Keep making eye contact with this weirdo across my desk and it’s kinda freaking me out
I just remembered a fun SRE interview we used to run where we’d break a VM in several ways and share an ssh session with the candidate to pair on fixing it.
Lots of how we’d break the machine are no longer relevant today. Crazy how fast this stuff moves on.
Lots of how we’d break the machine are no longer relevant today. Crazy how fast this stuff moves on.
January 6, 2025 at 9:09 PM
I just remembered a fun SRE interview we used to run where we’d break a VM in several ways and share an ssh session with the candidate to pair on fixing it.
Lots of how we’d break the machine are no longer relevant today. Crazy how fast this stuff moves on.
Lots of how we’d break the machine are no longer relevant today. Crazy how fast this stuff moves on.
Is the only issue I have with BlueSky: certain parts have extremely strong group-think.
This is automating looking at the first few hits on Google nothing about it is ‘privacy breaching’ but because it’s AI and on X everyone wants to pile in.
This is automating looking at the first few hits on Google nothing about it is ‘privacy breaching’ but because it’s AI and on X everyone wants to pile in.
Ya'll, the Grok update is actually SIGNIFICANTLY worse than just summarizing your Twitter account. My twitter account is locked and private, but I typed in "Summary of @TierganVashir" into Grok and it found info on me from 25 other websites including Tumblr.
January 6, 2025 at 6:57 AM
Is the only issue I have with BlueSky: certain parts have extremely strong group-think.
This is automating looking at the first few hits on Google nothing about it is ‘privacy breaching’ but because it’s AI and on X everyone wants to pile in.
This is automating looking at the first few hits on Google nothing about it is ‘privacy breaching’ but because it’s AI and on X everyone wants to pile in.
Guys this whole 12 day thing is a terrible idea, this tree was emotionally load bearing 😭
January 5, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Guys this whole 12 day thing is a terrible idea, this tree was emotionally load bearing 😭
Reposted by Lawrence Jones
Folks need to understand this.
Pornhub is absolutely in the right here. They are blocking states who require this because they don't want to be responsible for your PI data! They do not NEED that info to provide their service, so collecting and maintaining it is inherently privacy violating!
Pornhub is absolutely in the right here. They are blocking states who require this because they don't want to be responsible for your PI data! They do not NEED that info to provide their service, so collecting and maintaining it is inherently privacy violating!
pornhub is blocked in 17 states because 17 state governments are demanding that you upload your face and identifying information to a privately held company that may or may not sell that data to the highest bidder and pornhub believes that is a violation of your rights.
January 2, 2025 at 1:04 AM
Folks need to understand this.
Pornhub is absolutely in the right here. They are blocking states who require this because they don't want to be responsible for your PI data! They do not NEED that info to provide their service, so collecting and maintaining it is inherently privacy violating!
Pornhub is absolutely in the right here. They are blocking states who require this because they don't want to be responsible for your PI data! They do not NEED that info to provide their service, so collecting and maintaining it is inherently privacy violating!
I wrote some reflections on 2024 focusing on my experience at incident and everything that went by.
Now the third year I’ve done this, hoping to make it a tradition.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/2024/
Now the third year I’ve done this, hoping to make it a tradition.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/2024/
Looking back at 2024
From reliability engineering to wrestling with LLMs, my fourth year at incident.io pushed me harder than I'd expected. We launched On-call, weathered some tough times as a team, and I ended the year d...
blog.lawrencejones.dev
January 2, 2025 at 10:33 AM
I wrote some reflections on 2024 focusing on my experience at incident and everything that went by.
Now the third year I’ve done this, hoping to make it a tradition.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/2024/
Now the third year I’ve done this, hoping to make it a tradition.
blog.lawrencejones.dev/2024/