X Stats

Login Sign Up
@tonyennis

Tony Ennis

@tonyennis

4,360 Tweets
2,743 Following
2,723 Followers

Building software teams & mobile apps Prev: Built a bank in Asia YC S21

Filtered by topic: Tech Philosophy & Takes ✕ Clear filter
Date ↓ Tweet ❤️ 🔄 💬 👁 📝
Jan 02 Just Shipped OnePageTime A single page to make sure you're spending your time wisely - Visualize where your time is going - Zero learning curve or advanced features, just start tracking - 100% Free - Use signed out (or sign in to save your data) https://t.co/RzZnd7wFXr https://t.co/TBvYWpAvOI 3 1 0 275 297 .
Jan 02 Hume Health scale is unusable out of the box, app wont get past the Bluetooth connection screen. Don’t buy one 4 0 0 216 110 .
Jan 01 The hardest part of vibe coding as an experienced developer is the whiplash You go from traveling 100km/hr to slowing to snail's pace, on a constant loop. Needs a certain kind of stamina/temperament 0 0 0 116 202 .
Jan 01 Struggling to square this with my extreme bullishness on Alphabet after listening to the acquired pod https://t.co/ZxfIPk8Heq 0 0 0 200 126 .
Dec 31 @josevalim hey! I mainly code on a live url while ssh'ed into a vm - am I correct in saying the recent upgrade forbids this? 0 0 0 0 124 .
Dec 31 🤦‍♂️ @cursor_ai in built browser is not very good https://t.co/lSB55cavww 1 0 0 203 73 .
Dec 29 Just open sourced a Claude Code <> Slack bridge so you can run Claude in a VM and get it to do stuff without ssh'ing. There are other libraries but none had the features I wanted. Reeeally liking this single file approach - feels like it speeds things up a lot - took about 2 hours to vibe code with Claude Code. https://t.co/Ykl0gXw3Cd 6 0 0 422 340 .
Dec 29 Having a lot of fun turning Claude Code into a real assistant - Gave Claude Code it's own VM ✓ - Connected Roam -> G Drive in real time ✓ - Connected G Drive -> Cloud Claude ✓ - Connected Cloud Claude to Slack ✓ 0 0 0 415 217 .
Dec 24 @fractaledmind One of my 2026 goals was to “lean into html on Twitter”. I fear you may have beaten me to it 😅 2 0 0 0 109 .
Dec 22 From our team's Granola Wrapped 😅 I may have finally arrived at the lifestyle I set out to build. https://t.co/rg6kWb6zVa 4 0 0 212 123 .
Dec 20 I keep seeing these charts of engineering task that take LLMs 4.5 hours to complete, but no one ever says what the task is or if it’s things that are actually useful. 3 0 0 434 166 .
Dec 20 The future of frontend engineering is in having in-depth knowledge of CSS, not having in-depth knowledge of javascript. 0 0 0 146 119 .
Dec 17 @fractaledmind @rikschennink Gotcha! Maybe one day when I ditch my puritanistic ways and go back to having a build step 😅 enjoyed your most recent thread 1 0 0 0 153 .
Nov 27 @hunvreus From what I’ve observed people who like parallel agents work more in codebases that require a lot of boilerplate and where backend/frontend is separate, haven’t seen any rails folks talking about them for example 1 0 0 0 222 .
Nov 27 @StartupArchive_ @george__mack great one for the high agency list 0 0 0 0 65 .
Nov 21 @thatguybg Genuinely a banger 1 0 0 0 29 .
Nov 20 @RaulOnRails @shl Solely GitHub yup, apparently they trained on a bunc of labelled data but I’d guess you could do a decent job with a decent prompt 0 0 0 0 148 .
Nov 20 @RaulOnRails @shl More like this https://t.co/oTKSaQevya 1 0 0 0 56 .
Nov 20 @RaulOnRails @shl Thanks! Not exactly what I'm looking for. Weave has a feature were they calculate an "output score" for every commit/PR, which his based on effort & impact - use case for me isn't daily check in - it's end of week/month seeing if we focused on high impact work https://t.co/QEwbfRrO4C 1 0 0 0 306 .
Nov 20 Linear is a tool that works well for a certain type of team, which is IMO <5% of software teams. Most teams should not use Linear. 0 0 0 163 135 .
Nov 19 Is anyone building basic AI-powered engineering analytics (scan commits, figure out how much effort/impact is required, give it a score, see charts on per developer basis) that's not exorbitantly expensive? 3 0 1 347 206 .
Nov 11 @prisencotech @htmx_org Geo replication for both app&db is a much heavier lift (maintenance & cost wise) than a shimmer effect and link activation though. 0 0 0 0 162 .
Nov 11 @prisencotech @htmx_org My solution to this isn’t a js framework btw, but I’d reach for hx-indicator adding a shimmer effect to the main div, and another js snippet that gives the active class to the clicked link, before id reach for view transitions 2 0 0 0 250 .
Nov 11 @prisencotech @htmx_org I agree 100% with that last statement, ultimately it comes down to how it feels. If my app server takes 20ms to return the page, but when I test on hotel WiFi in SF and server’s in Europe, if there’s any latency at all (there will be) it feels slower than SPAs, and that’s where… 2 0 0 0 303 .
Nov 11 @htmx_org I think view transitions are less exciting than they seem because they have to wait for the network so they always feel slow, they were one of the only disappointments in my research for the bsdc talk, kind of a red herring for now at least 2 0 0 0 250 .
Nov 11 @WisprFlow I can't get the fn key on my Logitech keyboard to trigger Wispr Flow, is that a known issue? This is what Claude's telling me https://t.co/YQLp7vExFW 0 0 0 0 160 .
Nov 11 There's a massive opportunity to build an AI-powered messaging app on top of the Matrix protocol. So much context can be inferred from chat, and sending & staying on top of dms is an actually-useful AI use case. 2 0 1 313 217 .
Nov 09 @Liv_Boeree @r00k @spicyliltoaster Really? Nurturer + health-conscious + optimist + funny + east coast + high-openness - they don't seem like traits that are anti-correlative. What makes you think that's a unicorn? genuinely curious https://t.co/3skv6QbMwV 0 0 0 0 256 .
Nov 09 Them: "Which do you prefer? Alpine, react, or stimulus?" Me: "Yes" 1 0 0 337 67 .
Nov 07 @michaelque22 Various companies that handle this. Adapty will give you the money up front for 1% interest if you use their platform. You switch the bank account on App Store Connect, they pay you up front, the apple payout goes to them and they forward anything remaining to you 4 0 0 0 278 .
Nov 06 @iamgdsa Love market-product fit 1 0 0 0 32 .
Nov 04 @maxjanderson Have you used the product? This is a great example of a “looks smart but is actually retarded” tweet 3 0 0 0 114 .
Nov 04 @jackfriks Agree 100%. He missed step 0: make something genuinely good - high quality design - brand/ui/ux, good feature breadth and depth. Something that users feel justified in shelling out for. Even if retention is bad at the beggining as you’re figuring out the right mechanics, people… 1 0 0 0 290 .
Nov 01 A lot of people talk about products as though there’s some kind of perfect-information marketplace where everyone can come and buy the one-version of particular idea, and you need to be first to make the idea to secure the shelf space. But that’s just not how it works at all 2 0 0 321 275 .
Nov 01 Lots of talk that Apple missed Ai. And Siri is a truly awful product. But they still own the OS of 1.5b mobile consumers and growing, and have several years to learn from others early consumer AI experiments & release something incredible. I think they probably will https://t.co/evqlyUwxgg 2 0 0 147 294 .
Oct 28 This matches my own general intuition that consciousness ain’t that special. Our brains got big enough to assign symbols to stuff, which was physical stuff first but then we started assigning words to non physical stuff like emotions and systems, and we stopped noticing the difference between words that represent real things and words that represent non-physical-things, and terms like “consciousness”, which is not attached to the physical world, became so vague as to assume a kind of magical quality. At some point we learned how to use language inside our heads, and gained the belief that the voice we “hear” as we do that is our “self”. Combine that belief with a recursive loop of observing and narrating, and you have an emergent thing. That’s not to say human consciousness isn’t *different* to silicon consciousness, or that we should treat silicon consciousness with the same reverence that we do human, but it does feel like comparing flying - birds can do it or planes can do it, but it’s still flying. 3 0 0 388 1k .
Oct 28 @lottsnomad I thought that too and then @faith_alqah sent me a 100 screen Figma and we built it anyway and it turned out she was right (about this one) I think a big reason why people convert and it’s rated so well is because the app feels reasonably well finished and substantial, which I’m… 1 0 0 0 292 .
Oct 26 Still haven't found a way to reliably get good AI inside of slack. Claude's own implementation is so bad you'd wonder how anyone ok'd it for shipping. https://t.co/rH8CXuv6H0 0 0 0 192 174 .
Oct 26 Two ingredients to a coming explosion in actually-useful browser agent products: 1. The Browser Agents getting good enough 2. Building the UI/UX scaffolding around it It sounds like hubris but I genuinely think we're furthest along on #2 of anyone I've seen. Just waiting for a breakthrough in #1 and I can feel it coming 3 0 1 281 323 .
Oct 26 Two ingredients to a coming explosion in actually-useful browser agent products: 1. The Browser Agents getting good enough 2. Building the UI/UX scaffolding around it It sounds like hubris but I genuinely think we're furthest along on #2. Just waiting for a breakthrough in #1… 0 0 0 0 279 .
Oct 21 These guys have a ton of twitter hype and spent last week announcing new features on here, but their app literally doesn't work. Their support email basically told me "Works for us" Sign of the times 🤡 https://t.co/jiuiN6fx6J 2 0 0 238 226 .
Oct 13 Ryan himself wondered about this back in May, and don’t think Remix 3 really disproved this hunch. If you’re on react and thinking “how can I improve the ratio of complexity:value”, there’s more value in going full offline first than in using a slightly better React, IMO https://t.co/oheqhHL0x2 1 0 0 409 295 .
Oct 10 I'm slowly changing my mind on how much more value we can squeeze out of AI with the current architecture (LLMs). Human inquiry/reasoning has multiple steps - we have a "hunch", then we get our thoughts out of our heads and verify them (e.g. writing an article or writing a maths proof). Then there's a loop as our reasoning modifies the original premise until it becomes logically coherent. LLMs are already very good at the "hunch" phase. But we expect the base model to also do the verification step and come out fully formed. Surely it's better to just treat that phase separately and run it through the same loop *after* it comes out of the model? 2 0 0 467 654 .
Oct 07 If I keep recommending @magicpatterns to people maybe one day they'll build the feature that let's me use my own css-based design system 🤞 https://t.co/Pl3Cc12bCJ 2 0 1 193 162 .
Oct 03 @bradgessler @37signals 👋 not using Hotwire native, built our own on react native but using rails web views & sending html over the wire. One app with hundreds of 5 star ratings, another launching soon 7 0 0 0 205 .
Sep 30 "How do you manage 8 dev teams at the same time?" Every morning: Headphones on, read updates, make loom responses for 30m, then jump on call with whoever needs a deeper dive. + Plus super talented team + Plus 3+ years of experiments + Plus clear guidelines on how to build https://t.co/Xy9LUG221Z 7 0 0 426 299 .
Sep 24 .@Cloudflare if you're interested in saving users time, why not fix the load speed of literally every screen in the web app, which takes 3 to 5 seconds to fully hydrate? https://t.co/5JobwT1XBu 1 0 0 263 193 .
Sep 21 Currently run 4 “production” websites like this. If I have an idea for something I want to change, I jump into cursor, hit save, change is live. Can’t do everything this way, but for your personal website, for example, works remarkably well 3 1 0 495 240 .
Sep 20 @raagulanpathy I want to root for you guys and recommend you, but this is incredibly dumb. “This merchant” = one of the biggest banks in Europe, and “We currently have restrictions in place…” when all other fintechs do it no prob https://t.co/LxjsfbXHnG 0 0 0 0 253 .
Sep 15 @thekitze The full timeline ain’t played out yet https://t.co/9t8bOkUxBP 53 1 0 0 72 .
Sep 14 @seflless @interaction The whole product is inside an imessage chat yeah - very cool 2 0 0 0 84 .
Sep 13 Apple are so good at marketing they can make you care about 17 hairs worth of a difference https://t.co/xRhYhe9Raa 0 0 0 252 114 .
Sep 11 Pretty gnarly phishing attempt just now - one of the best I've seen, had zero immediate suspicion when I got the email but eyebrow was raised when it linked straight to an app, then checked the address. https://t.co/gHlGPC6rqw 5 0 4 470 226 .
Sep 11 @juliapintar If you're not on RSS you're still missing from a quarter of listeners 😁 https://t.co/fSgG6bitwM 0 0 0 0 108 .
Sep 11 @juliapintar Love this! Might be in a minority but I use a podcast app (Castro) which doesn’t list it. Any tips on how I can find it? 0 0 0 0 133 .
Aug 29 @kyrylosilin Nice, I fully agree! Built https://t.co/NESs4jkTw4 to solve the build step problem, and building a css starter that goes with it 2 0 0 0 141 .
Aug 28 I live close to the airport so I get a string of cancelled rides, then have to apologise (I feel genuinely bad) about a 10 euro trip where they’re giving 4 to the airport and 2 to the taxi app. Gross 0 0 0 130 199 .
Aug 28 *so* many examples of this in smaller populations where everyone's afraid to upset the status quo. If two friends blow up and never talk again, it’s usually because they never learned how to have productive conflict. This is also prob why it’s so hard to make friends as adults 2 0 1 337 278 .
Aug 27 I feel this way too - something about the simplicity of just including a blob of html that always has me coming back to it 0 0 0 244 122 .
Aug 27 Side point: - Giving-a-shit declines when responsibility is distributed across many people, which means... - Every additional new leader/owner added, reduces how much each one gives-a-shit, which means... - To build a great singular product experience, the optimal management system is much closer to (benevolent) autocracy than democracy - than most people think. 5 0 1 184 364 .
Aug 23 @mikker Did this for many years but the lack of a UI annoyed me enough that I switched everything to Hatchbox, which I know couldn't switch back from 0 0 0 0 149 .
Aug 22 This came through! Thank you for retweets, i will be attending railsworld after all! 1 0 0 483 84 .
Aug 19 @bebraw Yeah - I think it might be possible to break the vibe coding -> production software barrier by radically eliminating complexity and adding constraints 1 0 0 0 161 .
Aug 19 Just had to let another otherwise-good developer go because they said they'd rather leave than figure out how to get better (with super clear feedback). Sometimes when you remove ambiguity the reality is that many people simply don't want to do the work - and much more common at senior level 6 0 1 345 294 .
Aug 18 New Talk: "The Platform & A Stylesheet" Covered: 1) The (insane) progress in the last few years and what you can now do with HTML (popovers, modals, styled selects and more), and.. 2) Some ideas to bring the browser closer to handling things we take for granted in SPAs 👇 https://t.co/4uz7FtPA70 10 0 0 269 275 .
Aug 17 “Guinness with a splash of blackcurrant” was a fave with my grandparents, similar vibes 3 0 0 307 87 .
Aug 15 @levelsio @david_perell I've also seen that (and I'm Irish and normalized levels of drinking there is IMO crazy). I think culturally vilifying *heavy binging* is good/reasonable and might in some cases discourage the circumstances where spiralling happens, but vilifying *all alcohol consumption* is bad… 0 0 0 0 304 .
Aug 15 @joebell_ @tailwindcss (I’m a big tailwind fan and have been using it for years), but I think “create a component for every large group of classes” has big limitations especially outside a component-friendly framework like react, and I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought those limitations would ever… 0 0 0 0 300 .
Aug 15 @joebell_ @tailwindcss <div class=“spinner text-blue”> where the spinner class is already on its own lower layer and text-blue is on the utilities layer, but the spinner class may not have been written with tailwind, follows the grain of the web and is less code (but it doesn’t purely use tailwind).… 0 0 0 0 307 .
Aug 15 @joebell_ @tailwindcss Joe I've followed you for a long time & respect you a lot. I'm sure you realize you're effectively re-creating cascading & native CSS specificity here, and as Adam mentions it also doesn't always work. At what point do you think it makes sense to simply not-use-tailwind for all… 0 0 0 0 310 .
Aug 15 @adrianthedev That’s how I ended up doing it too! The YouTube Vanbuild rabbit hole goes deep. I may do one when I’ve got it to where I want it - have only done a few trips on it. 1 0 0 0 178 .
Aug 15 @adrianthedev I’ve had 2 - first one did the initial build but the finish was bad, second one fixed it up. It’s taken 2 years and my takeaway has been I should probably learn to be more handy so I can do this stuff myself. But most recent van guy did the couch/desk unit which I’m v happy with 0 0 0 0 293 .
Aug 13 @jeffwhelpley @ChrisEsplin I like that way of framing it. I would largely use the approach you mentioned if those were my goals for sure - in particular Cloudflare. I went down a deep rabbit hole of building a site optimizer that would inline CSS and a bunch of other optimizations when doing e-commerce… 1 0 0 0 304 .
Aug 13 @jeffwhelpley @ChrisEsplin Thanks Jeff! I'm talking about web apps specifically (so I'm assuming behind a login). But while I have you - let's say I do load a 70kb (gzipped) blocking css file on a website - to what extent will google search penalize me for stats that look like this? https://t.co/6dVPsD5swS 0 0 0 0 307 .
Aug 13 An example: Tailwind Lite is 68kb gzipped. Yes that's "70kb of blocking CSS", but it's also the vast majority of all the classes your app will need, full stop. Seems extremely reasonable to me. 0 0 0 217 193 .
Aug 12 Yeah. If you're a decent founder you generally work quite hard and think a lot about customer-desires. If you can force yourself into that mindset as an employee, and be ok with 30% of your work being dull/frustrating - you're already miles ahead of others - doesn't have to require long hours - simple not easy. 2 0 1 367 312 .
Aug 12 Gonna have to rename this - @tailwindcss folks understandably don't want to create confusion. New website/name on the way this weekend 2 0 0 201 134 .
Aug 12 It's really a shame how quickly "skill issue" went from useful concept to term used to weasel out of making a good argument. Basically let's people get away with rebutting as a 7 year old would. 2 0 0 225 194 .
Aug 12 As an aside - simple sinatra codebase hooked in to Hatchbox is so nice - 10 seconds from git push to live. 2 0 0 195 106 .
Aug 07 cc @colmtuite 1 0 1 103 13 .
Aug 07 I should issue a retraction here. These are much more common than "at the OS level and some native apps" - I haven't used one in a long time, but I've noticed them around a lot more now they're on my radar, to be fair. 2 0 1 354 218 .
Jul 31 Recruiting is a great example of the limits of structured data - I remember when the internet was taking off and there was lots of talk about how middle men like recruiters and real estate agents were dust, because now everyone had “perfect information”. There’s no such thing as perfect information. There are enormous databases listing skills, experiences and qualifications for hundreds of millions of people. And yet hiring for knowledge work is still a complete black box. Many making the same mistake when it comes to AI 1 0 0 243 526 .
Jul 26 @colmtuite I'd take the opposite side of that bet (>50% of web apps use multi level dropdowns). 1 0 0 0 100 .
Jul 26 @colmtuite Figma was the one that sprang to mind. I'd put all of those apps (linear, notion, slack, messenger) in a particular category - don't have the language but something that approximates massive surface area/huge company and extremely high interactivity. So fair - my original… 0 0 0 0 284 .
Jul 22 @colmtuite 😂 many such cases 0 0 0 0 28 .
Jul 22 Hot take: It should not be legal to run a consumer facing middle man business and not hold responsibility for the end product. Side point: The on demand apps have the leech-iest business models. Capture the customer, provide nothing more than a UI, squeeze the service provider https://t.co/ZwgsU4aogI 1 0 1 481 302 .
Jul 22 @adamwathan preact standalone? 0 0 0 0 30 .
Jul 22 Git workflows are still one of the biggest barriers to agentic coding. @gitbutler has been working on tech for years that just so happens to solve the problem beautifully. Love this 3 0 0 314 181 .
Jul 20 @kingsley_kelly @Replit Sure but that’s not the point I was making. If you use replit it very quickly feels like the people building it don’t actually use it themselves, because there are so many obvious first-run things to be addressed. Case in point it took a super high profile person tweeting about… https://t.co/DN8ARv8rZ3 0 0 0 0 327 .
Jul 14 @robotiguy Most of our codebases (except for you guys 😁) aren't written in javascript, so it's just not something we need. It's an optional addition which many developers prefer and which is particularly useful in large js heavy codebases with many contributors (keeps things organised).… 1 0 0 0 288 .
Jul 14 We have 10+ codebases with no typescript and AI can reliably contribute perfectly fine but thanks 3 0 1 379 97 .
Jul 02 @wycats I find this thread confusing - it doesn’t really explain how an MCP server scoped to one user’s account could actually access the transfer_app function on another account, and kind of implies that it was too confusing to even figure out (spent days, had to disable). Is there… 1 0 0 0 284 .
Jul 02 JavaScript developers man Very little discussion about the trade offs or when adding a new obfuscation layer makes sense, just dogmatic “here’s the newest best practice that everyone should be using” 4 0 2 398 200 .
Jul 02 There's a building in Amsterdam that looks like a big @kit office. Today I remembered ConvertKit are remote - turns out it's a museum that has an almost identical logo - very confusing. https://t.co/d8qnJ7RUSt 1 0 0 232 209 .
Jul 02 😂 Imagine being a brand designer when every startup is obsessed with the same color palette. https://t.co/S1ViRPHC39 1 0 0 144 116 .
Jun 27 What’s hilarious is this was my exact qualm when I went to America. Every app - DoorDash, Uber, Airbnb, https://t.co/LqhEbk4rly - you see one price and then when you check out it’s 30% higher. What places/countries are people visiting in Europe with this problem? 1 0 0 373 263 .
Jun 26 This is one of the best finished AI products I’ve seen - the conversation tone, personality, the way the AI guides the chat - you can tell it wasn’t just “let’s just wire together the APIs and get it out there”. The app also gets the important details right. Very impressive 1 0 2 463 274 .
Jun 26 @GitBookIO @mintlify Thanks for the response - the use case is showing live examples of our components (it's a css library) - I looked through the integrations but I don't think there's anything there. I'll keep my eyes peeled for an iframe block, thanks! 0 0 0 0 255 .
Jun 24 @Replit Workflows, run commands, nixfiles. None of it works out of the box, no feedback on what's happening, preview still displays old (cached?) version https://t.co/7o9B7oujba 0 0 0 112 177 .
Jun 24 I was an early fan of and believer in @replit but nowadays whenever I use it I always end up sinking at least an hour into debugging - it's a great example of a product that feels the opposite of delightful/polished. Such a shame 4 0 5 413 229 .
Showing 1-100 of 1458 tweets
← Prev 1 2 ... 15 Next →