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@tonyennis

Tony Ennis

@tonyennis

4,412 Tweets
2,743 Following
2,723 Followers

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

Date ↓ Tweet ❤️ 🔄 💬 👁 📝
Jun 14 The more I read anecdotes on this, the less I trust the US and people like Sacks on AI. No one has defined what “jailbreak” means in this context, and as the AI czar it’s pretty important to understand and be able to communicate (with other AI companies and the public) 1 0 0 172 269 .
Jun 12 This 100% - I am *baffled* by all the "I just leave my agent running for hours/overnight and come back to finished software" - there's no way that can create good software, is there? 3 0 1 169 182 .
Jun 12 I think a lot of people - myself included - use twitter as their "cynicism release valve", and as a result come across much more grumpy than they are IRL. Watching @thekitze go from moderately cynical but still entertaining - to as of recent - unabashed criticism and negativity - is a cautionary tale in what happens when you lean into it too much. 0 0 0 91 349 .
Jun 10 Sinertia Sinatra on the backend, activerecord for ORM, preact on the frontend, inertia in the middle - is my go-to stack for AI assisted coding - Super fast to generate - Close to zero ambiguity - Power of a real backend language - Extremely easy to code review - Rarely breaks - Apps feel extremely snappy 💯 2 0 1 174 313 .
Jun 10 Doing a lot of hardening of several largely-vibecoded features and the thing that keeps biting me is the *fallbacks* - instead of just raising an error there'll be some weird conditional that tries to get data from somewhere else - not sure how to prompt this away, seems to be something that both claude & openai do 0 0 1 90 316 .
Jun 06 Still using all three - Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex - on a day to day basis - Codex 5.3 spark for iterating on UI & simple backend - Claude Code (in the Codex app terminal) for when things get architectural - Cursor for when I need to drop down and explore things myself. 0 0 1 208 279 .
Jun 01 The *moment* we broke our single-ruby-codebase out into a control plane and a runner, claude code (Opus 4.7) became close to useless - not able to follow a chain of connections when diagnosing and fixing - modifying files-in-place, not syncing or restarting - basically no theory of how changes flow through the system whatsoever 1 0 1 176 329 .
Jun 01 @pewdiepie enters the chat https://t.co/3Vcw2yFuBV 0 0 0 82 50 .
May 28 How you know it's possible for the majority to be wrong 😝 https://t.co/6bz5y5Ers2 1 0 0 140 82 .
May 27 Hot Take: 90% of people using these models are building simple web software with a backend, which has low *fundamental* complexity - the high *incidental* complexity is what makes them need expensive models. Put another way - choose a simpler stack with a clear canon & you'll be able to build to your heart's content and save 95% to 99% on models. 3 0 0 779 350 .
May 27 Absolute State of the Art speed wise for LLM assisted software dev: A single file sinatra backend driven by codex-5.3-spark (on the $200 month plan) at 1000 tokens/second. I'm not sure it can get much better than this. Thanks @sama @thsottiaux https://t.co/fstwviBuUN 3 0 1 377 267 .
May 24 Funny seeing people's reactions to this. For the average person, this is obviously a completely hysterical way to think. The thing is that these types of pods have us all convinced that everyone should aim to be top .01% in terms of output, success, lifestyle etc - that's what these guys are. They know well that 99% of their listeners aren't going to have the level of commitment & lifestyle that they do, and so 99% of people shouldn't approach life with this level of neuroticism, but they can't say that because it breaks the everyman illusion that these folks are just like (me, the average listener). They can't really say "You can be top 1% successful & wealthy whilst drinking, but to be top .01% you have to be more committed, like us" cos that sounds douche-y, so instead they act as though everyone should avoid alcohol no matter what their goals, which obviously sounds even dumber. 37 1 30 14.6k 899 .
May 23 This shit is exhausting. Switched to Codex because 5.3 spark & @thekitze said the remote ssh stuff was better than cursor, but they have the same bugs as the others - in this case upgraded my account but somehow the conversation stays locked to "you've hit your usage limit" https://t.co/YLRTNKVWe0 2 0 0 261 302 .
May 23 Claude Code's AskUserQuestion tool in my experience 9/10 times is less useful than just asking the questions conversationally 3 0 1 293 125 .
May 22 Someone... didn't think through the UX here https://t.co/kv01h9D92w 1 0 2 169 67 .
May 19 4 months from this tweet to Viktor going mega viral - they are now the Lovable of the category. In the mean time we built an almost identical product (Gigabrain) but added far more web features on top, which was probably unnecessary in hindsight. Anyway, now the Viktor folks are out of the gates it’s time to get after them - in the same way there were multiple 9 figure revenue vibe coding companies, there will be multiple “ai co worker” companies too. I expect to be tweeting less about random dev stuff and a lot more about Gigabrain going forward. 3 0 0 469 556 .
May 19 This feels like the first milestone of the next step-change - open source models that are close to opus-level but 10x as fast. Now we just need bigger context window, and more providers than Cerebras. Big 5 0 1 432 204 .
May 18 Trying to make a quick payment with @Revolut this morning - after doing the mobile "take a selfie" flow - this is what I get - no way to continue, no way to try again, no way to contact support. Just "we couldn't authenticate you at this time". Just utter garbage experience https://t.co/AA6gSt9OaA 0 1 0 758 298 .
May 18 Linear is the opposite - "High Status" software - it is just as hard to figure out and use as Jira - truly awful. But saying that out loud is considered low status. I've encountered multiple teams who would be much better served with something else, but who trundle through because that's what the teams they look up to do. 6 0 2 2.8k 323 .
May 14 Examples of low status practices - Using a simpler stack so you can use "dumber" but faster models - Loading raw, no-build step CSS files straight from a *folder* (gasp) - Being ok with large PRs, using Claude to assist with code reviewing large PRs. - Coding on a VM (becoming less low status recently) 36 0 4 2.1k 303 .
May 14 Low status practices can be harmful if you have people with limited experience finding the edges of systems and understanding the harms that best practices protect from. But an extremely powerful weapon is the experienced practitioner who's ok with (thoughtful) low status ideas 2 0 0 228 278 .
May 14 An idea that's been occupying me a lot lately: "*Low Status* tech/software practices". There are a lot of places where older or "dumber" approaches are actually better or faster, but where 99% of engineers won't acknowledge or even engage with them. cc @htmx_org 92 5 3 18.7k 262 .
May 13 ... https://t.co/eUOGZhMnhU 0 0 0 98 29 .
May 13 Had this exact same realization a few days after posting about ZHCs. So much for AGI 🤷‍♂️ 3 0 1 1.2k 89 .
May 12 https://t.co/tH3HtefvfZ 1 0 0 84 23 .
May 11 Whenever people talk about why @Revolut is great, I'm reminded of stories like this, of which there are many. Revolut adds a nice UI & UX on top of the legacy system, but 1. They're just papering over broken rails, & 2. Customer Support is so unbelievably bad it should be illegal 3 0 0 1.4k 288 .
May 11 This is the difference between a vibe-coded-in-a-weekend product and spending months dogfooding & ironing out every little kink https://t.co/l2pf6sx4Dx 3 0 0 206 155 .
May 10 Spent the day using codex-5.3-spark (had to dust off cursor) - this feels like a genuine step change. My guess is a lot of code bases need a wider context window or better reasoning, but our sinatra backend, no-react frontend it is *both* insanely fast and extremely capable. 3 0 0 194 277 .
May 06 This 1000x. If you’ve been actually doing the work through chat, and extracting snippets or summaries as json blobs from every exchange, you’ll know that this is where the magic happens 1 0 1 318 185 .
May 06 https://t.co/scvAvL162a 0 0 0 120 23 .
May 06 https://t.co/scCGAgKt4D 1 0 1 146 23 .
May 06 Every day I see two to three tweets in my feed of things we're solving with Gigabrain (fka Operator) - going to collect them all here so that we can make some content on them when we (finally) go public 3 0 2 194 202 .
May 06 December 2025 will go down as the single month where hundreds, if not thousands, of product & AI-minded developers got Claude Code pilled and began building their own prototypes based on the below realization, many of which are now starting to pop up on our twitter feeds. 2 0 0 274 276 .
May 06 Also not to toot my own horn, but if you've been following me since Jan you'll have known this for quite some time. https://t.co/cnSOQNiNaz 0 0 0 53 141 .
May 06 AI Brain AI Workspace AI Operating System Are the next mega-category of AI product https://t.co/rYZNglWILt 0 0 1 123 108 .
May 06 @blakeandersonw @HilaShmuel @dotta Welcome @jacob_posel https://t.co/jbOlF7p3vv 1 0 1 116 81 .
May 05 There was a day when Twitter content looked like this and I miss it - there’s something so satisfying about finding non-obvious observations and compressing them as far as they’ll go without losing the insight. I get 2 or 3 tweets a day in my feed like this nowadays and they’re all from Justin 3 0 0 230 294 .
May 04 Of course @zapier was also working on an AI workspace product https://t.co/zyql9ryAJo 0 0 0 86 87 .
May 02 I feel personally targeted by this tweet 1 0 1 175 40 .
May 01 @annimaniac you may be interested in this :) https://t.co/eCqYHgwMPR 1 0 0 113 70 .
May 01 There's a new article like this every day on X, but this is the best one I've seen, and the one that most aligns with my experience 4 0 1 425 131 .
Apr 27 DevX maybe? 0 0 0 182 11 .
Apr 27 This is takeaway #1 and #2, but takeaway #3 is that the frothing at the mouth over how intelligent the models are, and what that means for the future of software engineering is in harsh contrast against what everyone is experiencing in practice. It’s like having an F1 driver as your uber driver who will occasionally glitch out and drive you off a cliff. 1 0 0 177 355 .
Apr 25 When I chat to my adhd friends - we all have super weird/esoteric strategies for dealing with it/maximising output, but what's fascinating is there's basically zero overlap & we all look at each other funny when we explain how we do stuff 2 0 0 187 243 .
Apr 15 Jay is actually the most impressive Indie hacker right now IMO. Many people good at product & outsource distribution, or good at distribution & outsource product. Can't name any who have done both solo - Built a unique social app in a category that is not easy to get adoption. - Built zero to 100k/mrr on tiktok UGC where he is also the highest performing creator No co-founder, no agencies, no paid (I believe). Crazy impressive 3 1 3 1.5k 430 .
Apr 14 I really wish otherwise super smart people would stop contributing to extremely silly narratives (running agents for a long time = a good thing) that other people and the media then also buy into. Just because something sounds cool doesn’t mean it makes sense. This is dumb 2 0 1 393 273 .
Apr 12 I may have a domain buying problem. Big plans for this one though. https://t.co/O0NXfAMvph 18 0 1 749 90 .
Apr 10 Operator as a "Resume" button for long running tasks I've always been bad at remembering all the important details of long running admin work, which usually leads to avoiding it entirely. Today instead of procrastinating, I just asked Operator "Do we have a journey related to my Dutch tax?" and it helped me pick up right where I left off. 7 1 0 778 342 .
Apr 09 People building new models should stop benchmark-maxxing and just focus on "how does this feel when it's hooked up to Code or Cowork", because that's by far the most important way that these models are going to be wielded. 3 0 0 265 222 .
Apr 09 For anyone deep in using harnesses like Claude Code day-to-day, it's evident that the most economically valuable trait of a model is how well it can power an agent harness, so talking about or focussing on anything other than that just sounds kind of unserious 1 0 1 550 260 .
Apr 07 Ai workspace tools I’m now tracking: - https://t.co/eRi57U3u6p by @blakeandersonw - https://t.co/Gg5aM6ja1F from @HilaShmuel - https://t.co/SFaUdMy2o5 from @dotta - https://t.co/a5y9mO0wGa from yours truly 98 3 8 17.6k 208 .
Apr 07 Introducing Operator - An AI workspace where teams and individuals work together with AI Join the waitlist at https://t.co/ZUhpnoi0fi https://t.co/ZwXL8s50EC 57 1 3 22.1k 158 .
Apr 06 😱 Bitcoin price is daaangerously close to $69,420 https://t.co/SLosNckXFz 1 0 0 77 73 .
Apr 06 Thoughts on Openclaw - It's created a new product category in consumers minds - AI chat that has great context and can *do* stuff (as opposed to just chat) = 👍 - At the same time, messaging that OpenClaw is now the De Facto way to get AI to do stuff, products being touted as "built for Openclaw" vs "built for agents" = 👎 0 0 1 235 322 .
Apr 03 @MediaKing eli5? 1 0 0 118 16 .
Apr 03 Matt's the expert here & i know very little, but I really struggle to understand this equation. Stripe doesn't just *get* the Indiehackers audience, nor does Hubspot with The Hustle - they can run ads for free, but editorial is still the same - where does this materialize? 1 0 1 351 277 .
Apr 03 1. Go to openrouter 2. Get a free account and free api key 3. Check their Claude code docs & update your env variables accordingly 4. Set the model to qwen 3.6 5. Enjoy Claude code with an opus level model with 1m context window for free ✅ Problem solved 2 0 0 767 259 .
Apr 03 🤣 https://t.co/6Zpeh5ycaw 1 0 0 170 25 .
Apr 03 It took one day 😆 https://t.co/TxbxijFCZA 0 0 0 105 43 .
Apr 02 Haven't seen anyone talk about this - you can now pay to bypass ads on Instagram? https://t.co/8Zq2K8gTwI 1 0 0 212 105 .
Apr 01 We now have 2 models that *feel* on par with Opus inside Claude Code. The glaring gap is still context window - compaction is still super regular and annoying. Once someone brings out a model that has same performance with the 1m context window, we'll have a realistic replacement. 2 0 1 336 281 .
Apr 01 I run a software agency and @claudeai just cancelled our entire team with no warning and no reason why. @trq212 @bcherny what can I do here? Can you even tell me what the reason is so we can fix? This is massively disruptive to business. There goes my day 🙃 https://t.co/oYEePLz9gy 2 0 3 902 283 .
Mar 31 This is such a great test for exploring "the end of labour" with AI - building something great is the product of a lot of seemingly small things that add up - do people really think that all the items on this list are *fully replaceable* by AI, even in the next 10 years? 0 0 0 227 271 .
Mar 31 What a shit show - hundreds of @claudeai code users getting their account suspended with no recourse https://t.co/7dcILK3kd1 3 0 0 639 124 .
Mar 31 Have seen this happen a few people in the feed already, now it's my turn. No explanation, no warning, using claude code normally. Why make people reliant in that way then completely destroy trust. Ugh @trq212 https://t.co/OtXm6xH6Hu 0 0 0 934 233 .
Mar 26 Seeing and taking this has completely destroyed the credibility for me of multiple people I held in very high esteem, who have either been gesturing strongly or stating explicitly that LLMs will get us to AGI - it makes the whole thing seem just completely farcical 1 0 0 196 265 .
Mar 26 I always thought having *multiple* AI bot identities didn't make sense - if intelligence-capacity isn't the constraint, why not just have one "God" bot that can handle everything, but I realized it's actually the best mechanism for setting context. E.g. I know that this identity has these credentials and access to these instructions. 1 0 0 114 335 .
Mar 23 https://t.co/JgBHhPpE28 0 0 0 96 23 .
Mar 20 Another AI workspace enters the chat https://t.co/Kp4Avvi6Z8 0 0 0 277 61 .
Mar 18 I think "AI Workspace" is a term we're going to hear a lot more of. It's where the Claude & OpenAI work suites will inevitably end up (cloud based & collaborative), but it will take them a bit longer to get there. I may as well share that we've also been working on an AI workspace with: shared & private spaces, files, skills, agents, automations, charts & bunch of other stuff. I'm now spending most of my workday in here & firmly believe this category of product will be crucial for organizations that want to accelerate the transition to being AI first. 7 1 4 5k 561 .
Mar 16 I keep seeing this caricature of men and I have to say, I literally don't know anyone who acts like this? Reminds me of the way the manosphere guys caricature women. Is this a US thing? Am I in a bubble? Are other people in a bubble? 0 0 0 311 234 .
Mar 15 Something I can see happening in the near future - Agents cause an increasing number of security issues & also begin to hammer APIs - Products begin to lock down their APIs, require 2fa, or charge extra for API/MCP - People end up just building their own replacements 4 0 1 246 273 .
Mar 12 The dumb thing about this is that the MCP spec could have allowed "rest API with Oauth" as a method, but they mandate the ridiculous every-tool-is-a-local-server approach, and now people are rightly seeing it's too burdensome and skipping it completely 0 0 0 244 253 .
Mar 11 Hallucinations starting to go back up again - wasn't this meant to be solved? https://t.co/pqDDsmM7A2 1 0 1 111 101 .
Mar 08 At some point companies will compose 100% of their execution from modular processes that will be gradually converted from human-only, to human-in-the-loop, to agent only, and you'll be able to visualize, manage and monitor your company just like an n8n workflow https://t.co/zcsBPqumxy 1 0 1 366 285 .
Mar 08 Would like to keep a thread of interesting people working on ZHCs (Zero Human Companies) or similar. So far I have @Shpigford @nateliason @johnrushx @Bencera @tonyennis (yours truly) Anyone else to keep an eye on? 2 0 1 347 220 .
Mar 08 I am simultaneously... - Building the most insane autonomous AI stuff & giddy about what is possible. - Having extreme doubts about the "death of white collar work" and quote-unquote "intelligence" of the current models I would guess same for a lot of people 1 0 2 290 264 .
Mar 08 This 100%. @Replit used to be my favourite product philosophically - I think I built one of the first rails-compatible boilerplates for it & was tweeting about it back in 2020. But every time I hear Amjad speak nowadays it just feels so inauthentic. I know it's tricky to find PMF & you have to sell the dream etc. but I don't think I've heard him be humble or radically honest on any pods - it's all stories of how he had this vision & did crazy hard things & hosts blowing smoke up his ass when in reality they've pivoted countless times & still don't really have a clear vision for where things will end up (which is fine, just be honest about it). 4 0 0 633 652 .
Mar 06 https://t.co/QbEPxXLNee 0 0 0 79 23 .
Mar 06 Direct quote from a senior consultant my client brought in, on a call this week: “You can’t just keep cramming things on a server, it’s just not how things scale”. It was a 2cpu 4gb ram server for internal tools that was at about 40% capacity on most metrics. The client has a few dozen customers and 50 projects. 🤷‍♂️ 3 0 0 319 319 .
Mar 06 Enjoy Derek's takes but... - "Boastful" certainly makes it easier & that mightn't be a bad thing. This culture is partly why the US is so prosperous - "Sham Products" - you could write an entire book on the delicate moral philosophy of what constitutes valuable. The underlying questions are 1. "What percentage of people who buy actually get value", and 2. At what ratio do you consider something "a sham". But many things have the characteristic that people who don't get value from them outnumber people who do get value - often it's the entire business model - gyms, insurance, social security. - "You can easily be a millionaire" - Ask anyone who owns a business that has employees, customers, suppliers etc & sees the effort required to hit seven figures in revenue, the difference between topline and the amount you actually take home, and how much effort is and stress is required, & you'll be very hard pressed to find anyone who would describe it as easy. Of course grifters exist, but this level of puritanical cynicism affects people's worldviews in a way that prevents a lot of people who have something of genuine value to offer (e.g Derek himself), from doing so, and leads to black-and-white, spiteful thinking that penalizes any form of self promotion or monetization that are by far net positive. 1 0 0 177 1.3k .
Mar 03 AI (Claude) is still not good at well reasoned, well structured argumentative documents, particularly high stakes ones. But speaking to AI and getting a first draft that you can completely rewrite is still a helpful exercise. 0 1 0 120 227 .
Mar 03 https://t.co/1xHkwYBcrE 0 0 1 171 23 .
Mar 02 This is awesome. If you want to take it to the next level and have both modern approaches and beautiful styling, https://t.co/lWxjnoglNd 😁 0 0 0 165 139 .
Mar 01 https://t.co/qe09e6twV9 0 0 1 80 23 .
Feb 21 I found an in between here Started with db backed Ui that had lots of features but was fundamentally point and click Ended up with a web based file browser - a thin layer on top of the filesystem that gives me extra stuff I don’t get with Finder. Now I use chat to do the acting but I can explore and inspect the outputs or intermediate steps where necessary 0 0 0 325 360 .
Feb 20 Is anyone using Notion agentically to store content? Seems incredibly inefficient with claude code https://t.co/j1orLmSk8D 1 0 0 218 122 .
Feb 19 Something the "Software is dead" commentary misses is the sheer premium people will pay to not have to manage or worry. It's been possible for years to get software built cheaply on Fiver or Upwork, but it takes *a lot* of back and forth, the responsibility burden for quality, stability etc is borne by the manager, not the doer, peace of mind is lower, and likelihood of success is lower. So people pay an agency 6 or 7 figures to build the same proof of concept. AI obviously changes the equation, but I'm not sure it does so substantially enough to remove those considerations entirely. 2 0 1 175 593 .
Feb 15 This was probably the most impressive thing Claude Code has done for me so far, there's no way I would have figured this out without spending days on it. https://t.co/fOXlhOP3Ja 3 0 2 316 177 .
Feb 10 I’ve seen a lot of people taking about session-to-session handover in CC. Something that’s been working really well for me is “Journeys”. I have a journeys directory and will often say “can you create a journey file for this” or “can you update the journey file”. I now have about 30 journeys some of which span 10 conversations over several weeks. Often for admin tasks or initiatives, not just code work. Has been working really well, probably the highest leverage modification I’ve made to vanilla CC 2 1 2 1.6k 506 .
Feb 09 https://t.co/3CNrELJc87 0 0 0 90 23 .
Feb 08 Ooooh https://t.co/VpAIZbFNbx 0 0 0 93 29 .
Feb 06 https://t.co/tD27v9Zq5Y 0 0 1 218 23 .
Feb 06 Banger tweet 2 0 0 141 12 .
Feb 05 This is so impressive, @kamrify is the gold standard of solo product builder - haven't seen anyone else who is as good at everything - design, ux, engineering, even the product walkthrough is great. 3 0 1 650 198 .
Feb 04 More on this. Using Pi as the harness... - Kimi k2 on Groq is fast but a bit dumb, and dangerous - GLM on Cerebras just has non-stop API rate limiting issues But both give you a taste of Claude Code at near instantaneous speed & it feels crazy Looks like post acquisition @GroqInc has no plans to add Kimi 2.5 Are there other super fast inference providers? 0 0 2 431 363 .
Feb 04 Aaaaand I lost a half day of work 🙃 Kimi k2 is fast but if you get to used to Opus/CC you forget these models can take extremely destructive actions on a whim (like git reset --hard HEAD for example) 0 0 0 154 200 .
Feb 04 So... using the super fast inference providers - Groq & Cerebras - is kind of addictive. So addictive that even though they make silly mistakes & require fixing, I think I prefer having to do multiple passes than to wait 2 to 3 minutes for Opus on Claude Code. 2 0 0 840 270 .
Feb 03 Switching from Claude Code to Pi wired up to Kimi K2 on Groq is like going from listening to podcasts on 1x to 2.5x. 0 0 0 399 116 .
Feb 03 Old enough to remember when @openclaw was called Clawdis 0 0 0 102 56 .
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