James Cowling
@jamesacowling
@convex CTO. Dropbox storage designer. Consensus protocol author. Motorcycle mechanic. Closet Australian. MIT systems researcher turned database shill.
511 Following 13.9K Followers
It's never a good look to laugh at people afraid of losing their jobs
If the model sucks is it still super intelligence?
Three very smart founders with three very different companies sharing their perspective on agentic development. Whoever you agree with these are folks out there building and grappling with real problems every day. Thanks to @zeeg, @jgreze and @theo!
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.@theo, @zeeg, @jgreze, and Convex all agree that agents can help you ship code faster but they're not talented, or curious.
Our third Abstract talk on Agentic development is live!
Three opinionated founders, one equally opinionated moderator, and somehow, no chairs were harmed. Full panel in the thread ⬇️
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I love this short RustConf talk because it's about just doing a simple thing to solve a problem instead of the giant complex service an agent wanted to build instead.
It's very easy these days to write a system that you do not understand because you're moving really fast with AI."
Our Infra Tech Lead Emma's talk from RustConf 2026, full vid in the thread👇
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These times include cold starts. 10x speedup isn’t too shabby!
There are still rare cases the new runtime is slower due to missing JIT optimizations. We’re working on it but also… just wait to see how fast things are when we add rust bindings for Convex functions.
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want faster queries and mutations? @convex runtime v2 is looking 🔥
quicker systems & lower customer bills coming soon
and this is before we even get rust server functions involved...
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Everyone who has switched to typescript or rust already agrees with this, perhaps without realizing it. Types, interfaces and guardrails make agents *more* performant. Complexity is always the enemy.
My hot take from chatting to @poteto is that we should use MORE abstractions in the AI age
You can use them (combined with harsh lint rules) to reduce the design space available to the agent and constrain them only to good decisions.
Combined with the fact that high-leverage abstractions let you do more with less code - so, more token efficient.
Plus, unwinding the damage from a bad abstraction is much cheaper with agents.
This runs counter to a lot of folks thinking that agents just want to read the raw code. They can, but they're not maximally efficient that way.
Be braver! Design abstractions.
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If someone says "distribution is the only moat" what they mean is distribution is their only moat
I've gotta hear Jamie talk all day and I still really enjoyed watching this talk
We were never paid to write code. Software engineering isn't dead, it's finally maturing.
Jamie’s talk from Abstract is now live! If you missed it, check out the clip below. Full talk in the thread.
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"REST API" in bold text is the em-dash of tech resumes
Every time I see these number flatline I panic and then I realize it's just npm stats being sus
Our friends at @convex are changing the way back ends are built.
With databases that are reactive out of the box, mutations that are written in TypeScript, and a model that agents love building with, it's no surprise their growth is taking off:
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I heard you want sandboxes as part of the API that makes your backend problems go away
Daytona is now available as a @convex component.
Give your Convex agents a computer: isolated sandboxes for running code, shell commands, and filesystem operations — controlled entirely from your Convex backend.
Guide and blog post below 👇
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Why you probably don't want to build your own infra no matter how many token you have, why architecture matters even more in the agentic era, and why it's time for all of us to be senior engineers.
Live now.
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The final talk from Systems Distributed ‘26 will premiere on YouTube tomorrow!
The Future Deserves Good Architecture by @jamesacowling—how to continue innovating at an accelerating pace without sacrificing quality.
Sep 30, 9am PT / 12pm EST / 6pm CET
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For less than the price of an avocado toast* you can have a Convex deployment in Australia
* actually it's free
New Convex regions just dropped! Canada and Australia.
We're told the Sydney one is displaying correctly.
The whole point of a startup is doing things different to what other people tell you
You cannot execute someone else's strategy.
Nobody thinks about your business nearly as much as you do. No one can obsess over the problem more than you. You have more data than all of them combined. You're the one who has to execute on all the space in between.
Every decision downstream of a framework you don't actually believe in gets wobbly. You just accumulate drift.
When things don't go perfectly right (and at a startup, they won't), you'll start second-guessing the whole thing and think you probably should have just done it your way. So yeah, just do that from the start.
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Free usage for our euro-homies!
When @convex launched European regions, the Convex Pro plan's included usage didn't apply to EU deployments because of some technical complications. We weren't proud of that.
Thanks for your patience, folks. As of today, it's fixed:
We'll support included resources in the upcoming Australia/Canada regions too!
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If the email took less time to write than it'll take to read just send me the prompt instead
Steve Jobs really nailed it with "real artists ship"
Turns out we have an ESP32 Convex client, for when you want the physical world to be in sync with your database.
At least two of these people aren't @AvgDatabaseCEO.
Databased chat with Convex and @glcst from Turso!
