The Two Zoom Levels of Agents
Building @Tonkotsu has taught us many lessons in product design, with both the underlying technology and user behavior shifting rapidly. One of the hardest but most critical lessons we’ve learned is about calibrating the zoom level — how close or far the user feels from the work. You can see examples of this play out across the industry: Codex gets flak for going “heads-down” for too long...
Dark Mode: Tonkotsu did 63 tasks and I gave feedback
We launched dark mode for Tonkotsu earlier this week. It was written entirely by Tonkotsu with 63 completed tasks. My involvement was exclusively during planning and verification (the classic barbell shape described here). Here's how it went... Step 1: Plan I started with Tonkotsu's planning agent and asked it to look at our frontend repo and formulate a plan for dark mode. I gave it general...
What coding agents do you use?
There are tons of great coding agent CLIs and IDEs out there. Which do you use on a regular basis? What stands out as being the killer feature?
Lessons Learned from Building Agents
PH builders: what are key lessons you’ve learned — whether technical or product or GTM — from building agents? This is still such a new discipline that it would be great to share amongst this community of builders. I’ll kick off with an experience that had us scratching our heads for months last year… Our product, @Tonkotsu, runs a bunch of coding agents in parallel. They’re built on top of...
Managing Unreliable Compilers
There’s a lot of discussion on X and other places about the future of software development. As with many things in life, the reality is both complex and in the middle of the extreme viewpoints. What we’re seeing at Tonkotsu: Agents are fast and powerful, but make mistakes. They can’t operate unsupervised. We think they’re like unreliable compilers. That means developers are as critical as ever,...
Thanks for #1 - here's what's next
Hey everyone - we’re tremendously grateful for our fantastic launch yesterday, ending at #1 for the day. Thank you all for your support! I started Tonkotsu because I saw a huge opportunity for a complete rethink of AI coding — not just incremental adjustments to established tools and workflows. Having managed teams of hundreds of engineers at Meta, Microsoft, and Atlassian, it’s been...
