trending
Derek Cheng

10h ago

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 compared to Claude. Users feel too zoomed out from the work.

  • By contrast, Cursor and IDEs are starting to feel too zoomed in. When the majority of code is written by agents, an editor-first UI is a misfit.

AJ

6h ago

Is a linux build on the horizon?

I just switched to OpenSUSE after windows kept messing with my touch pad drivers to the point where I had to reinstall them every day to somewhat fix the issue.
I've been a heavy Linux user on and off since 09 and have hopped all the distros.
I might try to run the Windows version of Tonkotsu with WINE or even Lutris, but I am unsure of how that will go.
I don't know if there will be a linux build. I know half of san fransisco is on mac so probably not lol.
but one can dream.

Derek Cheng

7d ago

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?

Derek Cheng

5d ago

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...

fmerian

19d ago

Tonkotsu - Manage a team of coding agents from a doc

Tonkotsu is a fresh approach: a clean, focused GUI that lets you manage a team of coding agents from a doc. FREE during our early access program.
Derek Cheng

13d ago

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, but their role shifts to being managers of coding agents.

  • This transformation means developers need to be focused on planning and verification, while delegating coding. The role has become barbell-shaped, and the industry needs new tools and workflows to accommodate this.

More here https://blog.tonkotsu.ai/p/manag...

Derek Cheng

17d ago

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 fascinating to me to find that the role of the developer has shifted overnight: you're now the manager of a team of agents. We're building Tonkotsu to help you succeed in that new role.

AJ

12d ago

What type of people will flock to Tonkotsu?

I've been trying it out and am highly impressed, and becoming aware of just how tonkotsu is built around a deeply simple concept.
Your document is your foundation, and you build from there. It should read like a notebook that also has every feature and its tasks attached. It's like if Jupyter or Colab were used for project management.
Tonkotsu is perfect for people who work in blocks or steps, for those who break down a problem into small er ones and keep their focus on the goal. Chart course on paper, engrave your goals in stone.
How do you use tonkotsu?

Do you consider yourself to be this sort of person?

And what's your favorite ramen?