Luke Ramsden

Today I was offered Dom Pérignon, caviar, an Ooni, and a Ninja Creami to take sales calls with software companies. One perk of building something people want... you never have to learn what kitchen appliance they want first.

We’re investing in British startup @TendrilsCompute through @UKSovereignAI, backing their ambition to reinvent the computer processor as part of a $30m funding round. Turning British ingenuity into new industries, good jobs and growth across the country. Our history tells us why it matters!

We're still so small but I'm loving the team we've got at Superlogical. They're so talented and kind and love their craft. It's a different era of software development and our expectations and practices reflect that. I want to share a bit about how we work. First, everyone is trusted to push to main. We do machine-aided code review pre-push and human plus more machine-aided code review post-push. Limited to no PRs. Culturally, we've all agreed that if we ever hire someone who we DON'T trust to push directly to main, then they probably aren't the right fit for the team (so far, not an issue). Some common sense here: if someone is stepping outside their lane or comfort zone, we'll open PRs. For example, I'm pretty trash at macOS/iOS UI, so I'll open PRs for UI-affecting functionality and ask for eyeballs/help. But for business logic and internals, I push to main. Second, everyone can cut a release. Our release process is fully automated and when you start a release (for any platform) it triggers a Slack notification and a 15 minute countdown. The 15 minute warning is a final gate that allows people to review plus collaborate on a changelog. During that 15 minutes, anyone in the company can pause the release rollout. After 15 minutes, the train leaves the station. You can't override the 15 minutes (except to pause). It gives everyone a chance to step in. Third, we avoid synchronization through fast remediation rather than through planning. The server and clients on various platforms ship features as fast as they can. We use post-hoc human review and AI-assistance to identify feature mismatches across products ("Windows has support for X and Mac doesn't." or "Mac and Windows differ in their behaviors for Y in this way."). This avoids expensive "sync" meetings and coordination. We trust that producers of features are mindful of what they're producing and we trust that adjacent product lines will self-synchronize quickly. In practice, we see feature parity across platforms within 24 to 48 hours. All of this works on mutual trust. It ONLY works with mutual trust. Everyone at all times has to trust that they've got each others back: 1. Push to main only works if you fix your mess, or if you don't, that someone else will quickly but that you'd do the same (and generally in equal amounts). 2. Anyone can deploy only works if you trust everyone to cut at the right time, with the right changelog, and that people will respect the 15 minute timer. 3. Sync through fast remediation only works if you trust other teams will pick up and integrate your work quickly, which only works if you would too. It also only works if you are fairly producing mismatches (e.g. not constantly). We've got a great team. I know we're still small and that these practices will change in many ways as we scale. But this is already a markedly different practice than what I would've done 15 years ago. In general, we are building from day 1 on a foundation of mutual respect, excellence, and trust. And it's been awesome.

Tendrils has raised $30M led by @benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing. @jaltma is joining our board. At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.

General Translation has raised $27m led by @martin_casado at @a16z to localize the world’s best companies. Today, @generaltxn serves Ramp, Cursor, and Sierra by translating apps, sites, docs, slide decks, and even product videos into dozens of languages. a16z invested alongside @upfrontvc, Peter Thiel, Fei-Fei Li, and more. 🧵

We had a security incident on Tensorlake today. There was no impact to customer information such as API keys or sandboxes. An application running on an upstream provider spins up sandboxes in our engineering team’s accounts and runs automation workflows. These sandboxes had access to our GitHub repositories. The attacker pushed malicious code to branches and triggered GitHub Actions to probe for secrets that workflows can access to build and deploy code. The upstream provider had a security breach a couple of weeks ago that exposed our environment variables. We had not rotated those env vars, as this is not a critical application for our production environment. This was an oversight, we should have acted on this immediately. We have no evidence that any critical systems were accessed beyond probing for secrets. We have rotated all secrets and undeployed the internal application from the upstream provider. Out of abundant caution, please rotate your Tensorlake API keys. We will share more information with customers over email and post updates in our trust center. We have already notified all paying customers by email, and we will follow up with additional details.

I have been trying to champion a definition of software factory that lands on the pre-ai definition of the word, potentially with agentic steps replacing some of the human steps. This is different from that “dark factory” idea or the tokenmaxxing thing. With that definition, what i read when you say this is something like “most companies don’t need ci” But I fear the term software factory is already dead and that nobody can agree on its meaning beyond “things that help you get software built” which could apply to 100 different interpretations

I won’t see a single frame of my own videos for a year that get posted to 300k+ people So how do I film? + Camera sits on a tripod with colored alignment marks for screen-free setup + I hit record and say the title out loud + I use a special keyword to delete Then I pull the SD card and put it in a box with no screen It names every clip from what I said, files it, and I get a receipt to confirm Press one button and it all goes to my editor Editor then edits and posts for me I never see a frame

Very important to add all your friends on Slack. You need to be Slack Connect-maxxing