Chief Technology Officer @IcehouseVenture Advocate of design thinking & equity crowdfunding. Coffee blogger, ski instructor & business author: https://xitter.cf/t.co/VVrkd4yYw3
Auckland, New Zealand
Joined March 2009
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Podcast now live on iTunes podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… and Spotify open.spotify.com/show/5KDpmx… – at Auckland, New Zealand
Peter Thomson retweeted
one cannot condone the language, but this is a website:
motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Peter Thomson retweeted
Ted Sanders on GPT 6.1 Terra
and the current OpenAI model lineup
news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
Peter Thomson retweeted
i'm in christchurch so my odds of bumping into a vc over coffee are basically zero
but if you're raising in sf, someone just mapped every cafe they hang out at
check it out! ☕
meetvc.cafe
made a map of Bay Area cafes where you’ve got the best shot at meeting VCs (and maybe raising your next round)
check it out: meetvc.cafe
Peter Thomson retweeted
My management tip of the day is to stop asking people how they’re doing.
Bad managers constantly ask people how they’re doing, and it causes unnecessary strain, strife, and emotion.
It commonly turns a 1:1 into a little therapy session. This is a disaster. Most managers can barely give constructive feedback well, let alone act as a professional therapist.
But even more nefarious is that it just reminds people they might not feel great.
How are you doing?
I don’t know. Not great I guess. We don’t know why we’re here. The universe is a mystery. I’m getting older faster than I’d like. People I know die sometimes. I’m not sure I’m living up to my potential.
…etc.
It’s like if you were climbing Everest and every ten minutes some bozo asked you to talk about your feelings for 30 minute.
I’m cold Jerry. I was trying not to think about my fingers being frostbitten but they probably are. I’m very cold is that what you want to hear?
The best thing you can do in your average 1:1 is focus on getting things done. Careers are made on getting things done. Focus on climbing the mountain.
I’ve never, ever heard someone point back to their successful career and say it all started when a middle manager asked me about my feelings every week.
Much success though can be pointed back to a great coach who is there to talk about the game, who notices the rare emotional turmoil of a player and manages it, but otherwise almost never asks for people to reflect on their feelings.
Peter Thomson retweeted
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
Peter Thomson retweeted
This image is so soothing to me every time I see it. I should get it framed and treat it like a motivational poster of a beach.
Peter Thomson retweeted
I’ve been playing a bit with t3 code to understand the hype, and I have to give props to them for making it possible to slot in custom client code with their clean api.
You can add features without even recompiling the interface or mobile app!
You can do fun things like make a cli the model can call to trigger compaction, or have a programmatic way to steer any running lane when a build completes.
I think hackable tooling around your harness is underrated and it’s very cool it just uses the codex app server underneath.
Kudos to @theo and his team
Peter Thomson retweeted
I still remember when chrome put the tab bar above the address bar and we all went “fuck that makes so much sense”
The attachment between the tab and the page was literally the key defining characteristic of that UI element. It visually grouped the tab header with the page it controlled. The sloped edges of the tab also aided in differentiating foreground vs. background tabs.
So they took that away and now everything is a floating pill.
Peter Thomson retweeted
Just spent the last 7 days on the front lines of the vulnpocalypse fending off an active cyber attack on one of our products.
Some thoughts:
- Software factories are going to be required equipment for everyone. There’s just no way to keep up with the pace of highly automated adversaries without one.
- We were lucky because we had spent the last few months getting our software factory running well. It is nice to have for product development but proved to be absolutely essential this week.
- At the minimum you need to have a coding server in the cloud pre-provisioned with read only access to all your logs and all the services you depend on for observability. With that in place you are a prompt away from reasonably good situational awareness, ongoing monitoring with loops, and ability for coding agents to validate fixes against your actual, observed attack patterns.
- Shared coding server also unlocks multiplayer incident response where everyone can see every session and jump in as needed. Sharing session links that can be forked is much higher bandwidth than re-explaining things.
- You don’t need to be Ramp/Stripe/Uber scale to have a working software factory in the cloud. We are a team of 3. Ours is built with an @opencode server (thanks @thdxr!), a forked version of compound engineering optimized for automated workflows (thanks @kieranklaassen!) and a multiplayer agent in slack that handles crons (we have our own harness but pick your favorite here).
- To get our software factory up and running well, we had to stop all new product development for ~6 weeks and just focus on getting the validation systems working that enabled us to reliably shipping PR without human code review. This felt very painful in the moment but was totally worth the eventual speedup in velocity.
- KYC for @AnthropicAI & @OpenAI cyber programs is now easy and quick (at least for defensive access), but a day felt like a lifetime this week. Submit your app now before you really need it.
- Getting Mythos access unlocked a deeper level of analysis that helped us shift from reactive mitigation to proactive patching. Wish we had done this a few weeks earlier. Get started now!
Peter Thomson retweeted
Passkey confusion comes from two sources: not knowing where to put passkeys/where they’re already stored, and the passkeys not activating
You need to do these two things to fix this:
1. Save your passkeys to only one manager, and choose a manager that works on all your devices. I have a Windows PC and some apple products, so a password manager (Bitwarden) makes more sense than Apple Passwords
2. Make sure that the manager you store your passkeys in is enabled on every device. For me, I had Bitwarden autofill disabled by accident in iOS -> General -> Autofill & Passwords
Now, something asks for sign-in on any device, Bitwarden shows up as recommended, it scans my face/fingerprint and I’m in.
Peter Thomson retweeted
I asked Claude to migrate a mid-sized website from PHP 5.6 to 8.2, including an E2E test suite in Playwright to verify nothing broke, and across several major framework versions too, and it did it literally overnight.
There’s no excuse to run outdated PHP versions in 2026.
Peter Thomson retweeted
Don't even have to watch this to know it's a banger
(I will watch it)
(Soon)
Your job is to eat the pain.
@aarondfrancis taught us all that pain doesn't disappear. Someone eats the pain. The questions is "Who will eat it? You or your customer?"
Or as Aaron put it, "Be the sin eater."
Peter Thomson retweeted
Philomena: Some people have been writing PHP for over 20 years. Is that because it's particularly difficult to finish?
Expert: No, software is constantly evolving.
Philomena: So they've been writing the same website for 20 years?
Expert: No, different projects.
Philomena: Have they tried finishing one before starting another?
Expert: That's not how software development works.
Philomena: My mate Paul spent 20 years building a shed. Turned out he was just an alcoholic.
Expert: Right.
Philomena: Is PHP like that?
Peter Thomson retweeted
There must exists an app with PHP, deployed on Railway, with calls to cURL, with other services written in node that use Brotli compression running on a couple day old Linux, with their code self managed on GitLab
They are having a hell of a week
Peter Thomson retweeted
Seeing software companies use yesterday's events to nudge worried businesses away from PHP... as if other languages don't have lurking security flaws. If anything, the response has reassured me. I feel more confident than ever building software with PHP for my clients.
