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Cole Lawrence

@colelawrence.com
544 followers 568 following 123 posts

End user programming & AI tool designer. 🛠️ CTO at phosphor.co & @forethink.ai 🦀 Rust NYC / RustEastCoast.com organizer 🙋🏻‍♂️he/him

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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 20/11/2025
I really loved sqlc's approach, so I'm glad there's another option like it for Rust!
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
I recommend Amp if you can afford passthrough pricing! I appreciate that they choose the best models for the job and I don't have to reconsider which models to switch to for different tasks every month
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
4. If we enjoy working together through the trial and aligned your value to your desired compensation Only through the experience of a trial can we actually understand if the compensation you're seeking is aligned with your impact. And it confirms for you whether you enjoy working here with us.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
3. If we work well together Working together is natural and enjoyable as we work through an interesting technical design problem. You balance building with thoughtful API design and can talk through how it might work well or not for AI agents to maintain
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
2. If we enjoy chatting about work It feels fun and effortless to chat. We can nerd out about similar things. I naturally learn something interesting through our conversation that I'll want to apply immediately.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
1. If you appear to be good. You are either a prolific product builder with experiences pivoting OR you have previously built something we need help building
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/11/2025
How to pass each interview stage for the first 5 hires at our startup: 1. If you appear to be good => Intro 2. If we enjoy chatting about work experiences => Technical interview (pairing) 3. If we work well together => Trial period 4. If we align on impact<>desired comp => You're permanent 🙂
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Reposted by Cole Lawrence
Rust NYC @rust.nyc · 30/10/2025
First annual Rust NYC Unconf registrations are open! rust.nyc/unconf
Illustration for RustNYC Unconf 2025 featuring three versions of Ferris, the Rust programming language mascot, as cartoon crabs in orange, red, and verdigris green (wearing a Statue of Liberty crown and holding a microphone) arranged above the text 'Unconf 2025'. The event details show 123 William Street, 26th Floor, FiDi, December 5th. Sponsor logos for Materialize, Lawrence Harvey, Empathic, and Antithesis appear at the bottom.
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Reposted by Cole Lawrence
Nicolas Roman Posner @nrposner.com · 09/10/2025
Finally wrote up my slides/notes for my presentation at the last #RustNYC meetup. Thanks to @busysp.bsky.social, @colelawrence.com, @statisticsftw.bsky.social, Ross, and the whole team over there for making it possible! nrposner.com/blog/rust-py... #rustlang
nrposner.com
Rust-Python Interop for Scientific Codebases — nrposner
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Reposted by Cole Lawrence
Nicolas Roman Posner @nrposner.com · 09/07/2025
Announced the RustQuest community project at the @rust.nyc meetup yesterday! I hope this can grow as a resource to effectively teach young students #rustlang + CS concepts in tandem! special thanks to @colelawrence.com and @busysp.bsky.social for support! github.com/nrposner/rus...
github.com
GitHub - nrposner/rust_quest: An incremental, gamified introduction to Rust and computer science fundamentals
An incremental, gamified introduction to Rust and computer science fundamentals - nrposner/rust_quest
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 06/04/2025
using LLMs to refactor and my new favorite prompt is becoming: "Ask me clarifying questions about any uncertainty you have about the refactoring." This is saving me so many little headaches where the LLM changed the approach in subtle ways.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 30/03/2025
I'm working through one of my toughest system designs ever—but I'm genuinely enjoying it. Usually, engineers steer the conversation too deep, while non-technical folks aren’t sure how to navigate the topics to ask great questions.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 30/03/2025
Absolutely killer combination for system architecture design: - Gemini 2.5 Pro for preparing interview questions - ChatGPT Voice mode for interview - Gemini 2.5 Pro for writing a technical write-up + updated overview instructions file for ChatGPT
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 18/03/2025
This is our first month to have two events in a long time! Check it out if you're in NYC
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 10/03/2025
That's pretty cool honestly
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 08/03/2025
Lovely primer on oklch, it feels like the cheat code to good color picking when you realize oklch and hct (material design) exist
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Reasonable change. I have a pretty massive Svelte 5 codebase, but I think there are only a small handful of effect$ instances compared to state$ and derive$.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Most AI eng I see is usually just one step and done. Embed, store, retrieve, and synthesize. I want to see a portfolio where you have added steps in between that benefit the end user. Metaprompting, strategically using scratchpads, memories, tool loops with budgeting, etc
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
That would be taking novel approaches to solving problems with multiple steps. For example, show me how you wrote one AI to generate intermediary code to be run and used to scrape a website or organize data from multiple systems (this is something happening at Ramp when they import from new banks)
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
But, I would probably just end up abusing this for very little gain. There was a cool use case for this with typed link parameters for the Qwik router as well
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Cool things are unlocked when TypeScript template literals become more capable of enforcing types. I'm interested in the inference as well, so you can retain the type based on what is written. For example, err`Permission not granted to ${user}` could be `Err<["Permission not granted to", User]>`
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Planning through prompting as well?
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
I learned about this from Stephen King's _On Writing_!
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Yeah, that's just a different role at that point. If they come into he team not having a portfolio of AI experience with the intent to "train up" it's high risk to me that it doesn't click for them. Like hiring a production artist for a role in brand design
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
can you meet with a customer trying to accomplish a task that could be advised by those documents and design a pipeline that connect the dots to complement their workflow when the task they are accomplishing is completely unique to their IP?
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
given pdfs, calendar events, emails, and other docs with timestamps and associated people (who read it, authored it, shared it) where everything is related to 6 different complex projects at an organization...
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/03/2025
Any tips on hiring AI product engs for a startup? Practical experience designing and troubleshooting tool-loops. $300k-$450k remote if they connect product thinking and AI pipeline setup, design, and devops experience. This is a hypothetical role at the moment, just looking for advice.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 28/02/2025
Great work, I'm excited to watch it :-)
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 24/02/2025
I started working on an open-source todo "UI" that syncs with a markdown file, since all my TODOs are in markdown for AI editing context. Also has a - Pomodoro timer - Customizable sound cues for break start, end, task completion, etc github.com/colelawrence...
Shows how the same TODO markdown file is synchronized in the "floating tracker view", "planner view", and the editor
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 23/02/2025
Lovely colors
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 05/02/2025
Can you say more words?
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 05/02/2025
Thanks for the explanation! Super interesting and simple approach to consider including immediately. Do you suspect that it would be effective to make a summary for each “Wait” gap to show “reasoning”? Or should you use a special tag/notation to make headers in the main completion?
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 04/02/2025
Made a fun little helper for React to make it possible to "click" buttons without clicking when you have a input focused. Was having some trouble with debugging some focusout issue gist.github.com/colelawrence...
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 04/02/2025
Music is either _the_ activity, and great speakers are amazing. Or, music is in the background and I easily forget how it sounds
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 18/01/2025
I made something like this create.bingo a while ago, but for super simple things. I remember I was able to avoid configuration files almost completely by naming my variables with their types. E.g. {{typesDir}} or {{nameStrArr}}, then the cli args and prompts could be inferred
create.bingo
Delightful templates for web repositories. 💝
create is a repository templating engine that allows you to instantiate ready-to-use repositories from flexible, powerful templates.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 16/01/2025
Insane. That’s incredible
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 13/01/2025
Super attractive couch for this aesthetic
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 11/01/2025
That was quick! What was the favorite use case?
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 09/01/2025
Also a good idea. I’m not sure how fast npx is at resolving where to execute the bin script
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 09/01/2025
If you want to run the typescript directly, you could try node 23’s typescript support— it could certainly be faster and might not give you headaches with source mapping in your debugger nodejs.org/api/typescri...
nodejs.org
Modules: TypeScript | Node.js v23.6.0 Documentation
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 09/01/2025
Not sure if it’s related, but if you are using a bloated version of zsh like oh-my-zsh and it’s set as the default shell, then that could add a second where bash is instant.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 09/01/2025
I need an agent that will just work on optimizing my typescript tsconfigs frfr
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 08/01/2025
Sometimes I fall back into the habit of writing code with a keyboard, and I have to fight that habit formed from the last 10+ years For LLM coding to pay off, you gotta learn how to keep the context/session "on the rails", and getting "on the rails" is the hardest hurdle to get over
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 08/01/2025
with AI, I seem to spend more of my time than ever designing the codebase's framework in a composable + testable way, because the payoff is huge when you know how each individual file is more complicated, but the total codebase is at a fixed complexity even with added features
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 07/01/2025
iOS Safari struggled to keep up for me
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 06/01/2025
I'm excited to be launching this new website for the next phase of @forethink.ai 🎉 I hope this page better communicates how we can amplify teams working in the browser by enriching the webpages they visit with private information from their company and peers–all with extreme care for data privacy!
forethink.ai
Forethink
Transforming yours and your team's scattered data into enrichments on every page you visit. All data is private and flows directly between your computer and your trusted apps.
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 29/12/2024
Great little write-up of today's best toolset for local LLMs Thanks for writing, Abishek ❤️
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 29/12/2024
Had the same experience yesterday when trying to watch it and not getting past the first 30 minutes
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 28/12/2024
I used to have a ton of little USB chargers and I went through all of them and labeled their amperage because it was so annoying to not easily tell which chargers would be decent for charging vs continuous power applications
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Cole Lawrence @colelawrence.com · 28/12/2024
Oh yeah. That makes sense. I wasnt aware of that issue, since I was using a magsafe. Seems similar to when few knew that some USB chargers were slow at like 5V/300mA
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