iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I know leaders who live in constant fear that a business-killing bug is lingering in some unread, AI-generated corner of the codebase. Grounding non-deterministic AI output in deterministic input is just one layer of the solution.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I think it’s emotionally exhausting to manage an infinitely hungry AI workforce while knowing there is no longer direct human ownership over every line of code.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Tokenmaxxing was always going to end. Goodhart’s Law doesn’t fail. What replaces it is the more interesting question.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Had a demo call earlier today where the CLI wizard set the live demo up in under a minute. The user's reaction said it all. Very proud of the team for building something that actually works that smoothly. That kind of experience doesn't happen by accident.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Show me a team's review queue and I'll tell you how they're using AI. Reasonable revert rate, reviewers who feel like they're adding value: coding agents being used well.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I recently posted a screenshot of an AI-generated PR with 50k lines of changes. The comments exploded with opinions on PR best practices. Almost nobody stopped to ask whether the review process itself still makes sense. It's like walking past a burning building to debate the exit sign.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Finished doesn't mean closed. One of my favorite things about the Multiplayer web dashboard is that you can reopen any session and keep going in the same thread the agent used the first time.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

This is a quote from Cat Wu, Head of Product, Claude Code, 👇 What makes this interesting to me, beyond practical advice, it’s what it signals about the maturity curve of working with AI.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

A bloated review queue full of AI-generated PRs isn't a sign that your team is moving fast. Developers who are addressing this problem are taking a step back and thinking about the whole system: what data agents work from, how duplicate issues get caught, what it takes to make a PR worth merging.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

If you’re using coding agents, your output numbers (epics completed, task throughput, PR merge rate, …) may look good right now. But those are not the metrics your manager is watching. Every single one of those numbers comes with an asterisk: production quality is declining.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Telemetry built for AI coding agents captures full-fidelity, pre-correlated session data at the source, so an agent isn't reconstructing a failure from sampled traces or scattered tools.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Developers don't want more dashboards to stare at or more alerts to triage. They want the thing that broke, to fix itself. So we don't have to go through this flow of 👇 five tools, eleven steps and four hours just to fix a bug.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

880+ engineering leaders were asked what challenges their organizations have experienced with AI in the past 6-12 months. 49% flagged security concerns. 48% are dealing with hallucinations. 23% reported an increased need for debugging.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The “10x engineer” was always a simplification and I was very pleased when it started to fade. Then AI coding tools arrived, and it came roaring back. Software engineering is a team sport. The engineers who create the most impact are the ones who multiply the capacity of the people around them.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Yes. Session-based, unsampled runtime data collection is very cool 😎

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

1 in 3 engineering managers is thinking about going back to IC. 37% say their hands-on technical work has increased in the last 12 months. AI made building fast enough to compete with managing again. @leaddev.com latest report puts numbers on what a lot of us have been feeling.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

The latest Jellyfish's AI Engineering Trends research shows token consumption climbing sharply, but PR revert rates remain roughly flat across all AI adoption tiers, hovering in the same 0.45%–0.65% band they were in a year ago. More tokens per developer hasn't bought fewer reverted PRs.👇

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

This meme is a lie and we all know it 👇 Human PR review was always a bottleneck. We merged things we hadn't fully read and shipped things we shouldn't have. The difference now is that coding agents made it worse with PR slop.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

First time at #KCDNewYork. Great event, easy to meet people, fantastic food. Met @salaboy.com, newly elected CNCF TOC member and author of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes. Already at the top of my reading pile. See you at the next one. 🙌

Me, Tom Johnson and Mauricio Salatino at the Canal St. subway station

Platform Engineering on Kubernetes book by Mauricio Salatino

Platform Engineering on Kubernetes book with author's signature

Me, Tom Johnson at the KCD New York event

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Who wants to review this PR? 👇😅 PR reviews were already a known weak point in software development before AI coding agents arrived. They just made it impossible to ignore.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Every major model release makes the same point: the frontier keeps moving. Claude Fable 5 today. Something better in six months. The most underrated decision any engineering team makes right now: building AI workflows that are MODEL-AGNOSTIC.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I'm speaking at the #DeveloperWeek conference tomorrow in 📍New York. If anyone is interesting in discussing agentic coding, debugging, or just have a coffee, find me and @bkstephj1.bsky.social ☕️

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Back in NY from #LDX3 London. 3 sessions in 2 days: AMA panel, a talk on why most MCP servers are collecting dust, and moderating a peer group. The questions after my talk made every hour of prep worth it. @leaddev.com sets the bar high for developer conferences!

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

It’s hard not to make the connection between between AI output quality and data input. The sooner the distinction between dashboard data and agent data becomes a first-class engineering concern the sooner coding agents will actually deliver on what everyone expects them to do.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

“some companies are shipping as many as 50% more defects than before.” This is 👆 from a recent DX report on AI-assisted engineering which confirms what many engineering teams have been quietly noticing: adoption is up, but quality continues to be inconsistent.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I'm speaking at the LDX3 conference next week in 📍London, UK. If anyone is interesting in discussing agentic coding, debugging, or just have a coffee, find me and @vladistevanovic.bsky.social ☕️

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

“Shift left” has become one of those empty buzzwords that started as genuinely useful and has become misunderstood or misused to the point where it just creates more confusion. See 🧵for the most concrete damage “shift left” does IMO

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Replace PR slop with a handful of high-quality PRs. Coding agents prompted by incomplete observability data produce noisy, low-quality PRs that create more review work than they save. Multiplayer provides coding agents unsampled, full-stack session data. Try it for free today: www.multiplayer.app

multiplayer.app

Debugging Agent for Developers

We connect your favorite coding agent to prod to fix application bugs automatically. Run us locally and eliminate PR slop.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Minneapolis last week. New York on June 9-10. I'll be presenting at DeveloperWeek a talk I've been wanting to give for a while: From Alert to Action: Redesigning Your Observability Stack for Agentic AI.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

First time at the @cncf.io Observability Summit. First time speaking there too. Honestly, what a rush. I gave a talk on building MCP servers and shared some of the lessons we've learned building the @multiplayer.app debugging agent on top of #OpenTelemetry.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I'm attending the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Observability Summit today in 📍Minneapolis, Minnesota. If anyone is interesting in discussing agentic coding, debugging, or just have a coffee, find me and @bkstephj1.bsky.social ☕️

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Your manager doesn't care how many PRs you opened this week. They care about this: (1) Change Failure Rate (CFR): the % of deployments that break something in production. Industry benchmark is 4%. Some teams using AI coding tools are now running at 6%, shipping 50% more defects than before.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

According to the most recent Pragmatic Engineer survey, Staff+ engineers use agents regularly at a rate of 63.5%, outpacing regular engineers (49.7%), engineering managers (46.1%), and directors and VPs (51.9%).

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

There's a story economists love to tell about ATMs and bank tellers. If you're a developer, you've probably heard it cited in relation to AI tools: the technology won't replace you, it will assist you.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Most engineering teams are using AI to write code faster than ever. But they are also shipping bugs with equal speed. Ultimately, the root cause is a data problem.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Coding agents take bad metadata at face value. They won’t reconcile five different naming conventions for the same entity. This is a fundamental and under appreciated asymmetry: humans accumulate skepticism as a kind of professional immune system. AI agents don’t.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

AI has no intuition for “that’s sus”. AI agents have none of that scar tissue that experienced developers accumulate over time.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

The Law of False Alerts: “As the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases.” Too many alerts and people stop reading them. Too many false positives and people stop trusting them.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Everyone in the room nods when you say “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s the first thing developers say when you ask them about AI and data quality. It’s also, apparently, the last thing they think about when they connect their observability stack to a debugging agent.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Hot take for a room full of observability practitioners: Logs, traces, and metrics were designed for a world where humans wrote and reviewed every line of code. That world is gone. I'm speaking at @cncf.io's Observability Summit North America in Minneapolis on May 21–22.

Observability Summit talk "from data dumps to smart context" by Thomas Johnson, Multiplayer CTO and cofounder

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Turns out “is that a problem?” has a pretty clear answer.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I'm joining this panel 👇 today and I'll be bringing a slightly uncomfortable perspective. 👀 Looking forward to an honest conversation with Jon Haddad, Michele Mancioppi, and Amy Tobey about what it takes to make agentic observability actually work.

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Reposted by Tom Johnson

Multiplayer @multiplayer.app · 18/03/2026

📅 Today, Wed, 18 MAR 2026 🕘 10:00 AM PDT | 1:00 PM EDT | 6:00 PM CET A panel on agentic observability with @tomjohnson3.bsky.social, @rustyrazorblade.com orblade.com, @michele.dash0.com, and @renice.bsky.social Hosted by @dash0.com and @leaddev.com Save your spot: leaddev.com/event/a-blue...

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

System-first o11y has its function, but more and more devs are realizing that effective debugging requires a session-first approach with a single timeline that correlates: • User interactions • Console errors • Network req/res • Backend traces and spans

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

This chart should scare you👇. 96% of developers don't fully trust AI-generated code, yet only 48% always review it before it ships. Sit with that for a second.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

First time speaking at a @cncf.io event. If you're going to be in Minneapolis, let's connect. ☕️👇 My talk will be all about the hard lessons from moving an MCP server into production and how to design for AI agents and effective debugging. Full schedule: observabilitysummitna26.sched.com

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

If your team isn’t discussing Spec-Driven Development or how your design decisions are documented, versioned, and shared, you’re undermining your AI tooling strategy.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

AI agents (especially when running in parallel) don’t operate well on vague intent. They need precise, well-reasoned specifications to make consistent decisions.

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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Most engineers tune out when they hear “system design.” It feels like overhead. Until AI forces you to care about it.

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