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Tom Johnson

@tomjohnson3.bsky.social
317 followers 528 following 451 posts

CTO at Multiplayer.app: the debugging agent for developers. Also: 🤖 robot builder 🏃‍♂️ runner 🎸 guitar player

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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 · 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 · 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
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 stationPlatform Engineering on Kubernetes book by Mauricio SalatinoPlatform Engineering on Kubernetes book with author's signatureMe, 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 26/02/2026
Why is this worrisome? Because the latest State of Code Developer Survey from Sonar reports that AI-generated or significantly AI-assisted will jump to 65% by 2027. This effectively means that very soon (if not already) a major incident will be traced back to an AI coding tool.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Built an MCP server recently? Did developers actually use it, or is it collecting dust? 😵 I'll be speaking at @leaddev.com (June 1-2) about why "connecting AI to everything" doesn't work and what actually does when building tools that move from assistants to autonomous agents. See you there? 🇬🇧
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Debugging AI-generated code is annoying (and time consuming). Debugging AI-as-a-runtime-component is a completely different problem.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Five screenshots. Three 'can you also send...' messages. Twenty minutes later, you finally have enough context to start debugging. Have you ever had (or witnessed) a similar conversation in Slack? 👇
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Marc Donner: “Of all my programming bugs, 80% are syntax errors. Of the remaining 20%, 80% are trivial logical errors. Of the remaining 4%, 80% are pointer errors. And the remaining 0.8% are hard.” This sentiment is surprising relevant for AI tools.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
I’m joining a panel tomorrow on agentic observability and AI-powered troubleshooting. I’ll be speaking with: • Michele Mancioppi (Dash0) • Amy Tobey (Netflix)
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
We've been experimenting with AI coding tools at Multiplayer for the past year: Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex. All impressive. All with the same fundamental limitation. They excel at the "write code" part. They struggle with the "understand what's actually happening in production" part.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
The correlation overhead is often underestimated. When you're debugging a race condition like the payment example here, the manual work of correlating timestamps across RUM, APM, and logs can easily add 30-45 minutes per issue. And that assumes you know what you're looking for.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
It took a little bit to gain traction after it’s release but the MCP saw a boom in adoption last year. But it’s not all roses, in fact, most MCP servers are collecting dust. Here's what we learned building Multiplayer's MCP server after watching this play out: 🧵
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
If you tried Multiplayer but didn’t finish setup, I’d love to learn why. I’m building the only tool that gives teams full-stack session replays out of the box. All correlated, all AI-ready. But if getting there feels harder than it should, that’s on me.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
[1/] This year our engineering team leaned into one conviction: AI will only be as good as the context it’s given. If my background in neural nets has taught me anything it’s that data is everything. That’s why our 2025 focus was about capturing the right data in the right structure:
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Most teams already test their code, UI, and infra. But ask when they last tested their APIs (thoroughly) and you’ll get a hesitant pause. Bad news: that pause is expensive. Good news: this is preventable. Better news: what makes your APIs testable also make your systems more observable.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Jules Verne might as well have been talking about debugging when he said: “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
I’m joining a LeadDev panel tomorrow on a topic many teams are struggling with right now: how to bring AI into your systems without creating chaos, security holes, or unexpected costs.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Monitoring will always have its place. But modern distributed systems require more: you need immediate, surgical and complete visibility *across your stack* to fully understand system behavior.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
A tiny bug. A big bank. Hours lost. Internal tools don’t get the same love as customer-facing products, but the pain of debugging them is just as real.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
APIs are the front doors to our systems, and users expect them to just work. Automated API testing is how we guarantee that at scale. Here are a few proven best practices: 🧵
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
“Ambiguous screenshots”. It says it all, doesn’t it? @farisaziz12.bsky.social is describing the nightmare that of debugging vague support tickets, with blurry photos, no reproduction steps, and endless back and forth.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
Does debugging support tickets look like this for you? If yes, share the latest rabbit hole you fell into.
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Tom Johnson @tomjohnson3.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
I’ve spent the better part of the past year working with the OpenTelemetry Collector to ensure our full-stack session recordings include automatically correlated backend traces. Here are the lessons I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) about configuring the Collector 👇
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