Building ref.tools, previously @figma & @PalantirTech
San Francisco, CA
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Today, we're announcing @ref_tools open beta. Ref is your team’s shared space to decide what agents build before any code gets written.
We’ve raised $4M from @villageglobal, @Daybreak_Fund, @tmrohan, @RitualVC, @tonigemayel @barrald @wesmckinn and @bentossell.
Every engineering team is battling the same problem. I call it Velocity Sickness. It's the disconcerting feeling that you're moving fast but not having the impact you expect. It's affecting individuals, teams and especially leaders.
It looks like:
- Too many PRs to merge.
- Brainfry and burnout.
- Engineers running in different directions.
- Critical decisions being made by agents.
The last one is the most dangerous.
At its core, software engineering is about two things: (1) what decisions matter for my system? and (2) making those decisions. When you let agents make critical decisions, you lose ownership of your system and product.
You solve these problems with Ref.
Learn more: ref.tools/blog/ai-broke-code…
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this is what a ref is
it's the notebook of everything you've done to explore and solve a problem.
it's easy to share with your team
it's basically impossible for someone to just "show you their prompt" now, because everything is about references, skills and examples
I often ask my agent to look at 3 other repos I've made first, search the web for references, use other AI APIs, etc.
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this is the fundamental ai content problem:
if you spend a lot of time looking at decks, its easy to tell which ones are thoughtless
if you rarely engage with slide decks, the ai generated ones will look amazing with zero thought
the timeline is full of it in every medium (design, slides, games, video etc)
if your audience is at all sophisticated in the medium you're producing, you can't skip thinking
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I'm changing how i review my teammate's work (code or plan)
it used to be i'd mostly read, react and throw out questions to start discussion and prompt the owner's research. I was a good collaborator by identifying problems or nudging in better direction
now it's the opposite.
If i'm leaving comments and pulling your agents out of flow, the comments deserve more weight. Gone are the days of "did you consider <X> approach?". The barrier to answering that myself is now so low that I owe you better
the goal is still not to gatekeep or take ownership of my teammates work. the bar for a good review is simply higher now that I can research, riff and test with a prompt
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the designers+machines meetup last night was so good (s/o @ben_issen)
i go to a lot of ai meetups and the vibe was noticeably different than most. it was cheerful and creative and curious
if you're in SF and like design and ai you should try to get in on the next one
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my personal version of this is the rule of no surprises
An engineer casually shares a demo that blows everyone's mind. the whole company gasps and cheers because the idea is so good, so well executed and it feels effortless. we have to do this! now!
i'm in the audience. excited but also a bit jealous. I want that to be me. I want surprise the team with mind-blowing ideas.
But when I chase that feeling and try to shock the team with my brilliance, I waste time and fall short.
So I have the rule of no surprises:
if I have a big idea, the team should never be surprised by it.
That means workshoping it before it's ready and being embarrassed of the rough edges.
But most of all, it means letting other people in so it becomes their idea too.
new post: the senior engineer death spiral
sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio…
a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.
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Dylan is right.
User interfaces are not going away.
Yes, humans will use computers alongside agents. When working with agents, we will need the ability to audit what agents do in a human-readable way.
Yes, some interfaces (ex: dashboards, in-chat UI for ephemeral tasks, etc) will be generated. Most important interfaces will be intentionally designed. We will want both deterministic and non-deterministic interfaces in different situations. We're thinking a lot about the best ways to help designers shape non-deterministic systems at Figma.
Yes, new input modalities like voice, VR/AR and BCI will change the way we use computers and introduce lots of new interaction paradigms. This is all very exciting :)
Overall, the surface area of design will continue to grow much broader. Design is the new code and the key differentiator for software moving forward. Expect more and more energy to go into design / craft in the years ahead... it will be how you win or lose.
Eric is right about plenty of things, but the market will prove him wrong on this one...
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gemini-flash-2.0 holds a special place in my heart because it hit the perfect cheap+fast+smart-enough tradeoff
the jev insight is that basically every cheap+fast+smart-enough problem is actually a classification problem
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i skipped worktrees and went straight to cloud agents last summer thanks to @terragonlabs (rip)
these days whenever i see someone using worktrees it makes me a bit sad because their life could be just a bit easier
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the shift away from tickets for managing a team's work is very real
i still need visibility and accountability.
but we don't need to decompose a project into parts. we used to do that to get better estimates and so multiple people can work on it in parallel. neither is relevant anymore
what's working really well for us is individuals in lanes and they commit to "I'll deliver<X> by next week"
we do plan review to stay aligned and daily stand-up to share ideas and get feedback
For the first time, I think issue tracking is dying. At least for small teams.
After five years, I shut down our Linear workspace.
Every issue I'd file now goes one of two places.
If it's urgent enough to deserve tracking, it's urgent enough to hand to an agent right now. It comes back as a PR, not some card rotting in a backlog.
If it needs more product thinking than that, it belongs on our feedback board.
The issue tracker felt like the middle ground between them. I don't think that middle ground exists anymore.
These days my agent workspace is the tracker. What's running is what's being worked on. Nothing else needs a status.
This gets harder with a bigger team, I know. But these days, I'm seeing similar across my friends.
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i just realized one really important anti-design slop force we lost
there used to be this thing where a designer would miss a use case or error state but then some poor engineer would be tasked with programing it. they'd actually have to manually, by hand, type code for each of these case.
this was always so incredibly annoying. you'd get a beautiful golden path and then a 15 unhandled edge cases.
my favorite i ever got was "this reminder shows at exactly the right moment" 😅 like okay what data we using for that? how do we define the right moment? are you trying to fight me?
this was frustrating for the designer too bc they sweat over this perfect design and the engineer is only concerned with silly edge cases (note: good designers do care about edge case. many are not good)
having to type every edge case required us to think about UX. this was annoying for everyone BUT it was positive frictionnand it was a force for good in the universe
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This is an excellent break down of multiplayer-AI!
At ref.tools we thinking about multiplayer-AI for coding as multiplayer context engineering.
One important requirement is that the shared context must be observable and mutable to the entire team.
The implication is that is basically impossible if you are sharing agent sessions directly. For non-trivial work, that's like dropping into a massive 100+ message slack thread and trying to build a mental model for what's happening.
You need surface that makes it easy to explore your ideas in-depth with and agent AND easy for your teammate to glance at and provide feedback.
It needs to be human-legible and agent-useful.
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i like working with vivek
We do almost no code review.
Most of our review happens in the planning process with ref.tools and Fable, not at the PR stage.
After we’ve aligned on key decisions/tasks as a team, I use Ref’s built-in orchestrator to fan out multiple tasks in parallel to Opus 5.
Once the initial implementation is done, the PRs all go through several AI-driven reviews to ensure:
* The implementation matches the intent of the plan (Ref conformance checks).
* General bugs are caught, fixed and noted in the plan (Codex is great here)
* Security review (Codex also great)
* Linting, unit and integration test suites are green (standard CI practices)
The orchestrator agent is typically still managing all of this when it’s in-flight. It notifies me if anything needs my input.
We also have preview deploys on all PRs so we can always manually verify features end to end ourselves when needed.
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also very curious where everyone is at!
very uninterested in either of these takes:
1) i never read code, you shouldn't either
2) it's slop unless you read every line
If you’ve stopped doing human code reviews: how is it going?
If you’re still doing them: how are you able to keep up with the explosion of code + PRs, and how do you prioritise what to review “properly”?
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Matt Dailey retweeted
Anyone that works in AI is working the hardest they've ever worked in their lives. On the surface it's somewhat ironic (AI should give us back time!), but the reality is that it's the most fun, fascinating and empowering epoch in human history. The intelligence revolution.
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these graphical game demos are getting mindblowingly good and I know this is about model capability, not games BUT
the things that make me love a game are:
- interaction that is fun from the beginning and has a high skill cap (ex. CoD)
- a story that could be a great book but I have autonomy to do it my way (ex. BG3)
where we at on those?
Astra built this three.js game with gorgeous graphics, then recreated every scene in Blender and made the trailer too.
It feels like a massive upgrade from Sol for 3D graphics and front-end design. The UI feels way more polished and less like AI slop.
The rocks, trees, monuments, and characters are all procedural code, keeping the game under 2 MB before the image and music assets.
The level of autonomy is unbelievable. It needed very little steering, though I still had to keep pushing it to work harder on the details.
The UI icons, buttons, and ornaments were made as transparent PNGs with GPT Image 2.
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wait a sec if everything's a web app and we all work with a side car agent via webmcp
...is the browser the governance layer?
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Matt Dailey retweeted
A principal engineer showing you their software factory
Sam Lambert
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