James Fredley

9 driverless @tesla @robotaxi rides in 2 days. $120.80 total. 5 were in the Cybercab: two seats, a screen, and no steering wheel or pedals at all. 4 were in the Tesla Robotaxi Model Y. No human driver in any of them. That makes 3 different driverless cars for me this year: ↳ March: Waymo Jaguar in downtown Atlanta ↳ April: Tesla Robotaxi Model Y in Austin ↳ September: Tesla Cybercab in Austin The price is what I still can't believe: ↳ Cheapest ride: $9.45 ↳ Most expensive: $19.36 ↳ A 5.5-mile, 17-minute ride: $14.79 ↳ Average: $13.42 a ride My honest take on the Cybercab: it's amazing. ↳ Smooth the entire ride ↳ It seemed to pick up pedestrians, bikes, and scooters better than a human driver would ↳ It hit a road closure with caution tape and handled it great ↳ The cabin is great, and the butterfly doors are awesome Compared to the Model Y, the ride itself feels about the same. The Cybercab carries 2 passengers instead of 4. Picking one mostly came down to which car could get to me faster. Prices move around, and sometimes the Model Y was the cheaper one. My guess is demand and how far the car had to come to pick me up. Either way, it was a bit more refined than @Waymo. The real difference is purpose. In April I said the Robotaxi felt native because Tesla built the hardware and the software together. The Cybercab goes one step further. It was purpose-built to be a taxi, for passengers and never a driver. There is no wheel to grab and no pedal to press. I rode from The Carpenter Hotel to Rails World at the Palmer Events Center and recorded the ride. $11.10. Inside Ruby on Rails - The Rails Foundation - Rails World, the talk was AI writing the code. On the way there, AI drove the car. The robots are driving. And now the car isn't even built for a human driver.

My @grailsframework 8 talk in Glasgow promised 10x. The load tests came back at 32x. Same schema, same seed, same request mix. 40 users. One layer at a time. 132 req/s with naive Grails Data (aka GORM) and the default pool. 231 after sizing the connection pool. 384 with one line of Hibernate config. 462 with entity batch sizes. 1,315 with grouped count queries. That is 10x without leaving Grails Data (aka GORM). Then I kept going. 2,661 with one hand-written SQL query per page. 4,199 with a rendered-JSON cache in front of it. 32x A 20-chirp timeline page went from 116 SQL statements to 2. The baseline was deliberately naive, the way a first version often is. That was the point. The part that surprised me was what did not help. Java 25. compileStatic. invokedynamic. Compact object headers. No clear gain. Every difference was about 5% or less. Virtual threads were slower in all four configurations I tested. 34% slower on the naive app. 40 requests in flight, 200 Tomcat threads. Threads were not the shortage. The database set the pace. Measure first. Count the queries. Then remove the work. The code and every measurement are on GitHub: github.com/TriumphInteractiv… Thank you to @TheASF and the Community Over Code team for a great conference. What is the first thing you check when an app is slow?

Boy it was a ton of work. Worth it.

One of the best Java conference values.

Can't wait!

I was running a little hot on Opus 5.5, for the week, switching to Sonnet 5.5 to see how it does.

Second month receiving @cursor_ai Ultra for free with @spacexai @SuperGrok Heavy. >2x the Grok 4.6 quota. It has replaced a lot of Opus 5 orchestration in my swarm.

Parking Options near Raleigh Founded (509 W North St, Raleigh, NC 27603) for ~5:45-8:30 PM (2.5-3 hours, weekday evening). Construction on North St/Glenwood Ave (Highline tower) may limit street access/spots. Street Parking (Glenwood South district) Location: W North St, Glenwood Ave & side streets (0-2 min walk) Rate: $1.25-1.50/hr, Free after 6 PM Lane Lot (Secure Parking USA / app) Location: 313 W Lane St (~4 min walk) $6.36 if you book in advance (gives you 10 hours): parkwhiz.com/locations/62103… Centerline Lot (P706, Power Parking/HONK) Location: 509 W North St (at venue, 0 min walk) Rate: $6.65 (1 hr), $10.85 (2 hr), $15.95 (3 hr) First two hours, but overage is camera enforced: qr.mypowerparking.com/MfiWw4 222 Glenwood Parking Deck (The Car Park) Location: 222 Glenwood Ave (~3 min walk) Rate: $4/hr ($20 daily max) 2.5-3 hr: $12 510 Glenwood Parking Deck (The Car Park) Location: 510 Glenwood Ave (~4 min walk) Rate: $4/hr ($20 daily max) 2.5-3 hr: $12

Every hype cycle writes another SaaS obituary. No-code. Web3. AI agents. After 28 years building software, my read is simple: Many commercial agents are SaaS with a new interface. The delivery model survives. The agent becomes the engine.

Claude gave up on the human. The human was the issue. Fair. On the long hard Agentic Engineering grinds, I sometimes get to this point. It's best to step away, touch some grass and then come back with fresh eyes.