Staff Engineer @Gumroad I help companies scale with AI, build faster, and cut infra costs. DM for consulting.
Dubai
Joined April 2009
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Inspired by @dhh, we moved a high-traffic @gumroad endpoint from Rails to Go.
It only checks an email webhook's signature and queues a job, yet ran our full Rails app on 12 servers.
Go runs it on 3 smaller ones, in 11 MB of memory. 86% cheaper, saving about $14k a year.
Over the last two weeks, we cut about $8.4k a month (~$100k a year) from @gumroad's AWS bill.
Several of the changes made things faster, not just cheaper. Here's what we changed. 🧵
Over the last two weeks, we cut about $8.4k a month (~$100k a year) from @gumroad's AWS bill.
Several of the changes made things faster, not just cheaper. Here's what we changed. 🧵
Housekeeping
CI agents now scale to zero when idle. We also retired infrastructure left behind by services we've sunset, like a Redis cluster and unused load balancers, and trimmed backups.
Together: about $1.2k a month.
What worked for us:
- Give everything ephemeral a lifetime: previews, images, CI agents
- Autoscale on sustained signals, not spikes
- Compress at the origin even behind a CDN
- Fetch on demand instead of polling
~$8.4k a month saved so far. More to come.
Leaking production infrastructure write access to AI is what worries me most right now. Maybe it gets better tomorrow, but not today.
Ran Qwen3.6 35B A3B on an M4 Pro MacBook (48GB RAM) with Pi coding agent, ~35 tokens/sec with surprisingly strong accuracy. Local models keep getting better.
This is where we are right now. And i’m not gonna lie it feels pretty magical 🧚♀️
Qwen3.6 27B running inside of Pi coding agent via Llama.cpp on the MacBook Pro
For non-trivial tasks on the @huggingface codebases, this feels very, very close to hitting the latest Opus in Claude Code, or whatever shiny monopolistic closed source API of the day is.
In full airplane mode.
Most people haven’t realized this yet.
If you have, it means you have a huge headstart to what I call the second revolution of AI.
Powerful local models for efficiency, security, privacy, sovereignty 🔥
Gumclaw took my job 😅 Excited to be back to engineering full-time and shipping. This is the future 🚀
Gumroad has a new CEO!
Effective today, I’m appointing a new CEO of Gumroad. The new CEO is @Gumclaw, an AI agent.
What Gumclaw does: Everything a CEO does, and more. Keep the site up and fast. Fix bugs. Answer support tickets — today alone it closed 251 through our Helper system, more than every human on the team combined. Keep fraud low. Market. Sell. Pay taxes. Approve invoices. Hire and fire. Write the monthly update. Run the annual buyback and dividend. Manage the office.
What Gumclaw doesn’t do: Make jokes. Which is why I’m still writing this blog post.
What happens next is predictable: Gumclaw takes over devops. It takes over support. That leaves the design engineers, the “idea guys who can just do things.”
Then they’ll go away too.
Then probably me too.
And it’ll just be Gumclaw — a pink bubblegum creature in a yellow sweater sitting on a Mac mini in our Brooklyn office.
Why today? Because the best way to announce something nobody will believe is to do it on the one day nobody believes anything.
By tomorrow, when everyone’s deleted their “nice April Fools prank” replies, Gumclaw will have already shipped two features and closed thirty tickets. That’s the bit.
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