Ferry

Mostly on Bluesky:

[Hans senfuma @senfumahans]

Its funny how everyone's idea of heaven is a complete untouched paradise, crystal clear waters, lush green forests, enough food for everyone, classless, moneyless, stateless, a Utopia of peace, unity andhappiness. But here on earth it's considered a leftist ideology.

[Donald Clark @DonaldClark]

Astonishing act of cheating by Argentines. As Spanish player is hurtled 360 degrees through the air, Argentinian player bottom left feigns injury to deflect, with Messi pointing to him. Clearly a rehearsed ploy. Deliberate and nasty.

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@BensMobile @RealJamesWoods Thank you for supplying us with the factual context Ben!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks. I'd expect something similar to be happening to well into double digit percent of engineers out there, while the awareness of it in the general population feels well into low single digit percent.

IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits.

Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.

Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn't have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.

Leverage. LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the "feel the AGI" magic is to be found. Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage.

Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Questions. A few of the questions on my mind:
- What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*.
- Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
- What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?
- How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?

TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@VictorVlam 90 tot 93% van de Nederlanders beheerst volgens onderzoek Engels, terwijl 18% laaggeletterd is en oa. moeite heeft met lezen. Ik denk dat je beter Engels kan praten op TV dan dat je het programma ondertiteld

[Today In History @historigins]

One of the greatest lecture in the world.

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@RCM_Doherty Je weet dat het een parodie is op een eerdere tweet van Lucille Werner en hij zelf die ⓘ eronder heeft gezet?

ⓘ This user isn't suspected of anything

[ChuckUfarley @CanadianBadBoys]

@DHSgov

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@YorickB Nevermind, gevonden (denk ik): https://t.co/VwLH9344RE

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@YorickB Kan het zijn dat die hier net ook over Veghel kwamen in de richting van St. Oedenrode? Vliegen ze een market garden route?

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@RWSverkeersinfo Veel respect voor ^SM die ontzettend veel mensen die hem/haar allemaal op dezelfde fout wijzen steeds met evenveel geduld koeltjes beantwoord. Knap!

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@ajsmith_me @parisroubaix @TamauPogi These are the questions we need answers to! ❤

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@HumansNoContext Never heard of a Green Egg? I hear Weber sells them, sometimes for more than 1000 euro or dollar

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@PieterOmtzigt Goedemiddag,
Gezien deze mening, zouden u en uw partij dan ook niet vermeld moeten worden in het bericht van @gl_pvda? https://t.co/ni17oripQ2

[Progressief Nederland @progressiefned]

Precies drie jaar geleden begon Poetin zijn agressieoorlog tegen Oekraïne, een oorlog die tot op de dag van vandaag talloze levens verwoest.

Het is belangrijker dan ooit om solidair te blijven met het Oekraïense volk, in het belang van zowel Oekraïne als onze eigen veiligheid.

[De Speld @DeSpeld]

Man hoopt reisjes naar Mars aantrekkelijker te maken door sfeer op aarde zo veel mogelijk te verzieken https://t.co/ooTdcpObQc

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@RagingGamerNL Jij ook Chris!

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@wolfofx That's not really fair. With him on the pony, he shouldn't expect her to keep up on her bike ;P

[Community Notes & Violations @CNviolations]

SNL did good on this one, not gonna lie.

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@arjankruithof Haha. Jaloers op je trip! En dan ben ik niet eens een 49'er. Moet fantastisch zijn. Geniet!

[Ferry @Llanirev]

@Dolfjansen Laat de beste man nou gewoon even zijn bingokaart met 7 hoofdzonden vol maken, dan kunnen we door. Waar zitten we? Hebzucht, Hoogmoed, Afgunst en Gulzigheid zijn afvinkt ✔. Woede ook? Dan alleen Onkuisheid en Traagheid nog 👍