Mihajlo Tintor

choose your battles

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

Farmers and agronomists: I need your brutal feedback.

Satellite imagery and vegetation indexes can still suck for real farms - clouds, poor resolution on small fields, and maps that leave you guessing.

We're building https://t.co/MKVqwwzF1A with possibly better satellite analysis + an AI Agronomist that could give practical crop advice and work on field features. This is early WIP.

What’s your biggest frustration with current satellite tools or vegetation indexes?
Any ideas or criticisms for the AI Agronomist or satelite imagery?

Be honest - every reply helps.

#AgriTech #PrecisionAgriculture

[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.

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

@scryptingg @MoummarNawafleh What.... we can't be that old already

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A major mistake I made in my undergrad is that I focused way too much on mathematical lens of computing - computability, decidability, asymptotic complexity etc. And too little on physical lens - energy/heat of state change, data locality, parallelism, computer architecture. The former is interesting; The latter bestows power.

[htmx.org / CEO of Perfectly Normal Behavior (same) @htmx_org]

what is HAPPENING on this TL?!?

@unclebobmartin is making thinly veiled threats

dan abramov is recommending react developers look at htmx

nervous!

[Pessimists Archive @PessimistsArc]

Nostalgia forgets pessimism:

It forgets novel reading was frowned upon
It forgets the moon mission was unpopular
It forgets the walkman was anti-social
It forgets the bicycle 'corrupted' women

After all, why would anyone have thought the good old days were bad?

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

Lol

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

best model for coding? @AnthropicAI sonnet 3.7 by far the best for me atm

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

Gemini 2.5 Pro is solid.

Making it easier to fill that 1M context window, while @GoogleDeepMind improves streaming & reliability.

Try out the experimental model, send feedback—we’ll fix everything. ❤️‍🔥

[Naval @naval]

A good organization focuses on correctness.

A bad organization focuses on consensus.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

The reality of building web apps in 2025 is that it's a bit like assembling IKEA furniture. There's no "full-stack" product with batteries included, you have to piece together and configure many individual services:

- frontend / backend (e.g. React, Next.js, APIs)
- hosting (cdn, https, domains, autoscaling)
- database
- authentication (custom, social logins)
- blob storage (file uploads, urls, cdn-backed)
- email
- payments
- background jobs
- analytics
- monitoring
- dev tools (CI/CD, staging)
- secrets
- ...

I'm relatively new to modern web dev and find the above a bit overwhelming, e.g. I'm embarrassed to share it took me ~3 hours the other day to create and configure a supabase with a vercel app and resolve a few errors. The second you stray just slightly from the "getting started" tutorial in the docs you're suddenly in the wilderness. It's not even code, it's... configurations, plumbing, orchestration, workflows, best practices. A lot of glory will go to whoever figures out how to make it accessible and "just work" out of the box, for both humans and, increasingly and especially, AIs.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

When working with LLMs I am used to starting "New Conversation" for each request.

But there is also the polar opposite approach of keeping one giant conversation going forever. The standard approach can still choose to use a Memory tool to write things down in between conversations (e.g. ChatGPT does so), so the "One Thread" approach can be seen as the extreme special case of using memory always and for everything.

The other day I've come across someone saying that their conversation with Grok (which was free to them at the time) has now grown way too long for them to switch to ChatGPT. i.e. it functions like a moat hah.

LLMs are rapidly growing in the allowed maximum context length *in principle*, and it's clear that this might allow the LLM to have a lot more context and knowledge of you, but there are some caveats. Few of the major ones as an example:

- Speed. A giant context window will cost more compute and will be slower.
- Ability. Just because you can feed in all those tokens doesn't mean that they can also be manipulated effectively by the LLM's attention and its in-context-learning mechanism for problem solving (the simplest demonstration is the "needle in the haystack" eval).
- Signal to noise. Too many tokens fighting for attention may *decrease* performance due to being too "distracting", diffusing attention too broadly and decreasing a signal to noise ratio in the features.
- Data; i.e. train - test data mismatch. Most of the training data in the finetuning conversation is likely ~short. Indeed, a large fraction of it in academic datasets is often single-turn (one single question -> answer). One giant conversation forces the LLM into a new data distribution it hasn't seen that much of during training. This is in large part because...
- Data labeling. Keep in mind that LLMs still primarily and quite fundamentally rely on human supervision. A human labeler (or an engineer) can understand a short conversation and write optimal responses or rank them, or inspect whether an LLM judge is getting things right. But things grind to a halt with giant conversations. Who is supposed to write or inspect an alleged "optimal response" for a conversation of a few hundred thousand tokens?

Certainly, it's not clear if an LLM should have a "New Conversation" button at all in the long run. It feels a bit like an internal implementation detail that is surfaced to the user for developer convenience and for the time being. And that the right solution is a very well-implemented memory feature, along the lines of active, agentic context management. Something I haven't really seen at all so far.

Anyway curious to poll if people have tried One Thread and what the word is.

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

@nptacek @NickADobos @karpathy I tried. It is headache, but still folder can be become section within single file, and as dev you can try navigating it.

[Mihajlo Tintor @Mikhail972]

@karpathy I think similar for smaller MVP projects that can be handled this way.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It's 2025 and most content is still written for humans instead of LLMs. 99.9% of attention is about to be LLM attention, not human attention.

E.g. 99% of libraries still have docs that basically render to some pretty .html static pages assuming a human will click through them. In 2025 the docs should be a single your_project.md text file that is intended to go into the context window of an LLM.

Repeat for everything.