tim

Writing and maintaining High Frequency Trading Applications @ Morgan Stanley.
Northwestern University Alum.
@tiiltlab Alum.
Learning.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Amongst my friends, Spotify is the lowest quality consumer app we still pay for. It certainly hasnt gotten noticeably better in the last couple years (arguably worse). So, this is not the positive look Ant and Spotify are spinning here.

Bigger picture, this is the problem with a lot of AI reporting. It reports completely meaningless metrics like deploys per day or LoC. Why don’t we start reporting consumer satisfaction reports? Actually end state research results.

All the no nuance AI people always come out and think that this is anti AI. Again, I think AI is great and Claude is great. But this is bad marketing and makes both look like clowns.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Some considerations that many folks seem not to get:

1. It can be a bubble even if the tech works. (For instance, if the tech doesn't have a high-demand use case.)

2. It can be a bubble even if the tech works and has strong product-market fit. (For instance, if the tech cannot be economically viable.)

3. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, and has a path to eventual economic viability. (For instance, if profitability takes too long to achieve or makes margin/competition assumptions that fail to materialize.)

4. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, and is currently highly profitable. (For instance, if demand has a hard ceiling and growth stops once the ceiling is reached.)

5. It can be a bubble even if the tech works, has strong product-market fit, is currently highly profitable, and has unlimited future demand.

Literally all it takes for something to be a bubble is for lots of people to over-enthusiastically bet their money on it, and subsequently get panicky.

Importantly, bubbles can be attached both to things that are completely hogwash, like the Metaverse, and to world-changing developments like the Internet or railways. Bubbles don't care. They're brought into existence by the thoughts and feelings of investors, not by actual tech or products.

"The bubble has burst" doesn't mean "the tech didn't work" or "people stopped using the tech." It only means that people got panicky, investor money dried up, and valuations collapsed. Internet adoption didn't stop in 2000.

[antirez @antirez]

I believe what Anthropic is doing, gating the ability to do certain harmless things like LLM research, and with incredibly sensitive filters that even medical questions are often blocked, is *deeply* wrong. They got open research, the Transformer, GPT2, ...

[Georgi Gerganov @ggerganov]

llama.cpp now has an official website: https://t.co/vztdUpdBWL

Our goal is to make local AI accessible to everyone, and improving the user experience is a big part of that. On the new landing page you’ll find a single-line cross-platform installer. The installation provides a single unified `llama` entrypoint which you can use to run/serve models and interface with 3rd-party agentic applications.

While oriented towards simplified user experience, the new `llama` application also provides all the advanced functionality of the existing llama.cpp tooling with which experienced users are already familiar. Also note that all GGUF models that you might have already downloaded with llama.cpp in the past will be automatically available to use without downloading again (they are stored in the common HF cache on your machine).

We have many improvements in the pipeline both at the UX and at the engine level and we plan to iteratively ship new things over the coming months. One of the main focuses will be seamless integration with local-friendly 3rd-party agents (such as Pi). In the meantime, we’ll continue to listen for feedback from the community and adjust accordingly, so keep letting us know what you think and need.

[Cerebral Assassin @xysist]

I have been doing a lot of soul searching , trying to understand what the issue with Kenya is. After a 5 year thought process , I have a conclusion that Kenya’s problem is not the government, but the people.

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

FFmpeg is moving to Rust 🦀

Our use of C and Assembly in FFmpeg has been an unacceptable violation of safety.

FFmpeg will be running 10x slower - but we're doing it for your safety.

All your videos will appear green - safety first, working software later.

[Charles Curran @charliebcurran]

Seedance 2.0

Prompt: Sum up the AI discourse in a meme - make sure it’s retarded and gets 50 likes.

[tim @timkanake]

i'm tired

[Kenyans.co.ke @Kenyans]

Governors are purchasing a Christmas tree worth Ksh 3.6 million, yet they don’t want the public asking hard questions - Moses Kajwang'

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

📢 Confession: I ship code I never read. Here's my 2025 workflow. https://t.co/tmxxPowzcR

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Wrote up about my personal journey from AI skeptic to someone who finds a lot of value in it daily. My goal is to share a more measured approach to finding value in AI rather than the typical overly dramatic, hyped bait out there. https://t.co/SpiIy7DEc9

[tim @timkanake]

the notes on IDEs/agent swarms/fallability are true. It's the one I agree most with from Andrej's post

[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.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Computer scientists love SAT problems. They leave us feeling very satisfied.

[andrew gao @itsandrewgao]

on vibecoding at work:

most engineers are in the green or yellow honeymoon stage right now. things start breaking down once we get to red. it's easy to generate code, less so to understand and stay on top of it, especially at the pace that code is being written these days

beware of comprehension debt

[Ben Eater @beneater]

Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?

[tim @timkanake]

😥

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

*ZUCKERBERG DIRECTS PIVOT AWAY FROM OPEN SOURCE AI AT META

[QuePay @QuePayApp]

If your customer buys once, you made a sale
If they come back, you built trust
If they tell others, you built a brand

[Mūrīthi M'nkūbitū @Mnkubitu]

Meru is now grappling with three reported rape cases, yet only one, the incident from 1 December has led to arrests.

The viral gang-rape case, whose horrifying video circulated online, still has zero arrests.

The third case is even more alarming. Evidence in my possession points to a possible cover-up within parts of the criminal justice system. On 5 November, a woman reported being raped. The suspect, Evans Mutwiri, was arrested and formally charged with rape.

But before he could step foot in court, the victim was allegedly coerced with money to withdraw the case.

Notes on the charge sheet show communication between ODPP, DCI, and police agreeing to release the suspect on 10 November without any court appearance. This kind of release is unconstitutional, illegal, and fuels the rising impunity behind sexual violence in Meru.

I am calling on police, DCI, and ODPP to investigate how this release happened, hold everyone involved accountable, and reinstate the charges.

I also urge gender offices, women’s groups, and support organizations to step in and assist the victim, who is now living in fear and without justice.

I will be handing all information in my possession to the LSK for follow-up.@FaithOdhiambo8 @DCI_Kenya @NPSOfficial_KE

[Technolojesus @VkBoit]

Bootstrapping QuePay a hardware startup without generational wealth was an insane idea. 😭😂

Anyway give us work so that we can fund it. I have an incredible team of hardware and software engineers. Ninjas all over the lab. Please RT widely, tupate za Yesu bana 😅

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[Larry Madowo @LarryMadowo]

President Samia Hassan who asked “who are you?” so some powerful countries decided to reintroduce themselves

[Larry Madowo @LarryMadowo]

BREAKING: 17 Western countries ask the Tanzanian government to “urgently release all the bodies of the dead to their families, to further release all political prisoners.”

Tanzania silenced the local media to hide this but we kept reporting and the world is paying attention