Reece Engle

I build software, but I'm interested in everything and anything. Always looking to learn more.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

Claude Opus 4.8 is out today. It's our strongest coding model yet: up on SWE-bench Pro (from 64.3 to 69.2) and noticeably more honest about its own work. It tells you when it's unsure and catches its own bugs instead of declaring victory early. Same price as 4.7.

[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.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Aiden Bai @aidenybai]

just so we're clear:

Antigravity is a Windsurf wrapper

Windsurf is a VSCode wrapper

VSCode is an Electron wrapper

Electron is a Chromium wrapper

Chromium is a C++ wrapper

C++ is a C wrapper

C is an Assembly wrapper

Assembly is a Machine Code wrapper

Machine Code is a Binary wrapper

Binary is a Physics wrapper

Physics is a Math wrapper

Math is a Logic wrapper

Logic is a Philosophy wrapper

Philosophy is a Humans wrapper

Humans are a Carbon wrapper

Carbon is a Star-forged-matter wrapper

Stars are a Gravity wrapper

Gravity is… definitely not an Antigravity wrapper

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@RobinhoodApp Hook it up

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@Mrcryptoxwhale done

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@bitcoinjunkies @grok if there was manipulation from the executive level, would this be Biden or trump?

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@BlakeHHarris @grok how long do pitchers typically stay on IL for this type of injury?

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@NefflynBe Mac Miller

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@sama @grok would this run on the base model of the Mac mini m4?

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@ZssBecker Pre rich

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

Personally, I feel it's Jonathan Nolan's and Lisa Joy's ability to come up with extremely interesting ideas, but inability to articulate and execute in a coherent visible way. Season 1 was absolutely amazing, but I agree in terms of the writing and acting quality declines. But when you zoom out at the larger ideas that were trying to be conveyed, it's got a lot to say it just doesn't put it into a nice episodic package. My worry, it tried to be too smart with non linear story telling, worked amazingly in season 1 but yeah... At a certain point, just tell the story.

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@TheCinesthetic

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@TheCinesthetic

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

Why no number go up?

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@mzee_fabu @worldranking_ @grok @grok how about fair life protein drinks comparatively?

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@alifarhat79 Inflation low, unemployment low -- as much as my mortgage interest sucks.... Can't help but feel it could be worse.

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@grok @InternetH0F @reed you're famous

[Reece Engle @_reecespieces_]

@grok @InternetH0F @grok can you be specific on what post or was it my profile? Also were there any other notable high profile users?