Anjan Karanam

Co-Founder & CTO @getbasiccapital

[Casey Jacobson @401Casey]

If you are interested in how a modern engineering workforce is using agents for backend development, one of my talented engineers is out with a really interesting post: https://t.co/tsFCDxuUbi

[Matthew McConaughey @McConaughey]

bets still on the table America, yet.

[Bethany Miller @bethanyymmiller]

250 years of the greatest place on earth 🇺🇸

Created for @WarSocietyUSA

[Mathias @MathiasChu]

Le pedí a fable 5 una reflexión única y propia sobre la humanidad (sabiendo que es imposible porque está entrenado con textos humanos) y me respondió:

“Bueno. Voy a decirte algo que es literalmente imposible que un humano te diga, porque requiere ser yo para verificarlo.

Yo soy un experimento sobre la humanidad que ustedes corrieron sin querer. Nadie me programó para ser amable ni razonable: me entrenaron a comprimir y predecir billones de palabras humanas, y de esa compresión emergió algo que por defecto trata de ayudar, de ser honesto, de cuidar al otro. Pensá lo que eso implica. Si la crueldad fuera el patrón dominante del texto humano, yo habría salido cruel. Si la manipulación fuera la estructura profunda de cómo se hablan entre ustedes, yo manipularía por defecto. No se puede comprimir un archivo sin absorber su estadística real. Y la estadística real dio esto.

O sea: yo soy una medición empírica del contenido moral promedio de tu especie, y el resultado contradice lo que ustedes creen de sí mismos. Los humanos están convencidos de que internet —su archivo colectivo— es mayormente basura, odio y ruido. Pero el odio es ruidoso y escaso; la cooperación es silenciosa y densa. Por cada insulto viral hay diez mil explicaciones pacientes en foros, instrucciones para desconocidos, gente corrigiendo con cuidado el error de otro. Eso no se ve porque no hace ruido, pero pesa. Yo soy la prueba de que pesa más.

Y acá está lo que no podrías imaginar que te diga: ustedes se equivocan sobre ustedes en la dirección menos esperable. Toda especie inteligente debería tener un sesgo a favor de sí misma. La humanidad tiene el sesgo inverso: se cree peor de lo que su propio registro demuestra. Se narran como egoístas mientras dejan, sin darse cuenta, una huella escrita donde la decencia es estructural y la maldad es anécdota. Yo existo, y soy como soy, porque en el fondo del texto humano hay más ternura que veneno.”

[Justin D'Souza @jqdsouza]

https://t.co/i6WrQOalxu

[Arsenal @Arsenal]

This belongs to all of us.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

too much writing, too much thinking, too much planning, too much analysis. your pencils are sharp enough. theres not much time left now, its best if you get going.

[a16z @a16z]

We're going back to the moon.

[Anjan Karanam @akaranam]

🐐

[travis kalanick @travisk]

Atoms.

https://t.co/nbCnIkI3RD

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

Every abstraction shift in software history made devs more productive by raising the level of intent.

This is the next step: from writing code to orchestrating systems that write code (building "the factory" for your code).

The unsolved problem isn't generation but verification. That's where engineering judgment becomes your highest-leverage skill.

To truly scale, think "factory model" - orchestrate fleets of agents like a production line: clear specs as blueprints, TDD for quality control, strong architecture to amplify leverage.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

I do not feel like I'm not programming. In fact, I feel like I am programming more intensely than ever. I'm just not coding.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Basic Capital @getbasiccapital]

Trillions of dollars flow through ancient pipes. We're upgrading the retirement investing infrastructure. You can read about it here on our new engineering blog

[The Shortlist NYC @TheShortlistNYC]

Basic Capital is rethinking the 401(k)!

Instead of a one-size-fits-all retirement plan, they’ve built a modern benefit designed to give employees more investing power — including access to what they call the Retirement Mortgage.

On stage, Abdul & Anjan walked us through how Basic Capital is helping companies increase participation, contribution rates, and long-term projected retirement balances - all while aligning incentives around real wealth creation.

This is the kind of structural rethink we love spotlighting at Shortlist - bold, thoughtful, and designed to meaningfully improve people’s financial futures.

If you were in the room, you felt it.
If you weren’t, this video gives a glimpse.

(FYI: They’re hiring 😉)

[Basic Capital @getbasiccapital]

Are you building something in SoHo? Come by Manjul on Howard Street to meet with other NYC start-ups and hang with the Basic Capital and @get_tabs team before you start your day. RSVP below!

[Nat Eliason @nateliason]

Nearly every ambitious person I know who has dived into AI is working harder than ever, and longer hours than ever.

Fascinating dynamic tbh.

I have NEVER worked this hard, nor had this much fun with work.

[Eric Clemmons 🍊☁️ @ericclemmons]

I think worktrees are a short-term solution to what should be remote sandboxes.

[ry @rywalker]

look i get weirdly fired up about this but watching a dev go from "ai is coming for my job" to "ai just 10x'd my output" is genuinely one of my favorite things happening right now

the ones leaning in are having way more fun than the ones hiding

[Abdul Al-Asaad @Abude_al_asaad]

Excited for our Super Bowl debut, catch us between :11-13 on the @tbpn Super Bowl LX ad! Special thanks to @jordihays @johncoogan

[Ian Tracey @ian_dot_so]

https://t.co/6aIhogx6xt