Daniel Altman

[GitHub @github]

We are investigating unauthorized access to GitHub’s internal repositories. While we currently have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories (such as our customers’ enterprises, organizations, and repositories), we are closely monitoring our infrastructure for follow-on activity.

[Daniel Altman @danielaltman]

@mesch Cuánto vacío-pan!

[Mirtha ceballos 🇦🇷✝️ @AlterEllo]

@periodistan_ Boluuuuu

Estaba muy preocupada.
Cuando fueron las protestas en Irán y mataron mucha gente del hermoso país que visitaste pensé que te habían robado la cuenta de Twitter porque andabas perdido!

Me alegra mucho que hayas recuperado la cuenta!

🫶🏼

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

If the current editors of the NYT were alive in 1945:

[Pablo Quirno @pabloquirno]

Ante la confirmación de la muerte de Ali Jamenei, Líder Supremo de la República Islámica de Irán, corresponde recordar que la Justicia argentina determinó que el atentado contra la AMIA del 18 de julio de 1994, con 85 muertos y centenares de heridos, fue un acto de terrorismo internacional planificado desde las más altas esferas del régimen iraní de la época y ejecutado por Hezbolá.

La decisión estratégica fue adoptada por la conducción política iraní vigente en 1993–1994, entre cuyas máximas autoridades se encontraba Jamenei, imputado en la causa.

La búsqueda de verdad y justicia por las 85 víctimas es una política de Estado y seguirá siendo una prioridad permanente.

Que estas noticias aporten alivio a las familias y contribuyan al reconocimiento de las responsabilidades y a la lucha contra el terrorismo y la impunidad.

[La Madre de Satán @LaMadreDeSatan]

Atefeh Sahaaleh tenía 16 años.
Fue ahorcada en 2004 por la justicia iraní.
Su delito: haber sido violada.
PROHIBIDO OLVIDAR.

[Ceci Denot @gordameir]

Me matan los “repudio al régimen pero esta no es la forma, van a llevar al mundo a una guerra” claro, un peligro, imaginate si Irán decide a partir de esto crear, entrenar y financiar una red de milicias jihadistas en toda la región para ocupar y desestabilizar países, matar a cientos de miles de personas y atacar barcos comerciales? O que pasa si se pone a organizar y financiar atentados en todo el mundo, desde Beirut hasta Buenos Aires? O si se pone a perseguir y asesinar mujeres, opositores políticos y minorías sexuales y religiosas? O imaginate que agarra y revienta deliberadamente a más de 30 mil civiles en un mes por protestar? Sería terrible realmente. Mejor no hacer nada.

[Daniel Altman @danielaltman]

Esto es tremendo…

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Karpathy just described the end of the library economy and the market hasn’t even started pricing in what replaces it.

The surface read is “cool trick with DeepWiki MCP.” The actual story is about what happens when the cost of understanding someone else’s code drops to zero.

For decades, the entire open source ecosystem has operated on a simple trade: you accept 100MB of node_modules, 291 transitive dependencies, and a mass of code you’ll never read, because the alternative was spending weeks understanding and reimplementing the functionality yourself. That trade made sense when human comprehension was the bottleneck.

Karpathy pointed an agent at torchao’s fp8 training implementation, asked it to extract a self-contained version, and got back 150 lines that ran 3% faster. Five minutes. No dependency. The agent found implementation details around numerics, dtypes, autocast, and torch compile interactions that Karpathy says he would have missed and that the library maintainers themselves struggled to document.

That last part is where it gets interesting. The agent read the entire codebase, understood the context, identified the exact subset needed, resolved internal dependencies, and produced something cleaner than the original. It performed the work of a senior engineer doing a focused code audit, except it finished before the engineer would have opened the second file.

Now scale that capability across every dependency in every project. The npm ecosystem processed 6.6 trillion package downloads in 2024. Over 99% of open source malware last year occurred on npm. The xz Utils backdoor showed a single compromised maintainer can threaten global infrastructure. Self-replicating npm malware appeared in 2025 for the first time. The dependency model is bloated and becoming an attack surface that grows faster than anyone can monitor.

Karpathy’s “bacterial code” concept, self-contained, dependency-free, stateless modules designed to be extracted by agents, inverts the entire incentive structure. Instead of writing code that gets installed as a monolithic package, you write code that’s easy for an agent to read, understand, and selectively extract. Documentation matters less because the agent reads the source directly. API stability matters less because the consumer isn’t importing your package, they’re generating their own implementation from your logic.

The people who should be paying attention are library maintainers. Today, a popular open source package creates leverage through adoption and dependency chains. Tomorrow, if agents can reliably extract the exact functionality a developer needs and produce self-contained code that’s potentially faster, the leverage shifts from the package to the underlying knowledge embedded in the code.

This might actually free maintainers from the brutal maintenance treadmill, where 500+ day vulnerability remediation timelines are common and burnout is the norm. But it restructures who captures value and how.

The winners write code that’s clean enough for agents to learn from. The losers maintain sprawling dependency trees that agents will route around entirely.

[Acción y Comunicación sobre Oriente Medio - ACOM @ACOM_es]

Ayer fue la entrega de los premios Grammy.
Nadie hizo mención a los miles de asesinados por el represor regimen de los ayatolas iraníes.
¿Por qué será?

[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.

[Agustín Antonetti @agusantonetti]

Estamos presenciando el genocidio más grande del siglo XXI.

Más de 40.000 muertos en menos de 20 días, en su mayoría mujeres que quieren vivir en libertad.

Nadie habla de esto, no hay manifestaciones, no hay flotillas, no hay artistas.

El mundo en silencio, dejándolas morir.

[Daniel Altman @danielaltman]

@HernanWilkinson QEPD Máximo!
Sus clases eran de las mejores que tuve! Me enseñó mucho!

[Daniel Altman @danielaltman]

@periodistan_ Te referís a tus amigos de Hamas, forro?

[Patricia Bullrich @PatoBullrich]

En pocos días, el régimen de Irán asesinó a más de 12.000 personas por manifestarse y lleva más de 120 horas con las comunicaciones totalmente apagadas para que no circulen imágenes de la violencia.

Mientras tanto, en las calles hay mujeres que se animan a pelear por derechos básicos y una sociedad entera que pide libertad.

Y frente a esto, el silencio ensordecedor de muchos organismos internacionales y de sectores de izquierda que suelen levantar banderas ajenas y gritar desde la comodidad de sus países democráticos.

Son también los amigos del kirchnerismo, con los que firmaron un memorándum de entendimiento por los atentados en la Argentina. Los mismos de siempre, del lado equivocado de la historia.

Espero que “las soluciones” lleguen pronto y traigan libertad.

Y a los de los discursos hipócritas, el silencio los deja en evidencia.

[@IsraelVive @IsraelVive1948]

Este muchacho publicó que a los judíos no había que cortarles el prepucio sino la yugular, hoy fue suspendido de su puesto de médico en un hospital público de la a provincia de Buenos Aires, y fue denunciado también penalmente ya no habrá sonrisas en fotos y hagamos famosa su cara para que ser violento y/o antisemita en la Argentina no sea gratis

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: Live look at Columbia University after they learned that over 2,000 unarmed Iranian civilians have been massacred by the Islamic Republic.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: The UN, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross release a joint statement condemning the Islamic Republic for murdering unarmed Iranian protestors.

See their statement below 👇

[Daniel Altman @danielaltman]

@periodistan_ @nbg__ Seguís demostrando que sos un forro…

[Hernán. @extonoesquilmes]

El régimen de Irán le sigue borrando a @periodistan_ todos los posteos en los que cuenta día a día la feroz represión que sufre el pueblo iraní, principalmente las mujeres y los periodistas independientes ¡Hay que ayudarlo a difundir!

[Marcelo Birmajer @BirmajerOk]

Si te compadeces cuando nos matan, pero te escandalizas cuando nos defendemos, es porque prefieres que nos maten.