sally 🌸

ai and frontier tech investor 🔧 loves board games and live music

[broadglow @broadglow]

congratulations to the cursor team

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Day 2 - golden hour at presidio

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Trying my best to ~~romanticize~~ SF for myself. Here for 20 days and will try to post an aesthetic photo of the city each day.

Stunning day + clocked 15k steps to get over jet lag

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

🚨 Do you understand what happened today.. a single Monday..

> Zuckerberg announced he's building AI to do his own CEO job.. after firing 31,000 people to "protect" it..

> someone bought $1.5 billion in S&P futures FIVE MINUTES before Trump announced halting attacks on Iran.. the biggest insider trade in broad daylight..

> then the Pentagon started deploying airtroops to Iran anyway.. the "peace" lasted 12 hours..

> then Iran launched missiles at Israel tonight.. so the peace someone made $1.5 billion off of was never real..

> OpenAI started guaranteeing Wall Street 17.5% minimum returns AND early access to unreleased models.. nonprofit to "we'll pay you to invest in us"..

> Jensen Huang told Lex Fridman "I think we've achieved AGI".. then walked it back in the same sentence.. the man selling the shovels just said the gold rush is over and expects you to keep buying..

> Claude launched an AI that sits at your desk and does your entire job while you're not in the room.. shipped it as a Monday night feature update..

> Goldman Sachs raised US recession probability to 30%..

> the owner of OnlyFans died at 43 with $3 billion.. couldn't buy more time..

> Larry Fink called tokenization "the next internet" after calling Bitcoin money laundering for years..

all of this.. one Monday.. if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..

it's only getting crazier from here.

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

Just in case Gen Z is trying to understand what happened today:

Claude was mogging OpenAI for weeks. Then this gymcel dev ships Clawdbot which was the fastest growing OSS thing ever, absolute looksmax for the whole ecosystem.

Anthropic tries to dairygoon him with legal. Dev renames to OpenClaw. OpenAI slides in like a foid-pulling Chad with acquisition interest. OpenClaw gets acquired by OpenAI.

Now Anthropic is getting jestergooned by the entire timeline and OpenAI is gigamaxing off their fumble.

Anthropic could've just let him cook. Instead they went full moid and got outframed by the jestermaxxers at OpenAI.

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

when kaparthy has moved to 80% agentic coding you really pay attention... interesting points
- still need IDEs (for how long?)
- core failpoint: overagreeable + bloat (plan mode helps)
- 2026 'slopacolypse' not just on socials but across github and arxiv (+ arguably startups)

[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.

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Exceptional read to start the year! A rare clarity for this topic - sharp, beautifully paced and truly original analogies. Oddly uplifting to hear from those at the forefront that we're still wildly early. Looking forward your next piece from the post-AGI side @zhengdongwang

[Zhengdong @zhengdongwang]

In my annual letter this year, I really try to get at what it means to "feel the AGI."

Featuring compute, inevitability, second-order effects, travel tips, Andor, and Isaiah Berlin.

https://t.co/tnamR3EWL0

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Almost stepped in human sh*t 💩 but saw this view + met some cool peeps 3 mins later so all is ok again. SF 🤷‍♀️

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Mandatory visit to Nintendo sf store everytime I come. There are so many new Mario characters? Pauline looking fine though 😮‍💨 anyone know any other fun game stores to visit?

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@nazzari @speedrun @vercinyc @_Actioners Visited SF 3 times this year already... might as well move here right! Would love to come 🌉

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Back in SF soon. What are the new best coffee / matcha spots? My picks:
- The Coffee Movement
- Bar Shoji
- Stonemill
- Motoring coffee
- Asha Tea

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

Clone “x” on cursor, Replit, Lovable etc. works pretty well already. Not one shot yet but close. IMO leaders are:
Shein = virality, volume, price
Fashion Nova = influencers, velocity, targeted aesthetic (gen z party)
Uniqlo = basics, “quality”, consistency

[Sam Altman @sama]

entering the fast fashion era of SaaS very soon

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

everyday is leg day in SF🦵🏻

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@AnnieLiao_2000 Cutest 🌸

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@clarejtbirch Haha this came up and I landed 2 days ago… targeted!

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

If you want to help build the home of the AI workforce, there are several roles open on SF and Sydney! 🐐 team

[Relevance AI @RelevanceAI_]

BIG NEWS! Relevance AI Raises $24M Series B + Launch Week Begins!

We've secured $24M in Series B funding led by @BessemerVP - with continued support from @insightpartners, @KingRiverVC, and @peakxvpartners - to help 1 million knowledge workers build their own AI workforces!

This accelerates our mission: helping teams create specialized AI agents that perform human-quality work on autopilot - so you're limited only by ideas, not team size.

✨ Agent Drop starts now! ✨

Over the next 5 days, we're dropping major releases that will transform how you build and scale your AI workforce.

"By the end of 2025, having an agent builder platform will be table stakes for competitive organizations." - Daniel Vassilev, Co-founder & Co-CEO

Read the announcement 👉 https://t.co/k5ElizBdcd

Follow along this week as we unveil each new feature - your AI workforce is about to level up!

#AgentDrop #AIWorkforce

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@0xpibs @eulerfinance @Dune 🫡

[Peter / 1k(x) @pet3rpan_]

https://t.co/I8BQzCyyuC

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@PrimordialAA Tokyo - Lake Kawaguchi (day trip but you'll want to stay longer if possible

Kyoto - Arashiyama bamboo forest + Monkey park (for kids). There are many shrines but my top 2 are Kiyomizudera (beautiful views and architecture, lots to do) and Fushimi Inari (spiritual)

[sally 🌸 @explorersal]

@rene3zhang Love this!!! 🍷