MT

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Just 20 minutes before Trump announced the Strait of Hormuz was open—Someone dumped 7,990 lots of Brent crude futures.

A $760 million bet that oil prices would drop.

Orders far larger than anything else in the market at that moment.

They made a fortune.

But somebody knew the announcement was coming.

This is insider trading at the highest level of government.

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: I don’t know who placed those trades, but I’ll tell you this: the SEC better find out. And if they won’t, when you elect this new majority in Congress and you give us gavels and subpoenas, we will.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

A year ago we were supposed to be getting $2,000 rebate checks, DOGE was going to find $2 trillion in waste to balance the budget, we were going to pay no income taxes because tariffs would pay for everything, gas & home electric bills would be cut in half, and no new wars.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: Epstein survivor Dani Bensky moments ago about attending Trump's State of the Union address:

“How can anyone feel safe in this country when our President’s sympathies are going to the former Prince Andrew and not to survivors?”

She then went on to list 3 things that need to be done immediately!

1) Where are the rest of the files?
2) Why are there no investigations when there are plenty of people in these files to investigate?
3) Why is the FBI Director out there partying like a college kid when he should be investigating the vast criminal enterprise?

“Release the Damn Files!”

[Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff]

Donald Trump's efforts to meddle in the 2020 election were laid out by Jack Smith in Volume 2 of his report, but the Justice Department refuses to release it.

Republicans should join us in calling for the release of this report and for Jack Smith to testify.

What are they afraid of?

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

In govts around the world, people in the Epstein files are resigning in disgrace.

In private business, executives in the files are resigning in disgrace.

In the Trump admin, nothing happens since the boss is in the files more than anyone and his party is filled with cowards.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

Many of you may have missed this, but the little boy who Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to at the Super Bowl was Liam Ramos!

Amazing!

[Roni Bergström @breerstrom]

@VoicesUnheard To anyone saying it's probably something innocent, these were sent around the same time on the same day:

Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:06:38 PM Subject: Pussy
https://t.co/uzfe8dNvsC

Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:19:26 PM Subject: Girls
https://t.co/VpON1nKqt2

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Why??

[Uncrewed @Uncrewed]

Indiana candidate filing deadline was today:

Dems got candidates in 91/100 State House districts and 25/25 State Senate districts!

The Republicans? 79/100 State House districts and nearly all of their incumbents in the Senate are facing primary challenges.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

Q: " You frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted on your social media-"

Trump: "I know a hell of a lot better than you do. You don't know what's going on. I know what's going on."

[Destiny Wells @TheDestinyWells]

I’m hearing that Indiana Democrats will be running a candidate in ALL 25 State Senate races on this year’s ballot. It’s not happened since 1974!

Also, as of noon today, we have candidates in 88 of 100 House races. We still have until noon tomorrow and caucuses to go — we may possibly run every seat!

THIS IS HUGE NEWS! 🔥

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

As critical as I am of the media and of the Democrats in terms of their (not) standing up to
Trump enough, I will also concede that it’s not an easy job.

In the past 48 hours we have seen:

1) Trump in the Epstein files, with some crazy accusations in there
2) a massive corruption story involving Trump, crypto, and the Emiratis
3) Trump saying he’ll use the government he controls to pay himself a 10 billion dollar settlement

How is anyone supposed to cover all that with the coverage those scandals deserve? By Monday, they’ll be forgotten and there’ll be another three new scandals. Maybe five.

Any one of the stories I listed above would destroy a previous presidency. Those three together won’t even dent Trump’s.

[Aaron Parnas @AaronParnas]

The DOJ redacted Donald Trump's face.

[Tony Cook @indystartony]

I spoke with Rep. Ed Clere about his decision to leave the legislature -- and the Republican Party.

He had a lot to say. 🧵

"You’ve heard that saying before: 'I didn’t leave the party. The party left me.' That’s how I feel," he said. "Under Trump, it has become unrecognizable."

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

The City’s budget is our future. And you deserve to know how it works.

[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.

[CJ Warnke @cjwarnke]

👀👀👀

Per @playbookdc, a Trump ally comments on Trump’s deteriorating mental state:

“A meeting with Trump left him shocked by the president’s state of mind”

“Fico used the word ‘dangerous’ to describe how the U.S. president came across during their face-to-face meeting.”

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

they dragged her away in chains and shipped her to Texas and only then checked, determined she was in fact here legally, and released her in Texas to figure out how to get back to Minnesota herself. and people wonder why her neighbors would protest!!!