pltod

Act on inspiration

[pltod @pltod]

Forcing new tools into old processes creates friction rather than improvement. Think carefully how to use them.

[pltod @pltod]

… and this tooling is exactly what people with high agency need https://t.co/m4dg8B25pd

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

recommended reading.

https://t.co/2GgZb04PoE

[pltod @pltod]

Exploring the HTML-in-Canvas Proposal | Codrops https://t.co/ppzVSMOjo8

[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.

[pltod @pltod]

It is not about the software.

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it.

It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built wrong in all the ways.

Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software makers! Of course they're excited about building bespoke software — that's what they do. X is full of them. Your feed is full of people who love making software talking about making software. Of course they’re excited about the revolution. Echo, echo, echo...

Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all.

So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design.

They don’t hate technology. But building and maintaining their own critical systems isn’t their wheelhouse, regardless of how much faster and easier it’s become. It's another job on top of the job.

Will these people use AI? Absolutely, for all sorts of things. Will some outliers go deep and build real custom systems? Sure, but they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software. The curiosity was already there. They were dabblers before.

Giving everyone access to software building tools doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. A powerful excavator doesn't turn a homeowner into a contractor. Most people just want the hole dug by someone else. They don’t want the responsibility either.

[pltod @pltod]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[pltod @pltod]

Is it cake?

[NVIDIA @nvidia]

https://t.co/7TekidlEyl

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

https://t.co/LXCn4XBJ1o

[pltod @pltod]

https://t.co/MkeQI2MXsw

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

Realizing universities might be about to face
the same disruption newspapers faced.
Four years of college.

Most of it could be learned in six months online.

[pltod @pltod]

“"Creation as a Service" will always beat "Software as a Service". I don't want your lowest-common-denominator software. I want software to work for me and meet my needs. I want platforms and infrastructure….”

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

"Creation as a Service" will always beat "Software as a Service". I don't want your lowest-common-denominator software. I want software to work for me and meet my needs. I want platforms and infrastructure.

To me, Slack is a good example of an ideal in-between of SaaS and Platform. I have zero interest in vibe coding my own Slack. (It's also particularly difficult software to perfect and scale, and if you disagree you have no idea how to build software 🤡).

I do have a strong interest in extending Slack with our own agents. As I shared yesterday, more of our company runs on Slack-based "@" agents. We're making it easier than ever to deploy Slack agents on Vercel, with our AI infrastructure (gateway, workflows, sandbox, etc), starting with @v0.

A lot of SaaS might be cooked, but Salesforce has a generational re-birth opportunity with Slack.

[pltod @pltod]

@igor9silva @ctatedev On a high level you describe UI declaratively with JSON and the library generates the code. Ready to use means if you refer the component “card” in your json document the framework will know what to generate. If there are no ready to use components you have to create them first.

[pltod @pltod]

“Something big is happening” - software engineering take … embrace the change … great read https://t.co/pIJ7bLDzLp by @ethanniser

[pltod @pltod]

💯

[David Ondrej @DavidOndrej1]

the single most important concept in 2026

[pltod @pltod]

… and this tooling is exactly what people with high agency need https://t.co/m4dg8B25pd

[pltod @pltod]

AI will eventually become the implicit tooling behind someone’s core business, hence, should not be a reason for much excitement.

[pltod @pltod]

Frontend is the new backend

[Sebastian Siemiatkowski @klarnaseb]

Watching Claude Code mass-murder backend tasks in seconds then spend 45 minutes misaligning a button...

... has given me more insight into the frontend vs backend engineer wars than a decade in tech. I used to think frontend engineers were being dramatic...

😂😂😂

[pltod @pltod]

Masterclass from Apple managing to stay in the AI race with … Mac Mini

[pltod @pltod]

@thekitze I was trying to find this post a few weeks back. Thanks for posting it again. We all fell in this trap and the usual excuse is that we want to stay balanced and to avoid the kind of obsession that GOAT-level success demands.

[pltod @pltod]

“… And that’s life.”

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

What the top 5% of tennis players all have in common

[Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey]

https://t.co/nVVqSm8DhO

[pltod @pltod]

The High School is the new University.

[pltod @pltod]

It would be better if the companies learn to scale when investing in better corporate culture rather than better processes. #culture #strategy #BusinessDevelopment #processes #scale #business

[pltod @pltod]

On choosing your entrepreneurial path … you either build a product you love, use, want to exist and start a “religion” around it or you are “customer-driven” and build whatever sh*t people want to use.