Ren Menon

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Major cheat code for life: Always having something on the calendar you're excited about. It can really be anything. Difficult physical challenge, big project, fun trip, ambitious goal, whatever. It creates energy. It promotes structure. It carries you through the lows. Life hack.

[matt palmer @mattyp]

https://t.co/2JoDjl3DQi

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced that the key to life is having low expectations and high standards. Low expectations for things outside your control. High standards for things within it. The recipe for a good life.

[ABC News @ABC]

Whale watchers joyfully observed a humpback whale off New York City's coast. The marine mammal was documented as the 500th humpback spotted in local waters, according to Staten Island-based nonprofit Gotham Whale. https://t.co/F5EPhbUFRJ

[V D Satheesan @vdsatheesan]

Strengthening Keralam–U.S. Cooperation: High-Level Meeting in Kochi

Met with H.E. Sergio Gor(@SergioGor), U.S. Ambassador to India(@USAmbIndia), alongside senior state officials in Kochi today to discuss strategic opportunities for bilateral growth.

Key areas of focus included:

🎓 Education & Innovation: Expanding joint research, university partnerships, and academic exchanges between U.S. and Keralam institutions.

🏖️ Tourism & Culture: Promoting wellness and Ayurveda tourism, alongside exploring potential "Sister Cities" concepts to connect communities across both regions.

⚓ Maritime Logistics & Ports: Unlocking investment potential at Vizhinjam International Seaport and Kochi Port, specifically in shipbuilding, ship repair, green bunkering, and supply chains.

💼 U.S. Invest Desk: Setting up a dedicated desk in the U.S. to connect prospective investors, support U.S. businesses, and engage with the Malayalee diaspora.

Both leaderships expressed enthusiasm for translating these initiatives into active, long-term partnerships.

@USAndIndia

#Kerala #USIndiaRelations #VizhinjamPort#GlobalPartnerships #EconomicGrowth #InvestInKerala

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

This is an invaluable initiative. We done @SergioGor for reaching out to a state that’s hungry for growth. And congratulations @vdsatheesan for looking beyond the conventional shibboleths of Kerala politics to welcome US investment in key sectors. Looking forward to seeing this narrative grow and flourish!
@USAmbIndia #USIndiaRelations

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

Humans try hard things, fail, learn, and get better through repetition.

AI models aren't as different as you might think.

Here's how models "learn" explained in simple terms. https://t.co/gFaNuyVliT

[Ren Menon @renjanmenon]

@dataguybobby @benln Excited to have it in the valley !

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

There are no words.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[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.

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

A promo for the #KeralaSoccerLeague. Co-starring akerala a tour and director BasilJoseph; all
In good fun!

[Ren Menon @renjanmenon]

@systemdesignone Leet code

[Ginger Zee @Ginger_Zee]

The NOAA weather radio is like a smoke alarm for weather alerts (tornado, flash floods etc). It will wake you from a deep sleep. It reads out the warning. It doesn't depend on cell service/power.

Do you have one?

Learn more about them here: https://t.co/7KFlrF3wtq

[Ren Menon @renjanmenon]

@systemdesignone Thank you !

[Ren Menon @renjanmenon]

@systemdesignone Leetcode

[Kevin Naughton Jr. @KevinNaughtonJr]

this is the kind of thing that should make you realize you can do anything in life

[The Khel India @TheKhelIndia]

That's the Wrap of India's Campaign at Paris 🇮🇳

India had the Best Ever Medal Tally at Paralympics in history with 2️⃣9️⃣ Medals

7 Gold 🥇9 Silver 🥈 13 Bronze 🥉

Each Paralympian gave their best here 💯

[Ren Menon @renjanmenon]

@dsmom58 Happy birthday!!