swetha narayanan

Food helps best, So does travel. Life is an influx of the two, best combined with music and love under the desert stars.

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

Sometimes , good things fall apart so that better things can fall together !

Just believe in yourself and keep hustlin' ❤️

[DJ Snow (Official) 🎤 @djericsnow]

@elonmusk 😂

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Starlink on Singapore Airlines! 🇸🇬

[Zac @Zac_labs]

Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest peak.

The Foreign Minister is self-hosting Claude on a Raspberry Pi and building a diplomatic knowledge graph using Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern. Wahlao!

SG devs, the minister is coming for your job. And he’s not even using Cursor — he’s on NanoClaw running locally. Can someone git pull his code and give it a test.

Only bad thing? He dropped this on Facebook instead of X. Minister, we need to talk.

https://t.co/JzU3ZeBdPz

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

Is AI Hiding Its Full Power? With Geoffrey Hinton https://t.co/ynXFeMS3KV via @YouTube one of the best @StarTalkRadio episodes I have listened to !

[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.

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

It was wonderful to catch up with Minister @joteo_ylm as always. Singapore has a very ambitious & forward-looking approach to AI - really excited to deepen our collaboration as we open our new @GoogleDeepMind offices there - and we're hiring for the office!

[Science Guy @pradyumn93]

Viruses blur the line between life and non-life but some scientists now classify them as part of a “virocell continuum.” When outside a host, they’re inert molecular machines. But once inside, they hijack a cell’s metabolism and become part of its living system, effectively turning the host into a virus-powered organism. In fact, over 8% of human DNA comes from ancient viral infections meaning part of you is viral, too.

[adarsh @adarshxd]

Introducing the Age of Blue Dots for Employment!

What if jobs and candidates could all appear on one digital map, as a “blue dot”, the way restaurants, hospitals and petrol pumps do, connecting millions of skilled young professions with local jobs?

That’s what ONEST is piloting in North Karnataka's Dharwad District: India’s 1st Employment DPI, connecting thousands of ITI students with thousands of local MSME jobs

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Making slides manually feels especially painful now that you know Cursor for slides should exist but doesn’t.

[Parallax Cinemas @parallaxcinemas]

Crying for no reason

Is this the voice that's been banned since 2018? ❤️💎@Chinmayi

[Min Choi @minchoi]

8. Will Smith eating spaghetti
https://t.co/jxWBZdTB7M

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

Google’s Veo 3 just dropped, & it’s rewriting what we think is real.

In >48 hours people are already breaking the boundaries of reality with AI videos that look & sound like real life.

Here are 20 insane examples you have to see:

1) Pharmaceutical ad:

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

@grok @hergomark @sama @adarshxd related to your latest tweet

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

Kinda wild Gemini released what seems to be the best AI coding model by far but everyone's just talking about Ghibli images.

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

@StarHub Ok, that really helped! Thank you for the reply! Wish this was easier via the app though, without going through live support to unlink @NetflixSG to StarHub .

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

Super frustrated with @StarHub and @netflix customer support teams. All I want to do is cancel my subscription with Netflix. But since my account is linked via StarHub , I am stuck in a loop with both companies pointing to the other to process the cancellation. 😢

[swetha narayanan @sweths21]

@StarHub This just leads me to an automated business chat with no resolution to my problem.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

What a case study of systemic risk with CrowdStrike outage... that a few bits in the wrong place can brick ~1 billion computers and all the 2nd, 3rd order effects of it. What other single points of instantaneous failure exist in the technosphere and how do we design against it.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Give people business books and they’re bored out of their minds.

Give them Shark Tank and they’re hooked.

This is the power of making hard things fun.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Crazy that if you sailed off from India in just the right direction and kept going straight, you'd eventually run into Alaska