Ilya Teterin

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[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.

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

I'm Boris and I created Claude Code. Lots of people have asked how I use Claude Code, so I wanted to show off my setup a bit.

My setup might be surprisingly vanilla! Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. There is no one correct way to use Claude Code: we intentionally build it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it however you like. Each person on the Claude Code team uses it very differently.

So, here goes.

[Love Music @khnh80044]

11 and 8-year old PRODIGY SISTERS played Vivaldi Winter with me on the violin in Rome airport! They were SO CUTE AND AMAZING.. the whole airport loved it 😍.

[John Rush @johnrushx]

After seeing these humanoid robot demos, I bet you'll be convinced that all manual labor will be gone to robots.

(even the world's oldest profession will be taken by them).

All 26 humanoid robot demos:

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

Engineers-turned-PMs keep making the same fatal mistake in stakeholder meetings:

They think logic will save them.

After mentoring a few folks, I've noticed a pattern no one talks about:

[frye @___frye]

here’s a fun fact: almost all modern computer systems depend on a single time zone database that gets updated when local laws change

it’s maintained by two people

[Piotr Sarna @sarna_dev]

Leslie Lamport's "A Science of Concurrent Programs" is so good. Brings back the university days, and I love the informal-yet-very-formal style

https://t.co/5XMhmreorr

[Ilya Teterin @ya_pulser]

@levwalkin а еще они говорят про pair programming …

https://t.co/17iaOJ1kjJ

[Jordan Taylor @Jordan_W_Taylor]

Aircraft are thirsty and burn lots of fuel, right?

Wrong.

The average fuel efficiency of air travel today is about 67 mpg per passenger. That makes it more fuel efficient than your drive to work. The best hit 100mpg/passenger.

How did aviation manage it?

A thread.

[Ilya Teterin @ya_pulser]

True. Not great, not sad, just true.

Why Most Programmers DON'T Last https://t.co/DUCCUQhFTU

[Jordan Mechner @jmechner]

In 1985, I asked my brother David (age 15) to be the rotoscope model for my new game, Prince of Persia.

38 years later, I've made him a (present day) cartoon character in my new graphic novel memoir REPLAY.
https://t.co/bsLWplOdYd

Thanks, bro!

@01FirstSecond @stripepress @princeofpersia

[Charity Majors @mipsytipsy]

"Don't tell people what to do. Tell stories"

...might be as close to a personal north star or mission statement as I've ever heard said. ☺️ Love it. 💕

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

Generation X is weird.

These 43-58 year-olds are so strange it presents golden opportunities.

Here are 10 mind hacks to use with Gen X:

[Julie Lerman @julielerman]

Them: How have you managed to not learn Kubernetes?
Me: With great intention

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Huge news for anyone working in tech in the US.

Noncompetes are now banned: not just in California (like before), but nationwide. Very, very relevant for anyone at Amazon (which is the Big Tech that has enforced noncompetes even for low-level engineering positions).

[Óscar Toledo G. @nanochess]

The end of an era #Zilog #Z80

[Sergio Pereira @SergioRocks]

Software Developer salaries have crazy variations around the world.

One thing is crystal clear, though:
- Regardless of where you live, working remotely for a US company will increase your salary.