Links
Mathematics in the Library of Babel: Speaking of vibe-shifts...Daniel Litt is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto.
I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.
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It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.
Best Practices for Claude Code: TBF this looks like an influencer account but I am collecting these guides and this is one.
The Claude-Native Law Firm: Another one of the above.
Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns: A more serious work...
I think of vibe coding using its original definition of coding where you pay no attention to the code at all, which today is often associated with non-programmers using LLMs to write code.
Agentic Engineering represents the other end of the scale: professional software engineers using coding agents to improve and accelerate their work by amplifying their existing expertise.
How will OpenAI compete?: Great read.
OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and it can’t invent all of those itself. What’s the plan?
These Al Prompts Exposed My Biggest Blind Spots: More influencer content but interesting direction.