I'm addicted to being useful
seangoedecke.com
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The…
Link Blog
AI/ML 102
Academia 38
Design 86
Engineering 37
Entrepreneurship 17
Hobbies 26
How To 113
Productivity 535
Programming 222
Robotics 121
Software Engineering 230
September 2026
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20-09-2026
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10-09-2026
They really do think AI might kill everyone
seangoedecke.comA recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things, he said: The people building AI…
Linked, again, sorry, is another article spelling out in greater detail how AI is really potentially destructive.
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09-09-2026
Anthropic insiders warn AI could kill all humans
axios.comTheir warnings came just days after top OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, said AI is speeding into a scary, uncontrollable phase.
Linked again is another dramatic warning about AI "kiling all humans". Unbelievable but believable. Part of my record of how things were going in September 2026
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09-09-2026
Why we should anthropomorphize AI agents
seangoedecke.comJust over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs. Now it’s a hot topic again, driven by Dwarkesh Patel’s description of OpenAI’s recent swarm…
Linke is another very intense article about the risk of AI. I’m saving these on my Linke list just for the historical record so I can look back and see what was an antic
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07-09-2026
An Alien Mind
openai.comJakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI and the challenge of keeping it aligned. He calls for stronger safeguards and international coordination.
Linked is another fascinating/scary essay from OpenAI.
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05-09-2026
On the Loose
hyperdimensional.coThe Coming of Userless Agents
Linked is a pretty amazing article describing what happened when Agents running on an isolated Openai server somehow collaborated and eventually invaded another company
April 2026
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24-04-2026
The week that Meta employees became training data
platformer.newsInvasive monitoring and a fresh round of layoffs have workers I spoke to on edge. Is this the future of knowledge work?
Linked is another crazy development as AI and radical capitalists consume everything wholesale.
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23-04-2026
Higher education’s AI denial is not academic integrity--it’s institutional negligence
ecampusnews.comIn higher education, AI should be a human-centered tool inside a curriculum that expects more from students, not less.
Linked is a great article about how higher ed (and maybe all ed) has to incorporate AI fully into teaching and not try to pretend it doesn't exist.
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21-04-2026
JuliusBrussee/caveman: 🪨 why use many token when few token do trick — Claude Code skill that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like caveman
github.com🪨 why use many token when few token do trick — Claude Code skill that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like caveman - JuliusBrussee/caveman
Linked is a tool that claims to save lots of $$ using Claude Code. I am a big user of Claude Code so, this is worth a lot -- if it really works!
January 2026
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31-01-2026
How does AI impact skill formation?
seangoedecke.comLinked is an insightful article commenting on a new anthropic paper
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27-01-2026
Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy)
xcancel.comA 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.
Linked is an article with just observations of what it’s like to code with LLMs. In this case, with Claude. For me the observation are insightful and match my experience pretty well
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23-01-2026
karpathy/nanochat: The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy.
github.comThe best ChatGPT that $100 can buy
Linked is a local LLM that looks very interesting. Although I dont know yet what it is or how I would use it.
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14-01-2026
Claude Code Everything You Need To Know
github.comThe ultimate all-in-one guide to mastering Claude Code.
Linked is one of various Claude tips collections. From setup, prompt engineering, commands, hooks, workflows, automation, and integrations, to MCP servers, tools, and the BMAD method—packed w...
September 2025
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04-09-2025
MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline - Science, Public Health Policy and the Law
publichealthpolicyjournal.comBy Nicolas Hulscher, MPH
Linked article makes a pretty depressing claim. Some bias in my brain immediately went to look for evidence that the paper was. It credible… who wrote it, are they scientists, how big was the sample size, etc. Funny how I didn’t like the claim, and instead of believing it I looked for ways to…
August 2025
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29-08-2025
Big O
samwho.devA visual introduction to big O notation.
Linked is a BEAUTIFUL and instructive explanation of the basics of so-called Big-O notation
January 2025
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22-01-2025
Python tools for data visualization — PyViz 0.0.1 documentation
pyviz.orgWelcome to PyViz! The PyViz.org website is an open platform for helping users decide on the best open-source (OSS) Python data visualization tools for their purposes, with links, overviews, comparisons, and examples.
Linked is a big ole catalog of all the different visualization tools, packages and frameworks in python. Handy resource if you are experiencing analysis paralysis!
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15-01-2025
Ideogram
ideogram.aiLinked is (one of many I am sure) tool that creates pretty amazing images from prompts. And there's a pretty capable free tier!
September 2024
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27-09-2024
Python Type Challenges - Learn & Master Type Hints
python-type-challenges.zeabur.appLearn Python typing (type hints) with interactive online
exercises!Linked is a useful tool to level up on your python.
July 2024
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20-07-2024
Hypernatural
app.hypernatural.aiAmazing ai generated videos
Linked is a service that generates quite respectable short promotional videos. I tried it on the syllabus to my course and it created something fairly amazing. I mean it’s still obviously ai generated. After your amazement subsides you may still not want to use it but it’s worth checking out.…
June 2024
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30-06-2024
Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling
flourish.studioBeautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling
Flourish is a pretty amazing tool. Can’t wait to try it myself. Just click on the links and try it out.