1
2025: The Year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 674 posts.
2
Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
3
Attention Is Bayesian Inference
My journey from building cricket bots to building “wind tunnels” with my collaborators — and finding the answer hidden in geometry.
4
AI employees don't pay taxes
Principal software engineer with deep experience in full-stack TypeScript, custom web browsers and real-time, media-focused systems.
5
LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
6
Five Years of Tinygrad
The first commit to tinygrad was October 17, 2020. It’s been almost three years since we raised money. The company is 6 people now. The codebase is 18,935 lines not including tests.
7
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop
Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainf*ck code results in an infinite loop, akin amost to a DDoS attack:
8
9
10
Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
When the world's richest man can simply 'correct' an AI to reflect his own values, what does that tell us about the entire alignment discourse?
11
Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"
Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. …
12
Codex vs. Claude Code (today)
Every AI tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and the only way to discover what they are is by using them.
13
Building an AI agent inside a 7-year-old Rails monolith
We run a multi-tenant Rails application with sensitive data and layered authorization. In this post, I walk through how I added the first AI agent tool using RubyLLM, Pundit policies, and our existing Algolia search, without introducing a parallel system or loosening constraints.
14
Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
Salesforces has entered a phase of public reckoning after senior executives publicly admitted that the company overestimated AI’s readiness
15
The Illustrated Transformer
Discussions: Hacker News (65 points, 4 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (29 points, 3 comments) Translations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified) 1, Chinese (Simplified) 2, French 1, French 2, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Vietnamese Watch: MIT’s Deep Learning State of the Art lecture…
16
Scaling LLMs to Larger Codebases
Where to focus investments to best leverage AI tooling
17
Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
18
I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me
After maintaining a total stance of public silence for months, I recently publicly announced my unexpected divorce on Instagram. I shared a picture of the divorce cake that my friends got for me, and shared a brief essay I had drafted the day before about the news. I had to edit it down slightly from my original draft…
19
A guide to local coding models
What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself
20
Get an AI code review in 10 seconds
Personal Musings and Transcripts
21
22
LLM Year in Review
2025 Year in Review of LLM paradigm changes
23
1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
24
AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
25
Two kinds of vibe coding
Back in 2009 I posted a simple Mandelbrot fractal viewer on the web: a single HTML file with inline Javascript. Just 329 lines of code, each pixel a tiny table cell. Click to zoom. Watch it iterate. That was about it!
26
AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating
Everyone's using AI wrong. Its superpower isn't writing for you. It's reading everything you've ever written and finding patterns you missed.
27
I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
28
AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
29
Gemini 3 Pro vs. 2.5 Pro in Pokemon Crystal
From 2.5 Pro's lighthouse loop to 3 Pro's "Zombie Phoenix" strategy against Red: a full breakdown of why Gemini 3 Pro is a superior long-horizon agent.
30