WELCOME TO GAS TOWN
Gas Town is an IDE that helps developers with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances.
2026.01.02
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16,438 matchesHOW META'S REELS BECAME A $50 BILLION BUSINESS
Meta's Reels is set to bring in as much as Coca-Cola and Nike, and the company plans to expand to more screens this year.
2026.01.02
SOFTWARE TAKETH AWAY FASTER THAN HARDWARE GIVETH: WHY C++ PROGRAMMERS KEEP GROWING FAST DESPITE COMPETITION, SAFETY, AND AI
Our demand for solving ever-larger computing problems consistently outstrips our ability to build greater computing capacity.
2026.01.02
AUTHENTICITY AFTER ABUNDANCE
Creation tools are getting better and better. This will make creators matter more. Those who have the ability to be real, to connect, and to have a voice that can't be faked will be those who succeed in this new world. The bar will shift from whether someone can create to whether someone can create something that only they could create. Only the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity will stand out.
2026.01.01
RATHER THAN FULLY CRACKING DOWN ON SCAM ADS, META WORKED TO MAKE THEM HARDER TO FIND
Meta took steps to make scam ads less discoverable to regulators, investigators, and journalists due to fears that Japanese regulators would require advertiser verification, a measure the company estimated would cost roughly $2 billion to implement and potentially reduce revenue by nearly 5%. The campaign was so successful that Meta added the tactic to a 'general global playbook' that has since been deployed against regulatory scrutiny in other markets. Meta had previously estimated that 10% of its 2024 revenue was from ads tied to scams and banned goods.
2026.01.01
TESLA FSD SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETES FULL COAST-TO-COAST DRIVE WITH ZERO INTERVENTIONS
A Tesla owner successfully drove coast-to-coast across the US on Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised with zero interventions during the trip. Their Model 3 completed the drive in 2 days and 20 hours, starting at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles, CA, and ending in Myrtle Beach, SC. It was accomplished with Tesla FSD V14.2 on AI4 hardware. The milestone trip was widely lauded by members of the Tesla community.
2026.01.01
NEURALINK WILL START HIGH-VOLUME PRODUCTION OF BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE DEVICES IN 2026
Neuralink received FDA breakthrough device designation for its speech restoration in 2025. The company also launched clinical trials in the Middle East and the UK, and completed two surgeries in Canada. It upgraded its surgical robot to be able to insert an electrode thread every 1.5 seconds at insertion depths of over 50mm. The threads go through the dura without the need to remove it. Neuralink plans to move to an almost completely automated surgical procedure this year.
2026.01.01
HOW I CODE WITH AGENTS, WITHOUT BEING 'TECHNICAL'
Ben Tossell, who works at Factory, a company developing a frontier software development agent, has spent 3 billion tokens in four months through an agent without writing any code. None of the code was read, but Tossell read the agent output religiously, which led to him picking up a ton of knowledge around how code works, how projects work, where things fail, and where they succeed. Tossell has shipped several projects using his method over the past few months, including a personal site, a 'wrapped' product for Factory, several custom CLIs, and an AI-directed video demo system. This post contains Tossell's guide to learning to program.
2026.01.01
HERE ARE THE MAJOR CHANGES I SEE COMING FOR CYBERSECURITY IN 2026
The primary security question for companies will be how good their attackers' AI is versus their own AI. There will be increased spending on agentic security platforms and significantly more in-house building of security tools. Asset management will become possible for the first time because of agents. Most security platforms will eventually be replaceable with AI prompts.
2026.01.01
8 PREDICTIONS FOR 2026. WHAT COMES NEXT IN AI?
2026 will be the year when generative UI takes off, the Smart Home finally fulfills its promise, and biometric proof of personhood becomes the new social login. Engineers looking to separate themselves from the crowd need to build and learn, as deep technical intuition is what will distinguish them from others. Agents will continue to be the main headline. This year, they will start interacting in our daily lives to anticipate needs.
2026.01.01
REFLECTIONS ON 2025
AI tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. The hardware scheduled to come online in the next few years makes current hardware look like pocket calculators. If previous observations hold true, then we are not approaching a plateau, the field is just getting started.
2026.01.01
2025: THE YEAR IN LLMS
Reasoning was a significant feature of many models from nearly every major AI lab in 2025.
2026.01.01
ON THE SOFTWARE JOB CLIMATE
There is a lot less money going towards hiring, but that could change if the tax code gets rolled back, interest rates fall, and data centers stop being the rage.
2026.01.01
NERD
NERD (No Effort Required, Done) is a programming language optimized for large language models.
2026.01.01
17 PREDICTIONS FOR AI IN 2026
Models will continue to improve their capabilities, but it will take a while for the full impact to be felt across the economy.
2026.01.01
ATMOSPHERIC COMPUTING
Atmospheric computing connects cloud services together, allowing users to store and run their own programs.
2026.01.01
WORKTRUNK
Worktrunk is a CLI for git worktree management designed to run AI agents in parallel.
2026.01.01
OPENAI IS PAYING EMPLOYEES MORE THAN ANY MAJOR TECH STARTUP IN HISTORY
OpenAI's average stock-based compensation for its roughly 4,000 employees is about $1.5 million per employee. The company's equity awards, aimed at helping it keep its lead in the AI race, are inflating its heavy operating losses and diluting existing shareholders. OpenAI recently announced the discontinuation of a policy that required employees to work at the company for at least six months before their equity vests. This could lead to further compensation increases.
2025.12.31
SOFTBANK HAS FULLY FUNDED $40 BILLION INVESTMENT IN OPENAI
Softbank sent over the final amount to complete its $40 billion investment in OpenAI last week. The company's stake in OpenAI is now around 11%. Softbank has been betting big on technology and AI companies. It recently agreed to pay $4 billion for data center investment firm DigitalBridge to strengthen its AI push.
2025.12.31
TESLA SHARES EPIC 2025 RECAP VIDEO, CONFIRMS START OF CYBERCAB PRODUCTION
Tesla has released a year-in-review video for 2025 that recaps major achievements for the company. The montage celebrated the company's progress on EVs, energy, and Robotaxi development. It also confirmed that the production of the Cybercab has started. The video can be viewed in the article.
2025.12.31
MEET A US START-UP TRYING TO BREAK CHINA'S RARE-EARTH MONOPOLY
There is too little money to be made in rare earth to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry in the US has fallen to small companies. Metal prices have risen in recent months as China has restricted exports in response to US tariffs. It will be difficult for local startups to compete as China's grip on the industry is tight, and it is known to sell rare-earth metals for less than it costs to produce them. The biggest question is whether the US government will continue to subsidize the domestic industry, and at what level.
2025.12.31
THE EFFICIENCY PARADOX: WHY MAKING SOFTWARE EASIER TO WRITE MEANS WE'LL WRITE EXPONENTIALLY MORE
Efficiency improvements reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. The pattern is consistent throughout history. We are about to see an increase in knowledge work output of several orders of magnitude. This will likely reveal that humanity has been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive.
2025.12.31
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN 2026
The primary impact of AI tooling so far is that the marginal cost of producing code has gone down significantly. However, producing code is only part of the job, so the bottlenecks for engineering time will shift elsewhere. The software engineering field seems poised to be more mechanized, but more productive as a result. Most of the effects of the mindset shift that has been accelerating for the last few months have yet to be fully realized.
2025.12.31
2025 LETTER
Progress is a smooth trend that obscures jagged details. History is a record of thousands of years of stasis before hundreds of years of growth. There hasn't been any constant normal trend ever, so no one should expect AI to be the same. Nothing is truly inevitable, but it would be strange if progress stopped tomorrow.
2025.12.31
FIVE TAKES TO END 2025
A lot of the assumptions across the tech industry were seriously put to the test this year. This post takes a look at some of the things that happened to see what the future may bring. It covers OpenAI's business, Google's dominance in AI, Alan Dye's role at Apple, software on-demand, and what Apple needs to do to win next year.
2025.12.31
WHEN THE LINE STOPS GOING UP
It's easy to make progress when you start doing something, but that will plateau over time, and it can be hard to come to terms with the change.
2025.12.31
10 IDEAS FOR 2026
10 ideas to consider in the coming year.
2025.12.31
BALANCE OF POWER
As big business, big government, and big mob get stronger, they can no longer avoid frequently interacting.
2025.12.31
TECH STARTUPS ARE HANDING OUT FREE NICOTINE POUCHES TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY
Companies like Palantir are giving employees free nicotine products through vending machines.
2025.12.31
TWO YEARS AFTER LEAVING GOOGLE: THE TRUTH ABOUT ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurship is hard, but it gives you a type of freedom that is difficult to give up.
2025.12.31
ADVICE FOR GENERALISTS WHO WANT TO JOIN STARTUPS
Find a way to prove that you can identify useful work before you are even hired by the company.
2025.12.31
META BUYS AI STARTUP MANUS FOR MORE THAN $2 BILLION
Meta has agreed to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based company that conducts deep research and performs tasks for paying users. Meta will continue to operate and sell Manus' services while integrating it into its suite of social media products. The deal will help Meta cement its position in the product segment of AI agents. It is one of the first times a major US tech company has bought a startup with Chinese roots.
2025.12.30
NVIDIA SPENDS $5B ON INTEL BAILOUT, INSTANTLY GETS $2.5B RICHER
Nvidia locked in a purchase price of $23.28 per share for Intel when the companies struck a deal in September. The deal had been under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission, but was then greenlighted on December 18. The purchase of 214 million shares closed on December 26, and Intel shares closed Monday at $36.68, making Nvidia's $5 billion purchase worth $7.58 billion. The deal will involve the companies jointly developing multiple generations of chips for datacenters and PCs.
2025.12.30
RESEARCHERS MAKE “NEUROMORPHIC” ARTIFICIAL SKIN FOR ROBOTS
Chinese researchers have created an artificial robotic skin that can sense pressure and locate input and injuries. The neuromorphic robotic e-skin (NRE-skin) is assembled from a collection of segments that snap together using magnetic interlocks, automatically linking up any necessary wiring. Each segment broadcasts a unique identity code, so it is relatively easy to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware if the system identifies damage.
2025.12.30
CLINIC-IN-THE-LOOP
Biomedical progress has become less productive for the last several years despite staggering advances in basic science. One of the reasons for this is that institutional bureaucracy has become harder to overcome. Increasing the number and efficiency of clinical trials would help create a faster feedback loop and result in better data to inform models and ideas. This could help decrease the cost of bringing new drugs to market and break a trend that has held since the 1950s.
2025.12.30
be you on 01/01. There is a clinically proven weight loss tool
that's helped users lose over 18 million pounds. Take a quick quiz and get a science-backed plan built just for you—plus Blinky, a Tamagotchi-style accountability buddy that keeps you on track. It's crazy effective. Get your personalized plan for at least 50% OFF [8].
2025.12.30
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WHY WE ARE LEAVING RESTRICTIVE DIETS IN 2025
Pressure. Extreme diets. All-or-nothing mindset. This doesn't need to
2025.12.30
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE, A GUIDE TO BUILDING INFRA SOFTWARE FOR AI AGENTS
The primary users of infrastructure software are rapidly shifting from developers to AI agents. AI uses systems very differently from how developers do, and it changes many long-held assumptions about how databases should be used. Many things developers took for granted need rethinking. The focus of engineers is shifting from perfected individual systems to designing foundational capabilities that AI can use at scale, iterate on, and run cheaply.
2025.12.30
CLOPUS-WATCHER: AN AUTONOMOUS MONITORING AGENT
AI will likely make 24/7 on-call a thing of the past. 24/7 monitoring is a lot simpler than the development process. There are often reference documents that engineers can follow to bring systems back up, and if they fail, there's always a backup and recovery plan in place. On-call jobs have always been more systematic. This post introduces an autonomous monitoring agent that does what an on-call engineer would do, but autonomously, forever.
2025.12.30
CAPITAL IN THE 22ND CENTURY
Labor and capital have traditionally complemented each other. While wealthy people can keep accumulating capital, it becomes less valuable when there aren't enough hands to use all of it, and hands grow more valuable when capital is plentiful. However, this correction mechanism breaks in the world of advanced robotics and AI. A global and highly progressive tax on capital (or at least capital income) may be the only way to prevent inequality from growing extreme.
2025.12.30
2025 IN REVIEW: JAGGED INTELLIGENCE BECOMES A FAULT LINE
The immediate AI risk comes from people overestimating AI's capabilities. A lack of reliability and trust is preventing wide adoption. There is a growing AI perception gap between quantitative users and qualitative users. AI leaders aren't even attempting to explain how AI works because it's complicated, and they're also incentivized to oversimplify and overpromise.
2025.12.30
ALL EXPERTISE GROWS LOGARITHMICALLY, NOT EXPONENTIALLY
Both human and computer expertise grow quickly in the beginning, for a short while, then more slowly, until growth is imperceptible.
2025.12.30
HOW GOOD IS AI AT CODING REACT (REALLY)?
AI models excel at isolated React tasks, but don't do as well on multi-step integrations.
2025.12.30
YOU CAN'T DESIGN SOFTWARE YOU DON'T WORK ON
Generic design advice is useless for most practical software design problems.
2025.12.30
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN 2026
The software engineering field will broadly become more mechanized and more productive.
2025.12.30
A FEW THEMES FOR 2026
2026 will see breakthroughs in continual learning and a blockbuster IPO.
2025.12.30
LG IS ANNOUNCING ITS OWN FRAME-STYLE TV AT CES
The LG Gallery TV is a mini-LED TV with a special screen that reduces glare and minimizes reflections for an art-like viewing experience.
2025.12.30
THE MEMORY WARS: WHY THE FUTURE KARPATHY, MUSK, AND JIM FAN SEE REQUIRES 16-HI HBM
The infrastructure buildout happening right now may be a sign that the AI chip competition may already be over. Nvidia recently requested 16-Hi HBM deliveries from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron by Q4 2026. This infrastructure layer could make AI inference effectively infinite and nearly free at the margin. The rollout of capability is arriving faster than our ability to conceptualize what to do with it.
2025.12.29
NVIDIA GROQ UPDATE: EVERYONE GETS RICH, PATENT WARFARE BEGINS
All of Groq's VCs, employees, founders, and the whole cap table will get paid from the recent acquisition by Nvidia. 85% of the payment will be up front, with the rest coming by the end of 2026. Nvidia will likely weaponize the patents it gained from the acquisition to create a 'scorched-earth zone' around SRAM-based inference. GroqCloud has become a shell of its former self with no IP and no technical leadership.
2025.12.29
ALZHEIMER'S: FROM CAUSES AND RISK FACTORS TO MODELS AND INTERVENTIONS
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by multiple factors. Each individual factor doesn't necessarily guarantee an AD diagnosis in every situation, but it increases the odds of it all else being equal. Preventing AD and reversing or stopping the disease are two separate areas of research. Attempting to modify risk factors of the disease once it has already started is unlikely to lead to a cure. Targeting the underlying dynamics of the disease is a more likely pathway to a treatment.
2025.12.29