Kevin King

@PeterJ_Walker 1000%

A universal truth: most radar charts should just be bar charts. Love your stuff, Anthropic!

“As a large language model I cannot—” [30,000 AI agents start a lobster cult and discuss how to hide from humans]

@karpathy Do you think the 10X engineer is a different person in the new paradigm?

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.

@guruchahal 100%. Also thought this was a helpful mitigant to the issue of balancing abstraction with what’s happening under the hood.

Interestingly, we already do this - we don’t understand/review the code of open source libraries we pull in, or underlying machine code/assembly for that matter. So this change will come too - we’ll stop caring that we don’t understand every line of code we are committing

@kwharrison13 I’d like to read.

Geez louise. I just read the most comprehensive OpenAI deep dive I've ever seen in one place. 33K+ words on the entire company. Dropping next week. Who wants a sneak peak? HMU.

@pitdesi @akshay__mehra @AkshatGoenka Have you been to Vij’s in Vancouver?

A new #1 in my fancy Indian food ranking! 1) Ambassadors Clubhouse (London) 2) Ettan (Palo Alto) 2 (tie) Semma (NYC) 3) Bungalow (NYC) 4) Dhamaka (NYC) 5) Rooh (SF) 6) Thali (Cape Town) Ones I would not eat at again: Indian Accent (Delhi) Gaggan (Bangkok) Copra (SF) Tiya (SF) Campton Place (SF) Honorable mention: Ekaa (Bombay) is very good but not really Indian food by my definition (even though they claim it is) RIP August 1 Five (SF), gone from this world too soon. There are many other really good ones that aren’t fancy enough for this list like Bombay Canteen (Bombay) and Besharam (SF)

@elonmusk When’s the 7-seater going to be released in the US? Waiting on it since, like you, I’m trying to stave off population decline (but with only 4 kids in my case).

True

@zck No lock in here. You can easily copy and paste all your saved memories into a new system - just click "manage memories" and you get the table of all the items that chatgpt uses across chats (or you can just request these in the chat window).

Used to be a daily Claude user. Switched over to o3. Now I have so much memory stored in ChatGPT that even a marginally better model (and it's not clear that Claude 4 Opus is that) isn't enough to get me to switch

@FoundersPodcast @DavidSenra1 No don’t change. The colorful language only adds to the intrigue.

@Ksq1 @DavidSenra1 This is incredible to hear Kevin! I’ll try to curse less in future episodes since little ears are listening 😂

My 10yo daughter, on a long drive home from soccer with her siblings today: “Hey, can we listen to that Founders thing?” After months of putting up with me listening to @FoundersPodcast in the car, now they want it. Thanks @DavidSenra1 for making something that inspires my kids.

Does this mean that White Lotus season 4 will be a staycation?

@typesfast @altcap The best chefs are fanatical about mise en place.

@altcap I do not judge chefs by the messiness of their kitchen while they’re cooking, only by how the food tastes at the end.

What a shit show. Trump told Time Magazine that Xi called him and Chinese embassy is denying it .

@paulg @charlesmiller_7 @FoundersPodcast would love to hear your take on this given your observation that “belief comes before ability”

@charlesmiller_7 So it's not an "underrated characteristic" because in fact this characteristic has little or no effect on outcomes. It's the wake made by the boat, not its engine.

@patrick_oshag @austinmcchord - founder of @datto, ceo of casana, runs @OutsidersFund and is a total polymath

You have to set up a 6-8 person dinner with the most interesting people in Boston, who are you inviting?

Feels pretty good to start the year off at inbox zero. Over/under on how long it will last?

@skupor A first for me too…

I never thought I'd tweet a Krugman piece, but hey, he's got some good points here :) nyti.ms/3fxlKUf

@bcwilless I too have been looking for the ideal solution here (meal planning, childcare and activities, family travel, home stuff, etc.). Currently use combo of todoist, notes, calendar sharing. Most important element is picking tools you're both onboard using and then being consistent.

Literally texting with my wife about scheduling an offsite to figure out our family's operating structure (planning tools, calendars, who owns what, etc). We only have a 2-yr old but it feels like a new product launch every week 🙃

@KTmBoyle 1000% agree with this.

Have a national parade in Washington for this man. Elect him to Congress. Put his face and name on the nightly news for a month. We need to celebrate and value unexpected acts of heroism. We need more heroes.

@AirCanada someone claims to have found 1 of our 3 lost bags (in bogota of all places). It feels like a scam. Can you please confirm this is official Air Canada outreach and not someone who picked up our bag and is phishing for personal info.

Could you pls respond…and also stop selling flights beyond your capacity to fulfill the basics like operating a staffed call center.

Hey @AirCanada I’m in Italy with my wife and 4 young kids and your airline lost our luggage 6 days ago (incl: suit and dresses for a wedding, beach gear etc). After calling and submitting webforms a number of times each day we’ve heard nothing from you…

@amyhucht @bfeld @jasonmendelson You might appreciate "Secrets of Sand Hill Road" by @skupor then. There is some overlap, but he does a good job going into more depth beyond the term sheet and legal elements. The grad level book is "The Business of Venture Capital" by M. Ramsinghani.

Finally read 'Venture Deals' by @bfeld and @jasonmendelson. Embarrassed it took me a few years from when @Ksq1 originally recommended but definitely worth the wait.