Pascal Wallisch

How much misconduct/fraud is there in the academic literature? About 0.2% of papers get retracted, but that's obviously a severe underestimate. Probably the best estimate comes from a manual (!!!) inspection of 20K (!!!) Western blot images. Estimate is 3.8% (1/2)

my point is that the low hanging fruits of physics were all picked in a brief window from about 1820 to 1970. Before that, it was difficult to get anything done at all, there was no funding and almost nobody worked on physics professionally. After that, there were ~millions of people working on physics research but nobody really made any important progress because it was all too hard, too data-poor and unconstrained. If you were born such that your productive years were outside this window, well bad luck

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

The academic publishing model: * Spend years becoming an expert * Spend ~1-3 years working on a project & writing manuscript * Editor takes weeks to assign reviewers * Most reviewers say no or don't reply to invites * Reviewers eventually get around to it months later * Reviewer reads for 0.5-1.0 hours and says - not interested, not good, not perfect * Spend next 1.5 - 2.0 years addressing reviewers/editors concerns which are often taste or tangential (often shopping across 3+ journals) * Postdoc has moved on, students have moved on

Most academic frauds aren't sophisticated masterminds. These guys were publishing totally fabricated case studies for a quarter of a century until Juurlink bothered to ask "Wait is this actually true?" and the author just said "Nope".

Claude can make blue1brown animations in minutes. Education is about to explode.

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.