Recurse Center

After 15 years it felt like it was about time to make a video.

Beautiful short film celebrating 15 years of the @recursecenter I love this community, always excited to chat with people about applying or re-applying!

Every programmer should write their own agent. It's fun, only takes 50 lines of code, and will surprise you. But to get the most from the experience, do these two things. First, hand-code it from scratch. Start with a blank text file and type out every line of code yourself; don't use any AI, not even autocomplete. Second, rely only on your language's standard library docs and the docs for Anthropic's API (or whatever model you're using). You can easily prompt Claude to do this for you. But the value of building your own agent by hand is that it helps you build a strong mental model of how they work, not just in broad strokes ("they're just an LLM in a loop with tool calls") but in the nitty gritty details. By doing everything manually you can make sure you don't accidentally gloss over important bits you don't understand yet, and you can experience directly how quickly new behavior emerges. For instance, my first agent had a single tool for adding two numbers. But that was enough for it to do multiplication by repeatedly invoking the tool. Once you get something working, there are dozens of fun things to try: add a second tool (perhaps `bash`? Make sure to do this in a sandbox), swap out the model (what's the worst model you can use and still get good results?), or make a simple memory system.

Robots, unease, agents for everything, and everything for agents. I'm at SFO, about to fly home after 36 hours in SF. I came back for the @ycombinator Alumni Demo Day, and to meet up with @recursecenter alums. Some quick thoughts after watching 50+ YC pitches, and speaking with dozens of current and past YC founders and investors, as well as half a dozen OpenAI and Anthropic employees: - Unsurprisingly, every single startup I saw was an AI startup. - Of those, the most common was "agents for X" -- agents for property management, agents for payroll, agents for hiring, etc. - But almost as many companies were "building X for agents:" E.g., phone numbers for agents, marketing for agents (so agents find your product more easily), developer experience for agents (so they can use your APIs more easily), and even insurance for agents (insurance for if they go off the rails...) - There were also plenty of companies training their own models, either for cost (e.g., for cheaper video avatars for CS agents) or for specialized tasks with proprietary data (e.g., hiring people to pickup groceries and training on motion capture data). - That leads to the last big trend I saw: lots of hard tech, mostly robots: Robots for scanning and sorting packages, robots for bio labs, robots that could prepare drinks, underwater defense robots, and many more. The energy at YC was positive and infectious: so many people earnestly building new stuff. That stood in contrast to what I heard in more private chats with software engineers and employees at the big AI labs. For them, the mood was all uncertainty. But I don't think the two groups actually disagree. They're just looking at different timelines. The founders are optimistic because they're focused on today, and today is a great time to build. The lab folks are worried because they're focused on the future, and what happens if AI really does just keep getting better.

@cbzehner Remote/hybrid Recurse Center! ;)

What is @recursecenter but for San Francisco?

📝 Apply to RC: recurse.com/apply

It's Friday! What better way to start your weekend than applying to RC? The application takes about an hour, a batch lasts 6 or 12 weeks, and the community will stay with you for so much longer. So: believe in yourself, write a little code, and think about what's been fascinating you lately. We'd love to see it. The Summer 2 batch starts June 29th, and the window's closing soon. Apply below:

The people I see who are still able to push themselves and engage in hard intellectual work are almost all flourishing right now. That doesn't mean they don't struggle; they do! But they don't flail. What's the difference between struggling and flailing? Flailing is bad; it is jumping about mindlessly, bouncing to a new thing any time you feel stuck. But *struggling* is good, because friction can be formative. It means you're *trying*, you're engaged and (assuming you persist) pushing through despite the challenges. Your capacity to do this will matter more, not less in the future, because AI is making it easier and easier to skate by (for now) while flailing. @jasminewsun's advice to do the "cognitive equivalent to lifting heavy" regularly is spot on.

And yes, you can use it to find Sauronhenges.

Read all about the math and code that went into Hengefinder in Victoria's blog post: victoriaritvo.com/blog/hengefind…

Want to find a henge near you? Maybe plan a Manhattanhenge picnic or photoshoot? Victoria Ritvo and John Pribyl built Hengefinder while at the Recurse Center:

Read the full blog post: maryrosecook.com/blog/post/usin…

Mary Rose Cook (@maryrosecook) on using encapsulated development to build videogames on her phone:

Every office should have one of these.

Rumor has it SFO will issue a travel alert for elevated risk of acquisition by Anthropic and OpenAI. If you plan to visit San Francisco, please know there's a real risk of being acquired by an AI lab after you deplane. More seriously: congrats to the many friends who have joined the big labs recently! Also, @RecurseCenter alums: I'll be visiting SF next month and will be hosting an alumni meetup the evening of Saturday, June 13th. DM me or check the RC calendar for details! (No, I do not plan to sell my company, even if it would make a great post.)

Attending the @recursecenter is without a doubt one for the best things I've done for my career and social life. (If you're curious, @InterlochenArts was the other.)

On this day, last year. Thank you to @recursecenter for all the energy you've given to my life ❤️

@rexledesma < 3 Can't believe it's been a year! -Eva

Want to join over 3,000 kind, sharp, and curious programmers? Learn more and apply at recurse.com 📝 Applications are open for our Summer 2 batch beginning on June 29.

Our website automatically updates as more people come to join a batch at the Recurse Center. Today, we finally hit 3,000 people! Thank you to everyone in our growing community! RC couldn't exist without you all. 👫👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏼👬