Nick Webb

@paulg @davidsenra @pmarca Maybe the great entrepreneurs of history?

@davidsenra @pmarca What? That's not true. Do you not feel that Charles Darwin, for example, was among the great men of history?

Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.

@paulg Disciplined in what respect? Having the self-control to not imagine harmful thoughts?

Something I told 13 yo: Neuroticism and imagination are closely related, if not identical. So if you're going to be imaginative you also have to be disciplined, in order to prevent bad kinds of imagination from bringing you down.

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.

@T2Rugby Well Australia also beat South Africa at Ellis Park in August. Probably more shows they dont have great strength in depth?

Now that 🇦🇺 Australia lost 8 out of their last 10 and not come closer than 15 pts against France, Ireland, England this month as well as lose to Italy. Can we all now agree Lions narrow series win was probably one of most overhyped and overrated achievements in rugby history?

@Tim_Burgess Beautifully said Tim.

I wrote a few words about Mani for The Sunday Times - I didn’t know it would be behind a paywall, so here it is if you would like to read it: 1/7

I took @davidhagmann's idea, and made a thing! If people like this and/or subscribe, I'll try to keep going or automate this.

@rocknrollofall Love this. What’s it from?

The magical notes, those fingertips, and every single song came out of this playing style. This is just a video of Mark Knopfler showing his playing style but when you stop for a minute and think... You realise that this style, told in just a couple minutes, created some of the best albums, singles, and solos of all time. There you figure out the magic.

@msj_photo @CJBolding What went wrong?

@CJBolding It was a very crazy and surreal day - a lot went right but a lot went wrong as well.

It was 28 years ago TODAY! - Thursday 21st August 1997 when BE HERE NOW was released - I shot the cover at Stocks House in Hertfordshire - It was a shoot I'll never forget - all questions welcome #Oasis #Oasis25 #Oasislive25 #Beherenow #OnThisDay

@axlreznor @NovaTwinsMusic Amazing! How did you get tickets?

Absolutely epic night with @NovaTwinsMusic at the Gibson Garage in London. Never once expected to see them in such a small venue. Least of all for free!

Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom.

To the extent I've been successful in life, it's because I've made a habit of quitting when the going gets just-pretty-good. Refusing to make barely positive-value bets with your life is a critical skill. (more below)

I spent some hours last month making an Anki deck for various emergencies where the outcomes will be significantly worse if you have to spend 30 seconds googling what to do. It's not extensive, or extensively researched, but it exists!

@TheRugbyPaper 100%

Does the current held-up law, adopted in 2021, need to be changed back to its original form? 🤔

It's wild how a simple change in surface materials makes such a radical difference in how a street feels!

@nvUltraApp That link is dead for me. Any word on nvUltra? Would love an updated version of nvalt. Cheers!

If you’re still on X, you should consider following me (Brett) on Mastodon, as posting here is going to be pretty infrequent because I hate this place these days. @ttscoff/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nojack.easydns.ca/@ttscoff/ Public release of nvUltra is finally within sight.

@andy_matuschak Hey Andy! Just starting on this and really enjoying it. I wondered if you found anything else that was helpful particularly for melody writing?

Puzzle Play is an unusual series of books on keyboard arranging by Forrest Kinney. Each idea is introduced with a bit of exposition, then a musical "puzzle"—a scaffolded creative task—followed by example solutions. Just finished the series, really dug it! forrestkinney.com/arranging

Giving very young kids access to real laptops with high ceiling video games is such a cheat code. My kids bootstrapped reading, math, spatial reasoning, etc, just because they had a *need* to do it since the carefully chosen games I've put them in front of *demand* it of them.

@tenobrus Notational Velocity was good back in the day.

good 👏 note-taking 👏 software 👏 doesn't 👏 exist

@dankuntz @__littleguy Oh, not sure that has the timestamp. see 1hr29m13

@dankuntz @__littleguy twitch.tv/videos/2397227…

Announcing... 🌀"THE LITTLE GUY" by CREATURE CO. I’ve raised $1.2mm to build next-gen wearable digital pets! For 2025 and beyond, I believe fun >>> utility in personal computing. “𝘩𝘦’𝘴 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘨𝘶𝘺…” hesjustalittleguy.com @__littleguy

@dankuntz @__littleguy Congrats!! Very handy plugin!