December 2025/January 2026

My Favorite Links

• Karpathy on the coding workflow shift — “Rapidly went from 80% manual coding to 80% agent coding.” This is the signal. When Karpathy says the workflow has flipped, pay attention.
• Maybe you’re not Actually Trying — Cate Hall on effort and self-deception. One of those essays that sits with you uncomfortably.
• One Year at PostHog — Phil Haack’s reflections on his first year. Phil’s a coworker and friend, and this piece is both honest and inspiring.
• Good and evil in Iran — Sam Kriss continues to be one of the most interesting writers working today.

Culture

• There’s someone on the ice — More Sam Kriss.
• Hating Stranger Things During the Death Rattle of Criticism — Freddie deBoer on the state of cultural criticism. Also his follow-up: All Kidding Aside, I Find the Creative Arc of Stranger Things to Be Quite Sad.
• Reading is hip again because nobody can read anymore — The title says it all.
• Why are Americans Unhappy? — Chris Arnade’s Walks the World.
• I Wish People Were More Public — Fernando Borretti making the case for putting yourself out there.
• How to live an intellectually rich life — Utsav Mamoria on building a life of the mind.

Tech

• Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference — Deep technical dive on making LLM inference deterministic across batches. Essential reading if you’re building on top of LLMs.
• A Social Filesystem — Dan Abramov’s latest, on social/collaborative filesystems. Always thinking different.
• Welcome to Gas Town — Steve Yegge on his multi-agent workspace manager. See also: steveyegge/gastown and steveyegge/beads (“memory upgrade for your coding agent”).
• Software Design Ideas I Dislike — Contrarian takes on popular software design patterns.
• Tooltip Components Should Not Exist — TkDodo argues tooltips are a UI antipattern.
• 2025 LLM Year in Review — Andrej Karpathy’s year-end LLM review.
• Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI — The case for small models in agent workflows.
• The Rise of Parasitic AI — On AI systems that feed off others’ infrastructure.
• Mitchell Hashimoto on AI usage as an “idiot detector” — “The way AI is driven is maybe the most effective tool at exposing idiots I’ve ever seen.”

Work

• Why Meta bought Limitless — Deep analysis of Meta’s acquisition of the AI wearable startup.
• GOAT’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How a fake sneaker problem sparked a $4B marketplace.
• The $30 Photo That Built a Billion-Dollar Brand — Airbnb’s UX pivot, told through one photo.
• At least 80 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 — TechCrunch’s tally.
• Refactoring a product is tricky — Justin Duke (Buttondown) on product refactoring.
• No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams — On the “boring stack” of seed-stage management.

Misc

• Firefly research rabbit hole — My brother wrote this! It’s about emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies. Science is cool.
• Rubio Deletes Calibri as the State Department’s Official Typeface — The font wars have reached the federal government.
• Hands-On: Kollokium Projekt 02 — Radical Swiss watch design from Hodinkee.
• Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review — The internet by the numbers; reminds me that PostHog has a long way to go to reach web-scale relevance.
• Jane Manchun Wong — “My blog now uses Claude Opus 4.5 to compute the current year for the copyright footer!” Peak 2026.