Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
The real AGI-pill is specialized robots
Giacomo Randazzo argues that the excitement over general-purpose robots misses half the picture: AI agents will make specialized industrial machines cheap to design and general-purpose robots will make them cheap to build, so tasks move from general robots to specialized machines once frequent enough, leading to a Cambrian explosion of specialized machines.
18 min · 4,083 words
Venkatesh Rao, reading Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism, argues that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilist zero-sum thinking: fears of surplus intelligence and useless minds resemble old fears about trade and idle labor, while a 'cognitive capitalist' view sees intelligence creating new demand and new freedom for minds.
15 min · 3,546 words
We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Dan Luu argues that AI coding tools let skilled engineers attempt far more ambitious software, using Michael Malis's pgrust (a Postgres rewrite with JIT-style optimizations whose testing has surfaced real Postgres bugs) as the running example, and explains why programming expertise still matters for judging model output.
27 min · 6,109 words
Alex Gusev, CTO of Uploadcare, reflects on turning 40 and realizing that AI coding agents have removed the engineering challenges that drove a lifetime of side projects and startups, and on what it means to look for a new kind of challenge in a second professional life.
3 min · 804 words
Friday essay: AI is devastating higher education, but the system was already broken
Jeff Sparrow argues that generative AI is ravaging universities, from AI-written essays to scraped scholarship, but that marketised, efficiency-driven higher education was already broken, and calls for a struggle over what knowledge and the university are for.
28 min · 6,529 words
The compiler was supposed to end programming too
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. An essay on what the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, how the bottleneck moves when code gets cheap, and a guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
14 min · 3,332 words
An essay on mathematicians' emotional reactions to AI-generated proofs, from Terence Tao's call for etiquette and Hugo Duminil-Copin's account of panic to spiritual angst and humility, set against the 1976 four color theorem and other industrializing disciplines, arguing the romantic era of mathematics is ending.
8 min · 1,738 words
Writing is no longer proof of work
Sean Goedecke argues tech companies rely on writing as evidence of compliance, effort, and expertise, much like Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work, and that LLMs are eroding that signal, leaving engineers to save real effort for writing meant as communication.
6 min · 1,283 words
Bitter Lessons and Premature Optimizations
Veit Heller revisits Knuth’s ‘premature optimization’ line and Rich’s Bitter Lesson, arguing that the shape of efficiency arguments—not just the slogans—matters when building AI systems and robots.
7 min · 1,668 words
How to Formalize All of Mathematics
A guest post by Jeremy Avigad, Kevin Buzzard, Johan Commelin, Rémy Degenne, Kim Morrison, Oliver Nash and Adam Topaz. Responding to calls to formalize all of mathematics now that AI proves theorems well, the authors say a coordinated effort could expand discovery if done well but do lasting damage if rushed, and lay out their concerns and experiences with AI and formalization.
10 min · 2,382 words
The math that OpenAI keeps for itself
Daniel Paleka on what OpenAI's flood of AI-proved math results conspicuously skips—especially cryptography—and why the gaps matter for research priorities before the field's incentives shift further.
5 min · 1,192 words
Revisiting some of my priors about OpenClaw
Geoffrey Huntley revisits earlier skepticism about OpenClaw and explains what changed in his thinking about the open agent platform.
5 min · 1,209 words
How worried should we be about extinction risk from AI?
Fields Medallist Timothy Gowers reflects on Jacob Tsimerman's pivot to AI safety and argues carefully about extinction risk, timelines, and what mathematicians can usefully do.
34 min · 7,782 words
What is a forward deployed engineer, and do you need one?
Denys Zaichenko explains what forward deployed engineers actually do inside customer teams, how they differ from solutions engineers, and when a company needs one.
6 min · 1,404 words
Why are we even doing all this?A guest post on What’s new about the value of curiosity-driven work in an age of AI
Rikab Gambhir’s guest post on Terence Tao’s blog asks what research and learning are for when AI can already answer many technical questions—arguing for curiosity, taste, and the human practice of doing hard things even when tools get smarter.
6 min · 1,455 words
Brian Potter of Construction Physics looks at whether robotics can repeat AI's scaling playbook, explaining what robot training data is, how it is gathered through teleoperation, simulation, and other sources, and how large today's robot datasets are compared with those behind language models.
16 min · 3,630 words
I Know Why the Mathematicians WeepOn technological grief
Derek Thompson talks with Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz about why OpenAI's flood of AI-generated proofs has left mathematicians grieving, arguing that science is both a craft and a conversation between minds, and that machines producing knowledge without human understanding threaten the social half of science that people will need to protect.
8 min · 1,932 words
Guan, the solopreneur behind WriteMapper, argues that AI will transform how we work without replacing every tool: each technology shapes what we create, chat is not the best interface for most tasks, and choosing the right tool remains up to us.
2 min · 383 words
AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot
Scott Alexander rebuts the claim that AI companies' existential-risk warnings are a ploy for hype, distraction or regulatory capture, arguing that unaffiliated AI researchers are just as worried, that leaders like those at Anthropic and OpenAI voiced the same warnings long before they ran AI companies, and that such a plot would be self-defeating.
14 min · 3,142 words
Karri Saarinen argues that good products carry the perspective of the people who make them, and worries that agent-driven 'software factories', where individuals ship independent changes, dilute that shared point of view into an average of outputs. He hopes easier software-making leaves more room for people to develop and follow a perspective.
3 min · 587 words