CTO & Co-Founder
Switzerland
Joined November 2015
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Yet another update to my 10 years old side project updating a remote with 32Mb of RAM and communicating over LowPan. It is now displaying a self-updating weather widget whenever docked. Additionally also connects to my TV and displays in real time any music played via Tidal or Youtube.
I am constantly amazed by AI and what it can do. Was able to resurrect an old project from almost 10 years ago and build integrations with Tidal and several other devices in my home.
But this was just several hours of work. Complex work over embedded systems, IR, APIs, compression algorithms and extremely limited resources (think low powered radio, few MB of RAM)
More details later.
Emanuel Scirlet retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
I do agree with this one and tbh it’s quite exciting
volume does matter
look, i get it. if you were an engineer before agents came along, you're rightfully skeptical about lines of code and number of PRs being used as a metric for any kind of productivity. and i agree! or at least, i used to. for ease of explanation i will talk about this from the perspective as being an engineer on a large team of at least 50.
volume didn't matter before because we focused on impact. you could have high impact even with a few PRs: for example you could make a one line config change and save the company millions of dollars.
but before agents, the times where i saw volume come into the conversation were for the outliers. on the negative end you might have someone who is struggling to perform, on the other end you might have someone who was a "coding machine" archetype. a coding machine was someone who could just lock themselves in a room and emerge with a stack of PRs that solve a huge number of problems. so volume did matter, but only at the tail ends of the distribution, and combined with impact.
if you've ever worked at a large tech company before, you'll get what i mean. the thing about agents is that big tech co problems are now small-medium co problems as well.
how do agents change this calculus? well, everyone now has the ability to become a coding machine. you have incredibly capable frontier models that can write code better than any of us, at a rate much faster than we can. in this world, if you're still producing the same number of PRs as before, why wouldn't you pause to wonder why you're not being more productive? alien intelligence is here, and yet you can't outship a human coding machine?
this brings me back to why i keep talking about trust (nitter.gq/poteto/status/21020504…). if you haven't put in the work to trust your agent's output, it is very difficult to scale up your productivity.
and yes, this approach does require more tokens, but i think about this in terms of cost per intelligence. before agents, this cost was very high - you needed to hire many software engineers with high 6 figure salaries to do the work. tokens are still expensive today, but are likely to get cheaper over time (nitter.gq/theo/status/2107924138…) factoring in the cost of intelligence. what looks exorbitant today will likely be affordable in 6 moths to a year. a single engineer with agents can do the work of tens if not hundreds of engineers, at a fraction of the cost.
the reality that i don't think has hit yet is that job of the software engineer has truly changed. our job is not merely to produce software any longer (well tbh it was never only about the code, but bear with me for the sake of the explanation), but the machine that writes the software. this idea of a software factory, or a Michelin kitchen as i like to call it, is still a topic of research. and it's the type of stuff i like to share, not to flex, but to show you what's possible when you put a lot of rigor into using agents at scale
Building in the right direction with a cohesive UX matters more than just building. Anyone can build now
Emanuel Scirlet retweeted
Google Stitch can’t design for existing products.
Google Stitch is impressive, but it has the same flaw as Lovable+Cursor when it comes to actual product design: great for zero to one, bad for existing apps. So... why not design IN your live product? Comment for MVP access
I've been building something quietly for the last few months. Today I'm sharing it.
Introducing Contextual Design — an AI designer that works directly in your live product. 🧵
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Think: Devin for software, but for design.
An AI agent that works inside your live product — not from a blank canvas.
Benchmark: $1000/day senior designer quality.
We're opening access to our first 50 teams.
👉 contextual.live/
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We're also hiring engineers.
If you want to build at the intersection of AI and design — this is the role.
🤖 Founding AI Engineer → jobs.ashbyhq.com/contextual/…
🛠️ Founding Full-Stack → jobs.ashbyhq.com/contextual/…
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I think he refers to the coding part. I think system design will still be required but who knows. Really curious how it will unfold
Emanuel Scirlet retweeted
"Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months,"
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI models will be able to do 'most, maybe all' of what software engineers do end-to-end within 6 to 12 months, shifting engineers to editors.
Absolutely, there is plenty of work to go around but day in day out coding era is coming to an end
Claude 4.5 is going strong, but theoretical scores only partially translate in real world use. In some cases Opus is still better than Sonnet 4.5 despite being an older model
Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.5—the best coding model in the world.
It's the strongest model for building complex agents. It's the best model at using computers. And it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math.
ALT A benchmark table for Claude Sonnet 4.5 showing leading performance across many domains, including agentic coding, computer use, mathematics, graduate-level reasoning, and financial analysis.
The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region and 16 years of Swiss innovation. 👋☁️🇨🇭Dr. Werner Vogels announces new #AWS Region in Switzerland. bit.ly/3WXOMhk
#awsswitzerland bit.ly/3A1OFY6
