open source hard & software design
Joined March 2007
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Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
this but forever. we're not running out of work.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding.
ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds.
The findings are brutal.
The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written communication skills, and general cognitive reasoning.
They wanted to see what actually predicts vibe coding proficiency when you never touch a line of source code yourself.
Two major predictors emerged.
Written communication proficiency mattered. The ability to structure thoughts and articulate intent unambiguously in text directly impacts what the AI builds.
But that wasn't even the main takeaway.
Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success.
Even when researchers controlled for general intelligence and reasoning skills, CS background still heavily dictated who built working software and who completely crashed.
In fact, CS knowledge contributed roughly twice the unique predictive variance of writing skills alone.
Why? Because vibe coding isn't about writing code. It’s about debugging logic.
When an AI agent builds a complex application and quietly breaks an edge case under the hood, a non-technical user looks at the glowing UI and assumes it works.
They don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what logic to challenge. They lack the mental models to recognize architectural catastrophe.
You can prompt your way past syntax.
You cannot prompt your way past a fundamental lack of engineering intuition.
The hype told us that learning to code is dead because language is all you need.
The data just proved the opposite.
To truly master the vibe, you still need to understand how the machine thinks.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Playing around with a Kent Beck-inspired prompt today:
Before implementation, look for opportunities to prefactor the code to make the implementation easier. "Make the change easy, then make the easy change."
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Exactly right. The bottleneck has never been compute or capital. Its taste and judgment about what humans actually want. Infinite compute just makes the great founders faster and the confused ones more confused. nitter.cf/dflieb/status/20601962…
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
I'll tell my kids this was Based Beff Jezos @beffjezos
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
This 30-minute speech by the Head of Anthropic "Coding Agents" researcher will teach you more about vibe coding than 100 paid courses.
Bookmark it & give it 30 minutes today. This video will change the way you use AI forever,
This weather bot turned $300 → $122K on Polymarket weather markets in 3 months
I fully decoded algo and built a self-learning Hermes weather trading agent
using weather APIs + Opus 4.7, the bot runs 5-min scans & searches mispricings on Polymarket
run your agent in 5 steps:
• set up a VPS server on Hetzner - $6
• create a weather API on {visualcrossing} - free
• set up Hermes agent using one-liner code - free
• connect Telegram bot + Opus 4.7
• send {weather trading logic} from article to agent
started my agent 2 days ago with a test sum and already having 40% profit
agent already caught 2 traders with +400% ROI on Seoul & Chicago weather markets
bot used for logic: polymarket.com/@coldmath?via…
my bot test wallet:
polymarket.com/@hermesweathe…
Hermes bot is a self-learning agent so give him enought trades {100+}, to build his own logic. start small
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
This 2-hour Stanford lecture breaks down how models like ChatGPT and Claude are actually built, clearer than what many people in top AI roles ever get exposed to.
Save this and set aside two hours today. It might end up being the most valuable thing you learn all week.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Something I taught 14 yo: Most progress is a mix of steps forward and steps back, just with with more of the former. But you can get a run of steps back. So to judge progress accurately you need to use a big enough window, or it could look like you're failing.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Agents are good at bash. Bash is not good for agents. We should cut our losses and restart now before it is too late.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
I built this thing called Clicky.
It's an AI teacher that lives as a buddy next to your cursor.
It can see your screen, talk to you, and even point at stuff, kinda like having a real teacher next to you.
I've been using it the past few days to learn Davinci Resolve, 10/10.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Now that we are out of the water, hopefully this month will be a transition to the future.
#generative #everyday #creativecoding #daily #code #nannou #821
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Vertigo of Latent Space
Montage marked the decisive invention of cinema: a mode of associating images capable of producing new relations. Yet this potential has remained largely unexplored, as cinema has most often reproduced narrative forms inherited from the novel.
With artificial imagination, another regime of images emerges.
Images are no longer simply arranged; they transform into one another within a continuous space.
It then becomes possible to work not with sequences, but with transitions, passages, thresholds.
Vertigo is approached here as a latent structure, a field of forms in circulation.
The film becomes a set of persistent forms that reactivate, deform, and recombine in contact with other images.
What is at stake here is less a reinterpretation of the film than an attempt to approach thought in action: its movement, its bifurcations, its reminiscences.
In The Flow, this research unfolds on another scale.
It seeks to follow the flow of consciousness, not as narrative, but as a continuous dynamic in which films, memories, and history intermingle and circulate.
This work around Vertigo constitutes a variation: a way of exploring how a film can dissolve into this flow and become one of the sites from which thought begins to move.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
Merkle trees are everywhere:
- ZFS uses them to detect data corruption
- Git uses them to verify repo integrity
- Cursor uses them for codebase sync
- Bitcoin uses them for transaction verification
Talked through how they work on the latest database stream.
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”
— Benoit Mandelbrot
Philipp Tiefenbacher retweeted
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.
