The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

12 Grams of Carbon

12gramsofcarbon.com

I'm increasingly certain no one knows anything about anything. Current founder @ noriagentic.com. Previous founder @ soot.com. Before that was googling. Writes about programming, AI, startups, video games, and misc other things. Click to read 12 Grams of Carbon, a Substack publication with thousan

AI / MLSoftware / engineering practiceGamingSociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
268 from 1 Nov 2020 to 22 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (88 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://12gramsofcarbon.com/feed

2026 73

  1. Agentics: agent evals considered harmful
  2. Agentics: Agent identity is a really hard problem
  3. The kids are worried about p(DOOM)
  4. Tech Things & Agentics: September Spotlight on AI Slop, AI Takes
  5. Agentics: what is developer process automation?
  6. Notes from the SF safety scene
  7. AI is not a normal technology
  8. Key ML Papers: 2020 to 2025
  9. Agentics Meetup Videos and our first AI Takes Series
  10. Agentics: Agent Optimized Codebases
  11. Tech Things: Consider that alignment may not be possible
  12. Agentics NYC Presentation: Software Factories
  13. It’s been about a year
  14. Is AI ‘structurally’ a centralizing technology?
  15. Tech things: we can’t control the bots
  16. Agentics: understanding the agent stack
  17. Movie Review: Thoughts on The Odyssey
  18. Agentics: how to build an agent to automate your on call
  19. Agentics: Personalizing Agents
  20. The Optimization Theory of Everything
  21. Agentics: Coding agents cannot remove complexity
  22. Tech Things: We need to talk about the open model situation
  23. Founders Guide: Success may not matter if you aren't doing what you love
  24. Notes from an AI Conference: What are the AI folks up to these days?
  25. Agentics: Design Principles for Building an Agent-First CLI
  26. Agentics: Sometimes free isn't cheap enough
  27. Agentics: Memorizing Session Transcripts Isn't Useful
  28. Agentics / Tech Things: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
  29. Agentics: the modern company won't have bullshit jobs
  30. Agentics: Cost to Implement vs Cost to Verify
  31. Agentics: HTML is All You Need (for Agents to Make Graphics)
  32. Tech Things: There is a massive shadow hanging over this Fable thing
  33. Agentics: Using Coding Agents for Browser Automation
  34. Agentics: local coding agents are inherently unsafe
  35. Tech Things: The Pope has Some Thoughts
  36. Boardgame Review: Dune Imperium is an Everything Sandwich
  37. Agentics Case Study: How Corvus uses AI to remove three hidden taxes on development
  38. Tech Things: Everyone's Getting Fired
  39. Agentics: 1100 people RSVP'd to learn about coding agents
  40. Guest Post: More Answers to the Dwarkesh AI Essay Competition
  41. Why is AI still scaling? How do the big AI labs make money? What should alignment folks spend resources / capital on? How should other countries keep up?
  42. Responses to “Why are doctors so unwilling to run tests?”
  43. Agentics: Using Metacognition to Get A Model Upgrade
  44. Why are doctors so unwilling to run tests?
  45. Agentics: AI enablement requires managed agent runtimes
  46. Open source maintainers need an answer to AI clean rooms
  47. Notes from the SF Peptide Scene
  48. Tech Things: AllBirds Goes All In on AI
  49. Tech Things: The Most Important Trial About Social Media Just Finished
  50. Agentics: I hate making powerpoints, coding agents make it better
  51. Tech Things: there was a lot of fraud this month
  52. Agentics: 6 emerging agent dev tool categories, market map, and meditations on the AI dev tool market
  53. Agentics: How to Effectively Use Coding Agents
  54. Founders Guide: So You’re Leaving Your Company
  55. I’d rather be uncool than be a nihilist
  56. Guest Post: What If AI Alignment Is a Skill, Not a State?
  57. Agentics: We wrote a linter for SKILL.md files
  58. Agentics: PMs Should Vibe Code
  59. Tech Things: SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS
  60. Measuring ASI: AI’s First Exam
  61. Agentics: Agent orchestrators are bad
  62. Tech Things: OpenClaw is dangerous
  63. The Final "Ilya's Papers to Carmack" Paper: Neural Scaling Laws
  64. Tech Things: Moltbook isn’t real but it can still hurt you
  65. "Why won’t my team use agents?"
  66. Is drawing a monospace terminal display straightforward?
  67. Prediction Markets are Dangerous
  68. Fuck it, we’ll build our own AI package manager
  69. Agentics: Your agent skills are all slop
  70. Tech Things: Why did NVIDIA buy Groq?
  71. The Last Best Coding Agent CLI
  72. Tech Things: Anthropic Did Not Make a Mistake in Cutting Off Third-party Clients
  73. Agentics: People are seeing the light on coding agents

2025 84

  1. Dinner for Two: Most Memorable Meals in 2025
  2. Tech Things: Netflix is buying nostalgia. Disney is buying OpenAI. OpenAI is buying time.
  3. Dinner for Two: Sigiri
  4. Agentics: Coding agents suck at microservices
  5. I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude
  6. Tech Things: TPUs power the Death Star
  7. Towards a language for optimization
  8. Neural Architecture for Dummies
  9. Agentics: Debugging when everything is on fire
  10. Agentics: Cathedral Builders Probably Shouldn't Use Coding Agents
  11. Agentics: Coding Agents can Manage Other Coding Agents
  12. Tech Things: Robotics has its GPT2 moment, Data has its Oil Moment
  13. A complete dump of the lore of Silksong as I understand it right now
  14. Founders Guide: how to get smart people to work for you for free
  15. Tech Things: OpenAI Can Never Claim AGI is Here
  16. Agentics: Averaging 10+ PRs a day with Claude Code
  17. From The Archives: Theory of Programming
  18. The mechanics of censorship
  19. Movie Review: Thoughts on Lawrence of Arabia
  20. Tech Things: OpenAI's Magic Money
  21. Etc Journal Club: The State of AI, Agents, MCP, and Reflections on the Industry
  22. Tech Things: Financing my Klarna Doritos Locos Taco
  23. Agentics: We’re all senior engineers now
  24. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Transformers
  25. Tech Things: OpenAI Announces Another GPU "Strategic Partnership"
  26. The elegance of movement in Silksong
  27. Tech Things: the point of crypto is breaking the rules
  28. One of my best friends is dead and I didn't even get a free churro
  29. Enshittification is our fault
  30. Why are people excited about the GPT-5 router?
  31. We created an IRL League of Legends
  32. Tech Things: Genie’s Lamp, OpenAI can't make graphs, Anthropic is also here, Where is everyone else?
  33. Building a SQLite CLI in less than an hour without looking at any code at all
  34. Silicon Valley is Wrong about Federal University Funding
  35. Tech Things: More Windsurf Drama
  36. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: RNNs
  37. Notes from an Indian Wedding
  38. Tech Things: What on earth is going on with Grok?
  39. Founders Guide: VCs are People Too
  40. Dinner for Two: Nowon
  41. Tech Things: Meta spends $14b to hire a single guy
  42. Decency is more important than policy. Rank Mamdani.
  43. Civ 7: City Planning
  44. A Few Quick Thoughts on Apple's "Illusion of Thinking" LLM Paper
  45. Fix the root, not the fruit
  46. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Deploying Big Models in 2015
  47. Civ 7: War Strategy and Tactics
  48. TV Review: Thoughts on "Andor"
  49. Deep Learning is Applied Topology
  50. Tech Things: xAI screws up its system prompts, again
  51. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Neural Turing Machines
  52. Tech things: OpenAI is Still an Unaligned Agent (?)
  53. Colleges have an education problem
  54. The latest Trump Executive Order Creates a Police State
  55. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Complextropy Redux
  56. Tech Things: Tesla, Waymo, and Self Driving Cars
  57. Tech things: OpenAI buys Windsurf, Google retains its lead, and where the hell is Apple?
  58. Contra Scott (and Rux) on Who's to Blame for Populism
  59. Notes from the SF Party Scene
  60. The tariffs aren't even INTERNALLY coherent
  61. Tech Things: Gemini 2.5 and The Bull Case for Google
  62. Civ 7: End Game Strategy
  63. Why We Can't Have Conversations Anymore and My Problems with Right Wing Epistemology
  64. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Relational Recurrent Neural Networks
  65. Dinner for Two: Leitao
  66. Civ 7: Military Strategy in Antiquity
  67. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: VLAEs
  68. The Five Year Old Test
  69. Founder's Guide: Rules for Product Design
  70. Civ 7: First Thoughts
  71. Meditations on AI and the Future of Business
  72. Tech things: Deepseek, but make it cheaper
  73. On Towards the Stars: Executing a Religious Victory
  74. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Relational Networks
  75. Founder's Guide: First time founders think about product, second time founders think about theses
  76. On Towards the Stars: Executing a Culture Victory
  77. Dinner for Two: Foxface Natural
  78. Tech Things: Inference Time Compute, Deepseek R1, and the arrival of the Chinese Model
  79. Movie Review: Joy Luck Club
  80. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: OG Attention
  81. Founders Guide: Prioritize Revenue and Profit over Growth
  82. Dinner for Two: Setting the Table
  83. On Towards the Stars: Executing a Diplomatic Victory
  84. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Graph Neural Networks

2024 53

  1. Societal Defaults
  2. Tech Things: OpenAI is an unaligned agent, part 3
  3. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Dilated Convolutions
  4. On Towards the Stars: Executing a Domination Victory
  5. Tech Things: AI Benchmarks, O3, and the Future of SWE
  6. Intuition around Stacked LSTMs
  7. On Towards the Stars: Executing a Science Victory
  8. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: ResNets
  9. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Identity Mappings in ResNets
  10. Tech Things: OpenAI is an unaligned agent, Part 2
  11. Musings on Healthcare
  12. Tech Things: The Economics of LLMs, GPT Pro, and the state of AI
  13. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Scaling Models with Parallelism
  14. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Set seq2seq
  15. Regretful leadership
  16. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: LSTMs
  17. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: RNN Regularization
  18. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Complextropy
  19. On Towards the Stars: Tourism
  20. The Great Bagel Chase
  21. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: NN Regularization
  22. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Pointer Networks, Conv Nets
  23. Ilya's Papers to Carmack: Table of Contents
  24. On Towards the Stars: Boats and Coasts
  25. How to Read a Deep Learning Paper
  26. On Towards the Stars: Nukes
  27. On Towards the Stars: Planes and Anti-Air
  28. On Towards the Stars: Spies
  29. On Towards the Stars: Building a Wonder
  30. A Primer on How to Deploy LLMs: Part 3
  31. A Primer on How to Deploy LLMs: Part 2
  32. A Primer on How to Deploy LLMs: Part 1
  33. Tech Things: OpenAI is an Unaligned Agent
  34. Founders Guide: Thoughts on Wartime Hiring
  35. On Towards the Stars: City States
  36. On Towards the Stars: Power and Climate
  37. Can Mechanistic Interpretability be Applied to Connectomics?
  38. Movie Review: Thoughts on "The Zone of Interest"
  39. Founder's Guide: Why should you only have one target demographic?
  40. Founder's Guide: The Importance of Brand Moats
  41. On Towards the Stars: Trade
  42. On Towards the Stars: Great People
  43. On Towards the Stars: Governors Part 2
  44. On Towards the Stars: Governors Part 1
  45. On Towards the Stars: Era score and Golden Ages
  46. Founder's Guide: The Importance of Explicitly Delegating Power
  47. Founder's Guide: Finding the Right Idea
  48. On Towards the Stars: Dealing with Barbarians
  49. On Towards the Stars: Religious Conversion
  50. On Towards the Stars: Selecting a Religion
  51. On Towards the Stars: Getting a religion
  52. Tech Things: Python Christmas Gift, Tech Layoffs, Amazon Spam
  53. Tech Things: NYT sues OpenAI, OpenAI bans ByteDance, and Tesla Charging Plugs

2023 37

  1. On Towards the Stars: Getting and Selecting a Pantheon
  2. On Towards the Stars: Eurekas and Inspirations (Boosts)
  3. Tech Things: Adobe and Figma, $1 Chevy Tahoe
  4. On Towards the Stars: How to War (part 2)
  5. Tech Things: EU AI Act, Biden Admin Order, Google Gemini
  6. On Towards the Stars: How to War (part 1)
  7. Thoughts on Meta's push for VR
  8. On Towards the Stars: Planning a City Layout
  9. Loyal and Longevity
  10. A Founder's Guide: The Importance of Organizational Structure
  11. On Towards the Stars: The Timing Push
  12. On OpenAI's Board
  13. On Towards the Stars: How to Settle a City
  14. Reactions from the Internet to Sam's Firing from OpenAI
  15. Movie Review: Thoughts on "The Creator
  16. On Towards the Stars: Synergies, Civ/Leader Abilities, and First Turn Planning
  17. On Towards the Stars: Tall vs Wide
  18. The Useful Part of OpenAI DevDay is the Assistants API
  19. On Towards the Stars: Information Collection
  20. Today we're talking about LLM dev tools
  21. On Towards the Stars: Yields and Percentages
  22. On Towards the Stars: Ramping and War
  23. On Towards the Stars: Strategic Races
  24. On Towards the Stars: Tactics vs Strategy, Geography, and Game Speed
  25. Movie Review: Thoughts on "Past Lives"
  26. On Towards the Stars: Game Settings, Terminology, UI
  27. On Towards the Stars: Your First Ten Turns
  28. From This Early Cradle of Civilization, On Towards the Stars
  29. LLMs are Programming Languages: A Review of Voyager (Part 2)
  30. LLMs are Programming Languages: A review of Voyager (Part 1)
  31. Creating vs Sampling: No Brightline
  32. On Code Review
  33. A Founder's Guide: Organizations as Systems
  34. Theory of Programming
  35. Responding to Ted Chiang on AI
  36. A Two-Line History of ML
  37. Nostradamus

2022 9

  1. Neural Network Sentience
  2. Programming: Simplicity in Prototypes
  3. Web3: A Neutral Take (Part 3: What I Think)
  4. Web3: A Neutral Take (Part 2: The Hate)
  5. Web3: A Neutral Take (Part 1: The Hype)
  6. A Founder's Guide: Collaboration at Google
  7. A Founder's Guide: Communication at Google
  8. A Founder's Guide: Google from the Outside
  9. A Founder's Guide: Corkscrew Development

2021 10

  1. Programming: Write Patterns
  2. A Founder's Guide: Thoughts on Moats
  3. A Founder's Guide: Startups as Hypotheses
  4. A Founder's Guide: Intro
  5. Clubhouse, Politics, and Demagogues
  6. Simple DL Part 5: Canonical Tasks
  7. What the hell is Water?
  8. GameStop and Coordination Problems
  9. Simple DL Part 4: Losses
  10. Simple DL Part 3: Features

2020 2

  1. Simple DL Part 2: Embeddings
  2. Simple DL Part 1: Introduction