AI Links, 12/31/2025

Alexander Kruel on robotics; An AI start-up for social connections; Steve Yegge's vibe-coding manifesto; Andrej Karpathy with related thoughts

Alexander Kruel writes,

I stand by my following predictions:

• By 2030, a robot will be able to cook various meals in an arbitrary kitchen. (70%)

• By 2035, robots can do 80% of all physical work at a human level. (70%)

I read about a start-up called 222 in the WSJ, but the article is inaccessible on line even to subscribers. So here are some quotes about the startup from Google Gemini.

The social connector startup 222 is an AI-powered platform that organizes curated, in-person social experiences and events to foster real-life connections and combat loneliness. It aims to “maximize the probability of an in-real-life future” by engineering chance encounters among compatible strangers, without the traditional swiping or DMs found on dating apps.

• AI-Powered Matching: Users complete a detailed personality questionnaire covering interests, values, and preferences. A machine learning algorithm then uses this data to match compatible strangers for group events.

• Curated Events: 222 organizes multi-stage social experiences, such as dinners at a restaurant followed by a visit to a museum or a bar. Events are facilitated by trained “curators” to ensure a welcoming and engaging environment.

I think that this is what college does. It brings together a lot of young people, with a good chance that groups of friends will form as people meet one another in class and in various on-campus events.

Remember that I say that your friends are your destiny. Having groups of friends at this age is really important. The 222 app wants to charge $22 a month. That is much cheaper than college.

In my opinion, this is much better than a dating app.

I think that friendship should precede dating. You should not date anyone until you have met their friends. If his friends are immature jerks, what do you think he is going to be like? Instead, if they’re well-behaved and you enjoy being around them, isn’t dating him likely to be a good experience?

Steve Yegge says,

• if you’re still using an IDE to develop code by >> January 1st, you’re a bad engineer.

• you need to drop it and learn how agents code, okay? Because it’s a skill set.

For me, it’s weird. I did web coding in the late 1990s, using a text editor. I then got out of software altogether and took up teaching and writing. So I completely missed the shift to using integrated development environments (IDEs). And I have no desire to learn how to use them. But now there is this vibe-coding opportunity out there, and it really appeals to me.

When Steve Yegge talks about how you just want to yell at the models for the dumb mistakes they make, I get that. But for me, it represents a net reduction in frustration. I mean, my own dumb mistakes as a developer were costly, too. It’s like getting into a self-driving car. Even though the mistakes the self-driving car makes are not the mistakes you would make, statistically you’re still safer with the self-driving car.

Andrej Karpathy writes,

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

My guess is that the AI’s will get better at “permissions, tools, plugins” etc. before most programmers do. And AI coding work will become less “stochastic, fallible,” etc.

Karpathy’s post is discussed in a Times of India article.

Boris Cherny, creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, responded to Karpathy’s post by sharing his own revelation. “The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all.” …Cherny described how newer developers without “legacy memories” of older models often use AI more effectively than veterans

substacks referenced above: @

Links for 2025-12-23