All of it

UF#26-1: Claude Code writing Claude Cowork, the Powell wars, UN's last century?, bio-sovereignty.

“May you live in interesting times”. Claude code wrote all of Claude Cowork, how’s that for an interesting time?

Oh, and we have the end of the UN-based order, with Trump pulling out of 66 international organizations.

Should we mention that the US admin and the FED are now in open antagonism?

We’re back with our read of the week, we’ll try to keep at it week after week even if not always feasible, but here we are now!

Coding AGI is officially here.

Over the holidays and into the new year, something fundamentally shifted in how the tech world sees AI coding tools. Andrej Karpathy, the guy who literally coined “vibe coding” and co-founded OpenAI, posted what amounted to a confessional: “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer.” Let that sink in. The guy who built this technology feels lost using it.

Karpathy’s framing is precise and jarring: Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is like “a powerful alien tool handed around except it comes with no manual.” The profession is being “dramatically refactored” and failing to claim the productivity boost now feels “decidedly like a skill issue.”

The reactions have been wild:

• Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code): “The last month was my first as an engineer when I didn’t open an IDE at all.”

• Jaana Dogan (Senior Google Engineer): “I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.”

• Nathan Lambert calls it “catnip for the entire workday” and quotes Doug O’Laughlin: “Claude with a 100X context window and 100X the speed will be AGI.”

• Linus Torvalds: “Is this much better than I could have done? Sure is”

What’s odd is that Opus 4.5 was released on November 25, 2025. The collective mind-melt came weeks later, over the holiday break, when people finally had time to properly experiment. As Lambert puts it, this moved “software creation from an artisanal, craftsman activity to a true industrial process.” The Gutenberg press. The sewing machine.

Anthropic says that performance “exceeds every human candidate who has taken their internal engineering hiring exam.” Uh-oh.

And as users usually do, users have been using Claude Code for everything – vacation research, tax prep, home automation, email management. This piece nails it: Claude Code isn’t a coding assistant. It’s a general-purpose AI agent that happens to use code as its language. It shifts the question from “is this a coding task?” to “can this be done digitally?”

And Then: Cowork

On Monday, Anthropic dropped Cowork, essentially Claude Code for non-coders. Built into the Claude Desktop app, it lets you give Claude access to a folder and then… let it work. Organize messy downloads. Turn receipt screenshots into spreadsheets. Draft reports from scattered notes.

Cowork was built in ~10 days by a team of four and all the code was written by Claude Code itself.

We are watching AI tools build AI tools. In production. Shipped to users. This is the flywheel everyone theorized about, actually spinning.

I have used Claude Code over the weekend, and I shit you not, it feels like being given a weapon of mass destruction construction. You feel invincible, and able to build anything.

The world will never be the same.

The War on Jerome Powell

I’m not the best person to comment on the war between the admin and the FED, which I hopefully will see dismantled in my lifetime.

But, this is new. The admin wants to print, and the FED is saying no (although they did just start with their QE again).

New scenarios, but will be very fun to watch. As for what we think, Balaji puts it better than anyone:

Nothing stops this train, not even Powell.

The End of Multilateralism

This is straight into our thesis. Nation states will have to finally realize that they are into a bottomless debt hole hole that they are into, spending money on absolutely everything - because of pure inertia.

The US is actually incredibly ahead here, but, as we said, nothing stops this train. In any case, this is a taste of the future: nation states don’t have infinite money anymore, and they will have to figure out where to cut. Although, most likely, most will just tax and print as that’s much easier than cutting.

This list is in fact mostly symbolic and political, with not that much of an economic impact, but whether you think this is sovereignty reclaimed or global leadership abandoned, it’s happening fast and it’s happening now.

Other Things We’re Reading

AI & Economics

• Capital in the 22nd Century
  Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel re-read Piketty with AGI glasses on: when capital substitutes for labor completely, inequality spirals unless we tax it globally – and the rich have access to private AI investments the rest of us don’t.

• Jevon’s Paradox for knowledge work
  Box CEO Aaron Levie on why making knowledge work cheaper doesn’t mean less of it.

• Labor Market Effects of AGI
  David Duvenaud with some sobering takes on what happens to jobs.

• The Final Offshoring
  What if the last country we offshore to is... nowhere? A PDF worth your time on what happens when AI becomes the ultimate low-cost labor.

AI Reflections

• Zhengdong Wang’s 2025 Letter
  A DeepMind researcher’s beautiful end-of-year reflection on the compute theory of everything, and joining DeepMind’s new Post-AGI team: “we’re so wildly early.”

• Shane Legg on the arrival of AGI
  DeepMind co-founder on timelines and what’s next.

Manufacturing & Hard Tech

• The Art of Industrial Leapfrogging
  The current manufacturing system is fragile; modular, closed-loop systems might spark a renaissance.

• The Closed-Loop Manifesto
  Optimization-first biotech where rapid feedback loops beat static understanding – AI-optimized therapies that adapt in real-time.

• Orbital Compute
  New GPU price modeling for space: if you think data centers are expensive on Earth, wait until you see the numbers for orbit.

• Becoming: Built Placental Support
  Predictive tools to make artificial wombs possible.

Geopolitics & Governance

• Sovereign Risk in Biotech - must read.
  Western companies licensing from China might be outsourcing their innovation capacity – the real IP moat may be agile AI-driven infrastructure.

• The Great Wage Squeeze - must read.
  Britain’s wage compression is stifling ambition and driving talent abroad.

• DARPA’s 2026 Budget
  $4.9 billion for engineered red blood cells, generative optogenetics, and high-efficiency nitric acid production – paging all frontier researchers.

Society & Culture

• Sterile Polygamy
  High-status men enjoying dating without commitment may be a demographic death spiral.

• How the US loses $500B to fraud
  The biggest fraud in welfare.

• Backing up Spotify
  Anna’s Archive backed up 256 million tracks and 86 million music files – our musical heritage survives another day.

• “Experts Stunned”
  The phrase of the decade.

• This is the way the world ends
  Peter McCormack on what’s coming.

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Let us know what you think of this format, and if you have anything else we should read!