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Adam Marcus

@marcua.net
2.9K followers 238 following 262 posts

Hummus, people, and data. Co-Founder & CTO of B12. Previously Locu, MIT CSAIL. He/him. marcua.net Queens is the future.

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Reposted by Adam Marcus
Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 27/09/2026
If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...
blog.marcua.net
If you write online, consider a “how I write” AI disclosure
Or: How I (don’t) use AI to write this blog
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 27/09/2026
If you write online, consider a "how I write" AI disclosure. Or: How I (don't) use AI to write blog posts: blog.marcua.net/2026/09/27/a...
blog.marcua.net
If you write online, consider a “how I write” AI disclosure
Or: How I (don’t) use AI to write this blog
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Reposted by Adam Marcus
Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 25/09/2026
This is an interesting post, and worth reading. I particularly like the aspects of code review that he identifies as not easily reduced to agent automatable functions www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/08/24/t...
adaptivecapacitylabs.com
There is more to code review than (automatable) detection
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 21/09/2026
Yes! “We should be spending some of our productivity gains on things that seem like slowing down: meetings, design reviews, conversations. These ways of maintaining alignment, sharing knowledge, and creating human connections are…more important than ever to creating good outcomes at scale.”
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 12/09/2026
Me First and the Gummie Gummies
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Reposted by Adam Marcus
Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I needed code indexing of major systems to help me research software. And now Standard subscribers get access to the same dataset. At the moment around 60 databases and programming languages are indexed (searchable, browsable), and the full 400+ project corpus is the goal.
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/08/2026
Every team I've spoken with is struggling with whether and how to review AI-generated code. I wrote up the prototype-plan-stack pattern we've used at @b12.io to understand many thousand-line AI code contributions for the past few months, with an actual example: blog.marcua.net/2026/08/31/p...
blog.marcua.net
The prototype-plan-stack development pattern
How we still review the thousands of lines our agents write
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Reposted by Adam Marcus
Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Microconferences: A modest proposal for alternative systems to generate, evaluate, and share knowledge.
argmin.net
Microconferences
A proposal to create alternative systems for generating, evaluating, and sharing knowledge
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 11/08/2026
Really nice blog post that struggles with the mentorship vs. production tension academia is facing. It’s the academic analog to the problem of mentoring junior engineers in the age of agents. I like the guidance for students to only use AI for a task once you know how to do that task yourself.
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Joshua Bowman @thalesdisciple.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Working on an A.I. policy for my calculus classes. Decided to be upfront about the current situation with LLMs and to give a heartfelt explanation for why the course still matters.
Al policy

Context

Artificial Intelligence, or "A.l.," Is a broad term used to refer to several different kinds of technologies. The kind most relevant to this class are Large Language Models (LLMs), which use mathematics to analyze large amounts of human-produced text and then generate new text that simulates what a human might write in response to prompts or questions. Some examples of LLMs are OpenAl's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.Current LLMs can provide a solution to any calculus problem I give you. So why should we work on them, you might ask? Here's the thing: for the most part, the problems were already solved anyway. Calculus as a subject is nearly 400 years old. It has reached into virtually every modern scientific and economic field. And while I would like to believe that I have crafted a few new problems with some small amount of originality tailored to this class, for the most part I have curated a collection of exercises drawn from my years of teaching calculus. Those exercises come from textbooks, workshops, friends, and other fields of study, as well as my own invention.
And they nearly all have known solutions, often with fairly standard approaches.
Before A.I. became widely available, you could find those solutions in another textbook, or from a friend's notes, or through a repository on the internet.The point of this class is not necessarily to solve problems that have never been solved before. It is for you to develop habits of thinking that are used by mathematicians, scientists, and policymakers-to develop a sort of mental toolbox that can be applied to new problems. If along the way you happen to find a new way of solving one of the class exercises, that's great! I am constantly learning new things from my students. But you will be bereft of discovery if you rely on a LLM for solutions to the calculus problems before you. Here I mean the discovery of having your own realizations, crystallizing your own internal understanding, claiming the knowledge in a way that cannot be taken away from you.
That ownership is what I want for you, and that is what the course is built around.
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 06/08/2026
Via @jacobian.org "The Django Software Foundation is hiring an Executive Director! Main responsibilities: fundraising, managing staff and day-to-day operations, and generally helping the DSF mature. We’re looking for candidates with a history of nonprofit leadership....
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ewuuu @eugenewu.net · 03/08/2026
vibes like this classic www.usenix.org/legacy/event...
usenix.org
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/07/2026
In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not authenticating for the privilege of handing it over! blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/a...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 31/07/2026
In "Authorize, don't authenticate," I argue for the elimination of the login screen in applications that manage your personal data. You should be authorizing apps to access your data, not authenticating for the privilege of handing it over! blog.marcua.net/2026/07/31/a...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 19/07/2026
Any data engineers in my network or on #databs looking for a short-term contract setting up a Databricks-based ingestion/analysis pipeline? Would be for an academic lab studying the platform economy in collaboration w/ NYC gov. Happy to connect you!
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Jeffrey P. Bigham @jeffreybigham.com · 05/07/2026
end of an era. the lesson one should not take from this is that human annotation/labeling is over, but the players have changed. scale, surge, companies that work at larger scale, have taken over.
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026
I'm starting virtual office hours for anyone who is a new/soon-to-be professional in software engineering/product management/design. I'm excited to learn from and give my opinion on questions and experiences participants have in these interesting times for our field. blog.marcua.net/2026/06/25/o...
blog.marcua.net
Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers
Free conversations with a neutral sounding board
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 25/06/2026
I'm starting virtual office hours for anyone who is a new/soon-to-be professional in software engineering/product management/design. I'm excited to learn from and give my opinion on questions and experiences participants have in these interesting times for our field. blog.marcua.net/2026/06/25/o...
blog.marcua.net
Office hours for new and soon-to-be software engineers, product managers, and designers
Free conversations with a neutral sounding board
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 23/06/2026
Dear New York: Today is the day to work through the uncertainty and make some compromises. Go vote!
A sign that says vote here/vote aquiA floor decal in the shape of an arrow that says Vote NYC
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Esther Schindler @estherschindler.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
20 full coaching scholarships for leaders from underrepresented groups in technology
monkeysthumb.co.uk
Engineering Leadership Coaching Scholarships
Coaching scholarships for engineering leaders from groups that are underrepresented in technology
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 01/06/2026
Really nice framing from @skamille.themanagerswrath.com : When using AI tools for communication, respect for your collaborators is the thing to optimize for.
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Kurt Luther @kurtluther.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Abstracts due today for Papers and Talks at ACM Collective Intelligence and HCOMP 2026. Hope you'll submit!
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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Whatever your transactional database is, help me understand your use of it. This survey is run by @theconsensusdev, independent of any database or vendor. Repost or pass along to industry peers for broader representation forms.gle/fqjQsezWsztx...
forms.gle
Transactional Database Usage Survey
All questions relate to the primary database(s) you use to store transactional (e.g. typically user data, not event / activity data) data. This survey is run by The Consensus, independent of any data...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 06/05/2026
For designers to work outside a codebase, you have to keep wireframes and implementation in sync. To that end, I'm sharing Figmimic, a bookmarklet that copies any website or webapp into Figma in an editable state. Try it: marcua.net/minitools/fi... Blog post: blog.marcua.net/2026/05/05/f...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 05/05/2026
A fine use of CLAUDE.md: a coworker instructed their agent to use Ska bands as example constants in tests. If you're wondering, the examples are geographically spread across the US (not internationally) and the later waves of Ska. They will be on `main` soon.
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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Donate $30 to an educational non-profit or open-source project and I'll credit you $30 toward The Consensus Standard subscription. I'm excited to support these organizations with you! theconsensus.dev/subscribe.html
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Olivier Grisel @ogrisel.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
The team of JupyterCon 2023, PyData Paris 2024 & 2025 organizes a new conference named Compute! Paris 2026 on open source computation and data. The event will take place on November 25–26, 2026 at Sorbonne Université in Paris. CfP deadline: May 24, 2026: compute.events/paris2026/cf...
compute.events
Call for Proposals — Compute! Paris 2026
Submit your talk proposal for Compute! Paris 2026. The Call for Proposals is open from April 15th to May 24th, 2026.
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George Stagg @gws.phd · 20/04/2026
I've been working on this over the last few months and in my opinion it is just beyond cool. Grammar of graphics for SQL users!
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 08/04/2026
Late last year, I gave a talk at Northeastern to students in a few software engineering classes about what's changing and what's staying the same for junior engineers in industry with the introduction of coding agents. Slides and notes here: blog.marcua.net/2026/04/08/a....
A timeline of the professional experiences a junior engineer used to develop over several years. Skills that used to take years to hone are now required in your first moments with a coding agent.
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Evan Peck @peck.phd · 18/03/2026
I made a tiny tool for quickly sharing small datasets (< ~1000 rows) without uploading any data to a server. 🔗 ziptbl.com It compresses the data into the link itself, so there’s no account, hosting, or storage layer involved. Here's Florence Nightingale's famous 📊 data: ziptbl.com#d=eNpdlE-LGz...
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Pao Siangliulue @paopow.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Are you a researcher in CS or a CS-adjacent field curious about how an AI agent can help you with your research project? Want to try a new tool for your research support in a paid user study ($100, 2 hr)? Limited spot numbers. See details and sign up here: forms.gle/JzLtkAhe7Ttv...
forms.gle
Project Document Study Interest Form
Hi! 👋 We are researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) exploring AI-powered tools to support researchers as they work on their research projects. We are looking for partici...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 12/03/2026
I've never built anything for a decade professionally, but here we are! blog.marcua.net/2026/03/12/b...
blog.marcua.net
B12 3.0
A decade of helping customers build their home online
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 08/03/2026
"...managers who treat AI as a productivity multiplier for their junior engineers are optimizing for output. The managers who use AI to push their juniors into harder problems are optimizing for growth. These look similar on a quarterly roadmap. They produce very different engineers over two years."
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Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
I want to talk about why AI-based mass surveillance is so dangerous, and why I would oppose it no matter which party or president is in office.
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Armin Ronacher @mitsuhiko.at · 05/03/2026
chardet was vipeforked to MIT and I have thoughts about it. Spoiler: I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/the...
lucumr.pocoo.org
AI And The Ship of Theseus
Slopforks: what happens when a library gets rewritten with AI?
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 27/02/2026
If you find yourself in Las Vegas, The Punk Rock Museum is a pretty good place to go! It's like 50% nostalgia for whatever 1-2 decades of punk you liked, 50% stuff Fat Mike / NOFX liked or collected.
A photo outside a black building labeled "The Punk Rock Museum" in neon green, with a hat that says "SKA" at the bottom of the photo
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 26/02/2026
Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...
A snippet from the introduction to the blog post:


Four questions agents can't answer

Software engineering after agents write the code

Feb 25, 2026

You’ve likely read countless words about how coding agents have massively changed software engineering. At the extreme, December 2025 was the turning point and we’re unlikely to write a line of code again. But amidst all this talk of change, it helps to understand what likely won’t.

I’m particularly interested in the questions agents can’t answer, doubly so if they are unlikely to answer them well in the coming years. Here are four such questions that blur the line between product management and software engineering. The questions reflect the fact that as coding agents cover more of the nitty-gritty of code generation, humans will be responsible for higher-level concerns. I think these questions will remain in the human domain for years to come:

    What should we work on?
    How much of it are we doing?
    How do we do it well?
    What’s getting in our way?

These questions are durable: we’ve encountered them since software engineering became a profession, and we’ll be responsible for them as long as we’re responsible for the products and systems we share with the world. The answers to these questions require judgment based on goals and constraints that are organization-specific, dynamic, and don’t live in some task management or issue tracking system you can integrate with. It’s hard to imagine an agent successfully synthesizing these disparate and context-specific inputs into answers.

What should we work on?

Companies tend to work at the intersection of what their users find valuable, what the business finds
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Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Only a few more days (full consideration deadline: March 1) to apply to our lecturer position at @cornelltech.bsky.social!
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rob pike @robpike.io · 26/02/2026
CBGB&OMFUG. Iconic and mourned. www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...
theguardian.com
‘The bathrooms were rank, but we didn’t care’: how the grimy-but-great CBGB changed rock for ever
Half a century ago, the famed New York venue run by a former marine and folk singer was ground zero for the punk and new wave scenes. Now the bands who played there are being celebrated on a 101-track...
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 26/02/2026
Just posted "Four questions agents can't answer: Software engineering after agents write the code" We're dedicating a lot of brain space to what coding agents can do, but it's equally important to consider what they won't accomplish for years to come. blog.marcua.net/2026/02/25/f...
A snippet from the introduction to the blog post:


Four questions agents can't answer

Software engineering after agents write the code

Feb 25, 2026

You’ve likely read countless words about how coding agents have massively changed software engineering. At the extreme, December 2025 was the turning point and we’re unlikely to write a line of code again. But amidst all this talk of change, it helps to understand what likely won’t.

I’m particularly interested in the questions agents can’t answer, doubly so if they are unlikely to answer them well in the coming years. Here are four such questions that blur the line between product management and software engineering. The questions reflect the fact that as coding agents cover more of the nitty-gritty of code generation, humans will be responsible for higher-level concerns. I think these questions will remain in the human domain for years to come:

    What should we work on?
    How much of it are we doing?
    How do we do it well?
    What’s getting in our way?

These questions are durable: we’ve encountered them since software engineering became a profession, and we’ll be responsible for them as long as we’re responsible for the products and systems we share with the world. The answers to these questions require judgment based on goals and constraints that are organization-specific, dynamic, and don’t live in some task management or issue tracking system you can integrate with. It’s hard to imagine an agent successfully synthesizing these disparate and context-specific inputs into answers.

What should we work on?

Companies tend to work at the intersection of what their users find valuable, what the business finds
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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
[new blog post] End of Productivity Theater muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/end-...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
End of Productivity Theater
I remember the early 2010s as the golden age of productivity hacking. Lifehacker, 37signals, and their ilk were everywhere, and it felt like...
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DuckDB @duckdb.org · 20/02/2026
🦆 ↔️ 🦀 DuckDB Labs is looking for a Rust engineer to join our team in Amsterdam. 📝 See the details and application page at duckdblabs.com/jobs/rust_en...
duckdblabs.com
Rust Engineer
DuckDB Labs provides services around the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system directly from its main developers.
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Tobias Müller @tobilg.com · 14/02/2026
Introducing polyglot - A Rust/Wasm SQL transpiler for more than 30 SQL dialects. It has 100% coverage for sqlglot‘s test fixtures. github.com/tobilg/polyg...
github.com
GitHub - tobilg/polyglot: Rust/Wasm-powered SQL transpiler
Rust/Wasm-powered SQL transpiler. Contribute to tobilg/polyglot development by creating an account on GitHub.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 09/02/2026
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
I'm scheduling speakers for NYC Systems 2026. Please DM or email me if you've got a staff/principal engineer or phd student who can come tell us something interesting about compiler / database / systems / infrastructure work! Schedule is on the site. nycsystems.xyz
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Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 05/02/2026
So much great advice in this thread!
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Ken Holstein @kenholstein.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!
 Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
anthropic.com
How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
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Adam Marcus @marcua.net · 28/01/2026
First blog post of the year! In "Claude Code and core dumps" I share how a coding agent helped me resolve a production incident. The agent parsed core dumps to track down a decade-old bug: someone had set a radio stream as their RSS feed! blog.marcua.net/2026/01/28/c...
blog.marcua.net
Claude Code and core dumps
It’s after dinner on the holidays and you’re on call when a production system alarm starts to go off. After doing some initial investigation, you find that the issue is not a common one you or your te...
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 29/01/2026
💔💔💔💔
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