#VibeClawding Building AI agents for myself | Learning in public | Build To Learn, Learn To Build
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Joined June 2009
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vishalsachdev retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
vishalsachdev retweeted
Microducks are trying too hard to impress @JensenHuang...
vishalsachdev retweeted
Hi, we're Threadlocked, a small collective of young researchers and hackers scattered across India and APAC.
We're sick of watching an entire generation mistake salary packages and credentials for the pursuit of computer science itself.
We're looking for curious hackers and researchers who still dare to take the road less traveled by treating computing as a craft.
We grew up in obscure corners of the Internet and learnt from strangers who encouraged our curiosity, shared their knowledge and even helped us access resources we couldn't afford. Somewhere along the way, we found our people. Now that we're in a position to do the same for others, we'd like to return the favor.
If any of these feel familiar we’d love to hear from you.
vishalsachdev retweeted
What is going on?! Remember when this was the most successful robot launch ever?
Yesterday we sold EVEN MORE Microducks!!!
We sold over $2,500,000 worth of Microducks in the first 24 hours. Is this one of the most successful robot launches in history?
Insane achievement by @antoinepirrone and the team!
vishalsachdev retweeted
Jensen closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with this Hermes Agent demo as the finale.
He introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, so he installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt.
Then he used Hermes, running on @nvidia RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for the @huggingface Microduck. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT-6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton, and Isaac Lab. Hermes trained thousands of simulated ducks on that course until the validated policy was ready to run on the real robot in the physical world.
At Nous, we believe open source is a practical tool as much as a philosophical ideal. It gives users the ability to build powerful, complex workflows chaining numerous local+cloud models, devices, and tools themselves instead of waiting for a company to enable them.
vishalsachdev retweeted
So, @etherealmachine has made its own 5-axis CnC machines from scratch in India. Quite remarkable, really. We got the exclusive look at their factory
vishalsachdev retweeted
I'm seeing a lot of euphoria about how Opus 5.5 is good at TLA+, and this means that all software will soon be formally verified. As a person who loves TLA+ so much he wrote a book on it, I want to throw a particular cold shower on people's enthusiasm by talking about the limits of what you can actually verified with it.
The high level simplification is that TLA+ sees a system as a set of "behaviors", or possible sequences of states. For example, the pseudocode "pick a random number from 1-3 and decrement it to 1" has three behaviors: `{3 -> 2 -> 1, 2 -> 1, 1}`. From here, there are two basic kinds of TLA+ properties:
- `[]P` means that `P` is true in *all states* of *every behavior*.
- `<>P` means that `P` is true in *at least one state* of *every behavior*.
`[]P` is immediately useful as an **invariant**, or something that always be true of your system. This is things like "your data is never corrupt" or "there's always at least one server online." `<>P` is a little more abstract, but for technical math reasons I won't get into here, can be stacked with `[]` to create really complex and useful properties. `<>[]P` represents things like "the algorithm eventually converges on the right answer", `[]<>P` things like "if two data stores desync, they will eventually resync", and `[](P => <>Q)` things like "If a message is put on the queue, it's eventually processed by a worker".
Really cool stuff!
These primitives were chosen to make a wide array of properties useful. And if we're clever, we can do all sorts of more complex properties, like bounded time constraints and history properties. But we're always constrained to 1) define a logical formula 2) over individual behaviors, and 3) check that all behaviors satisfy that formula.
So some things that we *cannot* express in TLA+:
- Possibility and reachability properties: that it's always possible to *make* P true, even if you don't actually decide to. Things like "I can always shut down the computer" or "A user can always change their password". These can't be expressed with `<>P` because that's "for all behaviors, P happens at least once", we actually want "for all behavior prefixes, there is at least one behavior where P happens at least once".
- Hyperproperties: properties that are defined over two or more traces. These are things like "painting a car red doesn't make it faster" or "users cannot infer secret data by observing public data". We can't do these because TLA+ only looks at one behavior at a time.
- Statistical properties: 95% latency is 1ms. Impossible because most of these are hyperproperties.
- Properties about if a system is robust against code changes. Impossible because, uh, you have new behaviors now.
Some of these are solvable in different logical formalisms. CTL can do reachability, PRISM can do statistical properties, etc. Those have their own tradeoffs and limitations, though, and no system can do everything. Others are solvable with a lot of cleverness tailored to the specific spec, like lifting a model into a hypermodel. But these are insanely inefficient and make your "clever spec" diverge significantly from the real world system, so introduce a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong.
The core problem, though, is (1): properties are logical formula. If we don't know how to express a system property as a logical formula, we can't verify it. 99% of the properties we care about fall under this. The information on the site is easy for a user to find. Our LLMs behave as we expect them to. Our application can't be used to break the law. TLA+ (and Quint and Lean and Rocq) are near-useless here, no matter how clever you are.
Don't get me wrong: `[]P` and `<>P` represent a huge range of useful properties and TLA+ is incredible at finding awful concurrency bugs. But there's a lot it fundamentally can't do and we shouldn't believe that it will solve all our worries about software bugs. And the same goes for all other formal verification languages, too.
vishalsachdev retweeted
This is brilliant. opusfived.dev
vishalsachdev retweeted
Live action with real robots instead of animation: episode 3!
This was the very first take. Pretty much everything went wrong and I almost stopped filming. Then I realized Microduck was giving an Oscar-winning performance.
Enjoy!
vishalsachdev retweeted
A personal note and then off to work:
@dhh I want to thank you for your unhinged enthusiasm. It's truly infectious. Watching you share your vision for Omarchy with hope and optimism and passion has been a breath of fresh air. Even your handling of the doubters. Positive, undeterred, open.
It's prompted me to reflect on what it is that I want to do that I can get this excited for. I've been reminded of a time when I was similarly stoked and undeterred.
Your passion has created a space of permission for others to have a similarly unhinged enthusiasm.
As much as Rails and Omarchy will be massive pieces of your legacy, I hope that people will also remember you for your enthusiasm and undeterred passion. It's so much easier to be stoked than to be cynical. There are always problems to solve. Such is life. And the fun really.
The celebration of what is good, what is possible, now that, that is an attitude worth adopting.
We can fix everything.
vishalsachdev retweeted
Omarchy is blowing up. I've never been involved with anything in my career that has grown this fast. With Ruby on Rails, we had years to build solid institutions, teams, and relationships. With Omarchy, we've been forced to figure it all out in twelve days. It's exhausting, but also incredibly exciting.
It was never sustainable with just Ryan and me running everything. That's how it was, more or less, up until Quattro. Lots of other contributors, but all the responsibility was on us to make sure the ship stayed afloat, the servers didn't crash, and fixes got pushed out quickly.
Now it's time to build a proper institution. Durable, resilient, and competent. That's what we're doing here on Basecamp now. I'm spinning up teams for every facet of responsible distro management, and I'm getting an absolute outpouring of interest for all of them. Everyone wants to be part of this. We're winning hearts, minds, and volunteers at an astounding rate. Great! We need all of it to succeed.
Because make no mistake: There are many people who'd love to see this rocket blow up before it reaches the moon. Aggrieved Linux users who don't like the sudden attention their exclusive hobby has received. Competing Linux distributions that are seeing our numbers explode. Mac stans who've sunk their identity into an apple. And, of course, any of the haters I've picked up in my quarter-century career speaking bluntly on the internet.
They're not going to succeed. Because we've already become unstoppable. There's too much momentum, too much money, and too much support now backing this effort. We're living the Mandate From Heaven meme at the moment. And we are here to fulfill the prophecy: The Year of Linux on the Desktop!
That has been a joke for two decades. But by the end of the year, nobody at Apple or Microsoft is going to be laughing. They're going to be scrambling. Because neither of these proud organizations currently has any method to counter the speed, vision, or ambition with which we're going to accelerate into the future of personal computing.
This is the moment. This is the opening. This is our chance.
For thirty years, we've been subject to one OS overlord or another. Dictating how we compute. Choking off competitors through platform malfeasance. Tollboothing the distribution. That ends now. Because Linux is going to win. And Linux is free. As in beer, speech, and source.
But just because it's inevitable doesn't mean it's going to be easy. We have a lot of work in front of us if we actually want to make our mark. But there's never been a better time for this kind of delusional ambition. The age of agents is the unlocking factor. It sounds like a LinkedIn slogan, but it's true. Where the application of tokens goes, the innovation follows.
We can fix everything.
Let's do it together.
Let's go.
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This is what I sent to the dozens of new volunteers who've signed up for teams within the new Omarchy organization yesterday. But we might as well broadcast our mission and intentions to the world too.
vishalsachdev retweeted
I have an older Mitsubishi ceiling-cassette HVAC unit controlled by an unreliable infrared remote.
Last week I took a photo of the unit and the remote and asked Codex for a solution.
It suggested I order a BroadLink RM4 Mini for $25 on Amazon.
I plugged in the device and then Codex set it up, reverse engineered the IR commands from the existing remote and built a local web app to control the temperature.
vishalsachdev retweeted
Polish prodigy Marcin Patrzalek has been accused of faking his playing. His response is worth a couple of minutes of your day.
vishalsachdev retweeted
Satya Nadella says LinkedIn merged four job titles, product manager, designer, front-end engineer and back-end engineer, into one:
"I'll give you at LinkedIn, we used to have product managers, we had designers, we had front-end engineers, and then we had back-end engineers and so on."
"So what we did is we sort of took those first four roles and combined them. In fact, increased scope and said, they're all full-stack builders."
"So at the same time, as you can imagine, if we're to build an AI product today, there's a complete new workflow, right? It starts with evals, right?"
"So basically, there's this eval to science, to infrastructure."
"And so evals are done by these full-stack builders and what have you and product managers in the new form, the infrastructure is built by the systems engineers at the back-end because they support the science that supports the product."
"So in some sense, there's a new loop and you have to structurally change."
LinkedIn has already put this into hiring. Its Associate Product Manager program is finished, and the replacement, the Associate Product Builder track, teaches code, design and product management at the same time.
Evals sit at the front of that workflow rather than the end, so writing them is now part of building the product instead of a check before shipping.
- Satya Nadella (@satyanadella), Chairman and CEO of Microsoft (@microsoft), with the All-In Podcast (@theallinpod) at USA House, Davos 2026.
vishalsachdev retweeted
Lost my phone at the office and spent 30 minutes turning the place over. Find My was disabled by MDM.
Out of ideas, I asked Claude how I could find it. It suggested tracking the Bluetooth signal strength, then wrote me a meter in about a minute.
I walked around watching the number climb. Found it.
Apparently you can just make the tool you need now.
Code: github.com/ben-z/findphone