Joshua

CTO @ Encamp
jmoyers@gmail.com

Can Agents Help Analyze Chess Openings?

Posted on January 04, 2026

Your browser does not support the video tag. I built a research project this weekend at the intersection of chess and frontier models. Not to play chess - agents and LLMs are getting eerily competent at that - but to explore whether they can help you understand openings, themes, attacking plans, and positional concepts through an interactive coaching interface. The core idea: build an agent harness with access to all the tools a chess player uses when studying. Stockfish [2] for deep analysis. The Masters...

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Thoughts on Karpathy's 2025 LLM Year in Review

Posted on December 21, 2025

Andrej Karpathy posted an incredible 2025 LLM Year in Review. It is a totally salient take (obviously, he's brilliant!) and mirrors a lot of my experiences in the trenches. I have a slightly different take on a point or two below. âȘŒ Like Karpathy, I believe there is a ton of value for the application layer above LLMs. I think the model providers are making a generally useful brain, but its frozen in a moment and for now at least, we need prompt and context engineering, specialized tools, and verification for...

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Foxes and Hedgehogs

Posted on August 08, 2025

There are people in the industry and perhaps in your organization that have a lot of context. They have good judgment, they have reasonable design sense, they know a lot about your product, the market fit, the ideal customer profile. They understand the competitive landscape - who the different players are, what they're doing, where the opportunities lie. And on top of all that, they may also be high-end software developers. Recently, I was watching an interview with Terence Tao [1], who's an Australian-American...

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Throughput, Reconsidered

Posted on July 05, 2025

I want to talk about a genuinely surprising personal engineering breakthrough I've experienced. Over the past 3 days, I challenged myself to experiment with a true AI-native development workflow based on the advancements I've observed over the last few months. I chose Cursor Ultra, Warp, superwhisper, Claude 4 Opus and a few other capable models for different purposes, and focused on creating the most comfortable and fluid experience possible. I'll provide my background so you can decide if this is relevant to...

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Hands on the Wheel

Posted on June 14, 2025

I see so many people online questioning their pursuit of hard science or skills like software development in a post-LLM world. I want to share some thoughts on why I believe this concern, while understandable, misses the bigger picture.

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