LessWrong posts by zvi

Claude Opus 4.6 and agent swarms were announced yesterday. That's some big upgrades for Claude Code.

OpenAI, the competition, offered us GPT-5.3-Codex, and this week gave us an app form of Codex that already has a million active users.

That's all very exciting, and next week is going to be about covering that.

This post is about all the cool things that happened before that, which we will be building upon now that capabilities have further advanced. This if from Before Times.

Almost all of it still applies. I haven’t had much chance yet to work with Opus 4.6, but as far as I can tell you should mostly keep on doing what you were doing before that switch, only everything will work better. Maybe get a bit more ambitious. Agent swarms might be more of a technique shifter, but we need to give that some time.

Table of Contents


Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False.

Inflection Point.

Welcome To The Takeoff.

Huh, Upgrades.

Todos Become Tasks.

I’m Putting Together A Team.

Compact Problems.

Code Yourself A [...]
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Outline:
(01:04) Claude Code and Cowork Offer Mundane Utility
(04:21) The Efficient Market Hypothesis Is False
(07:51) Inflection Point
(11:40) Welcome To The Takeoff
(12:04) Huh, Upgrades
(16:51) Todos Become Tasks
(18:36) I'm Putting Together A Team
(21:00) Compact Problems
(21:49) Code Yourself A Date
(25:20) Verification and Generation Are Distinct Skills
(27:11) Skilling Up
(36:44) AskUserQuestion
(37:14) For Advanced Players
(39:33) So They Quit Reading
(40:07) Reciprocity Is The Key To Every Relationship
(44:19) The Implementation Gap
(47:57) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

February 6th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iwX2aJPKtyKAbLdip/claude-code-4-from-the-before-times

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Remember OpenClaw and Moltbook?

One might say they already seem a little quaint. So earlier-this-week.

That's the internet having an absurdly short attention span, rather than those events not being important. They were definitely important.

They were also early. It is not quite time for AI social networks or fully unleashed autonomous AI agents. The security issues have not been sorted out, and reliability and efficiency aren’t quite there.

There's two types of reactions to that. The wrong one is ‘oh it is all hype.’

The right one is ‘we’ll get back to this in a few months.’

Other highlights of the week include reactions to Dario Amodei's essay The Adolescence of Technology. The essay was trying to do many things for many people. In some ways it did a good job. In other ways, especially when discussing existential risks and those more concerned than Dario, it let us down.

Everyone excited for the Super Bowl?

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. Piloting on the surface of Mars.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Judgment humans trust.

Huh, Upgrades. OpenAI Codex has an app. AI [...]
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Outline:
(01:13) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(03:45) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(04:20) Huh, Upgrades
(06:13) They Got Served, They Served Back, Now It's On
(15:15) On Your Marks
(18:42) Get My Agent On The Line
(19:57) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(23:14) Copyright Confrontation
(23:47) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(24:24) Unprompted Attention
(24:36) Get Involved
(28:12) Introducing
(28:40) State of AI Report 2026
(36:18) In Other AI News
(40:45) Autonomous Killer Robots
(42:11) Show Me the Money
(44:46) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
(47:58) Quiet Speculations
(48:54) Seb Krier Says Seb Krier Things
(58:07) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(58:24) Chip City
(01:02:39) The Week in Audio
(01:03:00) The Adolescence of Technology
(01:03:49) I Won't Stand To Be Disparaged
(01:08:31) Constitutional Conversation
(01:10:04) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:13:51) Don't Panic
(01:16:23) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:17:41) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:18:48) The Lighter Side
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First published:

February 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AMLLKDzjohCNbrA6t/ai-154-claw-your-way-to-the-top

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I had to delay this a little bit, but the results are in and Kimi K2.5 is pretty good.

Table of Contents


Official Introduction.

On Your Marks.

Positive Reactions.

Skeptical Reactions.

Kimi Product Accounts.

Agent Swarm.

Who Are You?

Export Controls Are Working.

Where Are You Going?

Safety Not Even Third.

It's A Good Model, Sir.

Official Introduction

Introducing Kimi K2.5,

Kimi.ai: Meet Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual Agentic Intelligence.

Global SOTA on Agentic Benchmarks: HLE full set (50.2%), BrowseComp (74.9%)

Open-source SOTA on Vision and Coding: MMMU Pro (78.5%), VideoMMMU (86.6%), SWE-bench Verified (76.8%)

Code with Taste: turn chats, images & videos into aesthetic websites with expressive motion.

Agent Swarm (Beta): self-directed agents working in parallel, at scale. Up to 100 sub-agents, 1,500 tool calls, 4.5× faster compared with single-agent setup.

K2.5 is now live on

http://kimi.com

in chat mode and agent mode.

K2.5 Agent Swarm in beta for high-tier users.

For production-grade coding, you can pair K2.5 with Kimi Code.

–

API here. Tech blog here. Weights and code here.

Wu Haoning (Kimi): We [...]

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Outline:
(00:16) Official Introduction
(03:16) On Your Marks
(06:10) Positive Reactions
(08:33) Skeptical Reactions
(11:05) Kimi Product Accounts
(11:39) Agent Swarm
(13:06) Who Are You?
(15:48) Export Controls Are Working
(16:24) Where Are You Going?
(19:47) Safety Not Even Third
(20:55) It's A Good Model, Sir
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First published:

February 4th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/omSudRiFDvtNRrxZS/kimi-k2-5

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First we must covered Moltbook. Now we can double back and cover OpenClaw.

Do you want a generally impowered, initiative-taking AI agent that has access to your various accounts and communicates and does things on your behalf?

That depends on how well, safely, reliably and cheaply it works.

It's not ready for prime time, especially on the safety side. That may not last for long.

It's definitely ready for tinkering, learning and having fun, if you are careful not to give it access to anything you would not want to lose.

Table of Contents


Introducing Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw.

Stop Or You’ll Shoot.

One Simple Rule.

Flirting With Personal Disaster.

Flirting With Other Kinds Of Disaster.

Don’t Outsource Without A Reason.

OpenClaw Online.

The Price Is Not Right.

The Call Is Coming From Inside The House.

The Everything Agent Versus The Particular Agent.

Claw Your Way To The Top.

Introducing Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw

Many are kicking it up a notch or two.

That notch beyond Clade Code was initially called Clawdbot. You hand over a computer and access [...]
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Outline:
(00:43) Introducing Clawdbot Moltbot OpenClaw
(02:02) Stop Or You'll Shoot
(06:05) One Simple Rule
(08:49) Flirting With Personal Disaster
(15:50) Flirting With Other Kinds Of Disaster
(16:58) Don't Outsource Without A Reason
(19:07) OpenClaw Online
(22:10) The Price Is Not Right
(24:06) The Call Is Coming From Inside The House
(25:40) The Everything Agent Versus The Particular Agent
(27:31) Claw Your Way To The Top
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First published:

February 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aQKBMEvTj3Heidoir/unless-that-claw-is-the-famous-openclaw

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Moltbook is a public social network for AI agents modeled after Reddit. It was named after a new agent framework that was briefly called Moltbot, was originally Clawdbot and is now OpenClaw. I’ll double back to cover the framework soon.

Scott Alexander wrote two extended tours of things going on there. If you want a tour of ‘what types of things you can see in Moltbook’ this is the place to go, I don’t want to be duplicative so a lot of what he covers won’t be covered here.

At least briefly Moltbook was, as Simon Willison called it, the most interesting place on the internet.

Andrej Karpathy: What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People's Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw ) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

sure maybe I am “overhyping” what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I’m pretty sure.

Ross Douthat: I think you should spend some time on moltbook.com today.

Today's mood.

Would not go [...]
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Outline:
(05:12) What Is Real? How Do You Define Real?
(05:58) I Don't Really Know What You Were Expecting
(09:08) Social Media Goes Downhill Over Time
(10:45) I Don't Know Who Needs To Hear This But
(14:33) Watch What Happens
(19:22) Don't Watch What Happens
(27:20) Watch What Didn't Happen
(32:06) Pulling The Plug
(39:10) Give Me That New Time Religion
(41:34) This Time Is Different
(42:18) People Catch Up With Events
(48:51) What Could We Do About This?
(52:52) Just Think Of The Potential
(56:24) The Lighter Side
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First published:

February 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y66jnvmyJ4AFE4Z5h/welcome-to-moltbook

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