Lance's Blog

2025 ended with Meta buying Manus for over $2b and Claude Code reaching a $1B run rate.

Lance Martin Humans refine their skills and learn preferences through experience.

Lance Martin Why Context Engineering Earlier this week, I had a webinar with Manus co-founder and CSO Yichao “Peak” Ji.

Lance Martin The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.

Lance Martin TL;DR Agents need context to perform tasks.

@rlancemartin The AI Engineering World’s fair took place last week in San Francisco.

@rlancemartin Summary I compared Cursor and Claude Code on a set of coding challenges, giving them access to external documentation in 4 different ways: an llm.txt file (with and without optimized descriptions), a vector database, and direct context stuff…

I recently grabbed all crime data captured by the SFPD Crime Incident Reporting system, which is available through SF open data.

iPython notebooks for data hacking Several notebooks that collate tools/notes for data hacking in one place: CS229 (Machine Learning), an excellent Stanford course taught by Andrew Ng.

Data to develop new drugs In the late 19th century, pathogen-immune serum was first used as a treatment against infectious disease.