Modern Descartes - Essays by Brian Lee

Originally posted 2026-06-24 Tagged: llms Since Opus 4.5 came out last November, my daily driving experience with coding agents feels like it’s stagnated.

Originally posted 2026-05-12 Tagged: llms, popular ⭐️ Does it make sense to hire junior engineers in the age of coding agents?

Originally posted 2026-03-23 Tagged: llms, strategy, software engineering, popular ⭐️ Does it ever make sense to rewrite your codebase from scratch?

Originally posted 2026-03-06 Tagged: llms This hot take on Moltbook which I started writing a month ago, is pretty lukewarm now - work ramp-up has kept me pretty busy.

Originally posted 2026-01-07 Tagged: personal, llms Reflecting on this past year, I feel grateful and lucky for everything that’s happened to me, both personally and professionally.

Originally posted 2025-12-23 Tagged: personal About two months ago, I wound down my startup and started a job search.

Originally posted 2025-12-22 Tagged: software engineering, strategy, machine learning, popular ⭐️ In my recent job search for an ML/AI engineering position, I talked to ~15 companies, made it to onsites for ~10 companies and received 7 offers.

Originally posted 2025-11-03 Tagged: personal, cartesian tutor, strategy 6 months ago, I started building Cartesian Tutor to explore AI tutors as the future of education.

Originally posted 2025-10-12 Tagged: llms, software engineering, popular ⭐️ For the last 6 months, I’ve been building an AI-powered tutor for teaching advanced chemistry.

Originally posted 2025-09-24 Tagged: cartesian tutor, llms Progress update This week, I worked on building a “Review problem with AI” function that would import any question on my website into an AI for an AI-guided interactive solve experience.