Who to Learn From
The fastest way to get better is to watch people who are visibly good at it and steal their patterns. This is the watchlist behind the Pattern Library — ranked by practical signal density (concrete wisdom you can apply tomorrow).
Tier 1 — Core (track everything)
Section titled “Tier 1 — Core (track everything)”| Name | Where | Distinctive contribution | Best single piece |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simon Willison | simonwillison.net · @simonw | The most prolific, reliably-practical chronicler of LLM tooling | Agentic Coding |
| Armin Ronacher | lucumr.pocoo.org · @mitsuhiko | Flask creator → the most-cited agentic-coding methodologist | Agentic Coding Recommendations |
| Geoffrey Huntley | ghuntley.com · @GeoffreyHuntley | Originator of the Ralph / agent-loop pattern | Ralph Wiggum as a software engineer |
| Peter Steinberger | steipete.me · @steipete | Curates the field’s best “essential reading” roundups | Just Talk To It |
| Thorsten Ball | registerspill · @thorstenball | Demystified agent internals for a generation | How to Build an Agent |
Tier 2 — High-value
Section titled “Tier 2 — High-value”| Name | Where | Distinctive contribution | Best single piece |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shawn “swyx” Wang | latent.space · @swyx | Coined “AI Engineer”; runs the field’s trend radar | The Rise of the AI Engineer |
| Mitchell Hashimoto | mitchellh.com · @mitchellh | ”Always have an agent doing something”; turn mistakes into lint rules | Ghostty & His Agentic Workflow |
| Steve Yegge | @Steve_Yegge | Big-picture labor/skill-shift essays | Revenge of the Junior Developer |
| Hamel Husain | hamel.dev · @HamelHusain | The definitive practical voice on LLM evals / error analysis | Your AI Product Needs Evals |
| Boris Cherny | howborisusesclaudecode.com · @bcherny | Created Claude Code; the source on how it’s meant to be used | How Boris Uses Claude Code |
| Cat Wu | @_catwu | ”Delegate to it like an engineer, don’t pair-program” | How Anthropic’s product team moves faster |
| Thariq Shihipar | thariq.io · @trq212 | Best voice on general-agent (non-code) workflows + skills | Claude Code is All You Need |
Tier 3 — Specialist / emerging
Section titled “Tier 3 — Specialist / emerging”Sid Bidasaria (sidb.io) · Mario Zechner (@badlogicgames) · Jeremy Howard (@jeremyphoward, the llms.txt standard) · Orta Therox (@orta) · Kenton Varda (@KentonVarda) · Eric Provencher (@pvncher, Repo Prompt).
How to track them
Section titled “How to track them”X has no feed, but almost everything else does. Make open feeds the backbone:
- RSS / Atom — most of the blogs above publish a feed (Simon Willison’s
atom/everything/, Armin’sfeed.atom, Substacks via/feed). This is the highest-signal, most stable layer. - GitHub releases — append
releases.atomto a repo URL to follow ships. - Hacker News — keyword feeds via
hnrss.org(e.g.?q=Claude+Code&points=50) catch posts even when you miss the blog. - Newsletters — Latent Space, Register Spill, Simon’s, Hamel’s.
- X — build one list of the handles above; there’s no native feed, so this is the one surface that needs a scraper.