Lists — Renaissance.Engineer

Creator of Claude Code. Author of Programming TypeScript. Thinks deeply about the evolution of coding from punchcards to conversational interfaces, and what it means for a tool to truly understand your intent.

@bcherny borischerny.com

Linus Lee

Independent researcher at the intersection of AI interpretability and creative tools. Has built over 100 side projects and written half a million words exploring what it means to expand the domain of thoughts humans can think. Just as synthesizers decomposed music into waveforms, he’s building instruments for navigating latent space.

@thesephist thesephist.com

Patricia Mou

Community builder addressing the loneliness and meaning crisis. Co-founded The Commons, a “metaphysical speakeasy” in San Francisco dedicated to co-created play and collective flourishing. Harvard GSD student rethinking from first principles how to build the spaces Americans actually need.

@patriciamou_ patriciamou.com The Commons

Thought leaders worth following On X / Twitter

Really smart people on Twitter. Known for substantive, deeply considered posts — not just popularity. Writers, researchers, and builders whose feeds reward your attention.

Andy Matuschak — Independent researcher on tools for thought, memory augmentation, and mnemonic media. Previously R&D at Khan Academy and iOS at Apple. TOOLS FOR THOUGHT

Maggie Appleton — Designer creating illustrated essays on programming, anthropology, and the concept of digital gardens as an alternative to feeds. VISUAL THINKING

Simon Sarris — Essayist and craftsman writing beautifully on making things by hand, bottom-up living, architecture, and sacred attention to craft. CRAFT & CULTURE

Henrik Karlsson — Swedish essayist behind “Escaping Flatland.” Deeply personal, rigorously researched work on childhood, agency, and what produces exceptional people. ESSAYS

Visakan Veerasamy — Self-described “friendly ambitious nerd” weaving a 15-year public second brain on creativity, friendship networks, and the art of being interesting. CREATIVITY

Agnes Callard — Philosopher at the University of Chicago. Author of Aspiration. Brings genuine philosophical rigor to everyday questions in The New Yorker and Boston Review. PHILOSOPHY

L.M. Sacasas — Independent scholar writing “The Convivial Society” — one of the most penetrating critics of technology’s social and moral consequences. TECH CRITICISM

Byrne Hobart — Writer of “The Diff.” Cross-disciplinary analysis connecting financial structures, historical patterns, and technological change with extraordinary depth. FINANCE & SYSTEMS

Venkatesh Rao — Writer behind Ribbonfarm, author of Tempo. Dense, original frameworks for understanding organizations, technology, and culture. SYSTEMS THINKING

Dan Luu — Engineer whose blog is legendary for meticulously researched, myth-busting posts on performance, systems, and industry practices. Actually measures things others only assert. ENGINEERING

Cedric Chin — Writer behind Commoncog, focused on the science of expertise and tacit knowledge. Bridges academic research on skill acquisition with real-world operator experience. EXPERTISE

Andrej Karpathy — Founding member of OpenAI, former Sr. Director of AI at Tesla. Teaches neural networks with rare clarity — his YouTube lectures and Twitter threads make deep learning genuinely accessible. AI & DEEP LEARNING

Alex Smith — Math PhD and chief content architect at MathAcademy. Spent seven years mapping the math genome — writes brilliantly on knowledge graphs, learning theory, and mathematical structure. MATHEMATICS

Tools

Tools for thinking, building, and creating across disciplines.

FlowTools.directory — A meta-list of tools for thought, knowledge management, and creative workflows. Maintained collaboratively. META-LIST

Dynamicland — Bret Victor’s communal computing lab. Computation leaves screens and enters physical, shared space. COMPUTING

IdeaFlow — Knowledge graph notebook that augments intelligence as you think. Notes that become thinking partners. KNOWLEDGE

Are.na — Visual bookmarking and research tool for connecting ideas. The thinking person’s Pinterest. RESEARCH

Readings

Essays, books, and deep dives that shaped how we think about building across boundaries.

IdeaFlow Background — Jacob Cole’s curated reading list on knowledge tools, augmenting intelligence, and the history of tools for thought. GUIDE

Inventing on Principle — Bret Victor’s foundational talk. Creators need an immediate connection to what they create. TALK

Age of Entanglement — Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity — mapping the four domains (Science, Engineering, Design, Art) and the flows between them. ESSAY

Transformative Tools for Thought — Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen on what it would take to build media as transformative as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. ESSAY

Why Books Don’t Work — Andy Matuschak on why transmissionist media fails and what might replace it. ESSAY

Home-Cooked Software — Maggie Appleton on the coming golden age of personal software by non-professional engineers. ESSAY

Pace Layering — Stewart Brand on how complex systems learn. Fashion moves fast, nature moves slow. One of the most cited frameworks in systems thinking. ESSAY

Childhoods of Exceptional People — Henrik Karlsson on the environments that produced original thinkers. Tutored 1-on-1, surrounded by talented adults, enormous unstructured time. ESSAY

Adjacent communities

Other spaces where cross-disciplinary builders gather.

The SF Commons — Patricia Mou’s “fourth place” in Hayes Valley, SF. A space for meaning-making, embodied pluralism, and non-dogmatic ritual. SPACE

Long Now Foundation — Fostering long-term thinking. The 10,000-year clock, the Rosetta Project, and seminars about long-term responsibility. FOUNDATION

Interdependence — A literary-hacker community reimagining digital futures through collective authorship. Co-signed by Daanish Shabbir and others. COLLECTIVE

Curated lists