The retreat for curious programmers.
Brooklyn, NY
- Tweets 3,404
- Following 403
- Followers 29,426
- Likes 2,221
Pinned Tweet
After 15 years it felt like it was about time to make a video.
Do you remember what you were doing 15 years ago today? I couldn't forget if I tried.
It was the day before the very first Recurse Center batch, and three of the nine people who were supposed to be in the batch had just dropped out. My cofounders and I were starting to worry if anyone was actually going to show up for our odd experiment.
Thankfully, six people did show, and our trial batch went better than we'd hoped: It was the first thing we'd built that people loved. And over the past 15 years, it gradually became our life's work.
To celebrate, we made a video that gives a rare look inside the @RecurseCenter: what it's like, how it works, and the impact it has on people.
Please enjoy, and consider sharing it with others.
5
27
4,432
RC alum Sarah Friend @isthisanart_ made FEED, a browser game where you play as an AI scraper. Are you archiving? Are you destroying? Is it delicious?
1
2
13
956
Check out FEED and a great selection of other work for Rhizome’s 30th:
websiteswebsiteswebsites.net…
2
129
Nolen's done it again 🃞
I made multiplayer Windows 98 Solitaire.
It's called Solitaire Alone Together. You can play together, with the whole internet, but you can't chat or talk.
solitairealonetogether.com
1
9
953
Today at RC, working on sorting algorithms with Jev:
Working on two new frontier sorting algorithms at the @recursecenter: Introducing jev-first-search and jev* (a thread)
18
1,943
Recurse Center retweeted
Another great answer to, "what do people do at the @RecurseCenter?"
Did you know tiny models are capable of out-planning a database?
I trained a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres. Write-up below 👇
1
13
1,121
Patrick Thill experimented with vibecoding for the first time and created a new constructed language that was intended to be a) not Eurocentric and b) easy to learn for anyone, regardless of their first language. And that was just one of the many cool projects he worked on during his 12 weeks at RC.
2
8
980
Recurse Center retweeted
How much could you get done in 12 weeks if you were free to follow your curiosity and work on whatever you want?
I get to see firsthand lots of people answer this question for themselves at the @RecurseCenter.
Case in point, this delightful post by Patrick, who just finished his batch. From fractals and Voronoi diagrams to reverse engineering games, writing a small programming language, implementing the DEFLATE algorithm, and diving deep into modern LLMs and agents, it turns out you can do a lot in 12 weeks.
thill.me/2026/09/11/what-i-d…
2
12
368
Recurse Center retweeted
If the @RecurseCenter is a gym for becoming a better programmer, reading books (or watching online classes) at RC is like a trainer showing you how to exercise: occasionally helpful or even necessary to get started, but if it's all you do at the gym, you won't get stronger. And it's an easy trap to fall into, since it's so much easier to watch someone else work out than to do it yourself.
So how should people spend their time at RC?
• Show up and write code every day
• Program with other people
• Follow your curiosity
• Go deep on at least one thing
• Build stuff you care about
• Give presentations about your work
• Be rigorously playful (or playfully rigorous)
Also, have fun. Twelve weeks goes by quickly.
2
17
704
Apps are siloed and rigid. How can we make personal tools instead?
@geoffreylitt walks through Embark and other dynamic document projects as models for personal software.
1
3
17
1,179
This talk is the latest in Localhost, a series of public technical talks given by members of the Recurse Center community.
Watch the full talk:
piped.video/MccJdr61xnc
1
4
512
We love seeing our alums contribute to fully open scientific research.
Wouldn't it be great if you could watch a frontier model training run in real time? As of this week, you can.
All the big labs are training models right now, but none of us can see the details. When they finish, they'll publish their benchmarks and write some marketing blog posts, but they won't share the model weights, details of the training, or anything close to what you'd need to understand or replicate any of their work.
The open weight labs are slightly better: they write more detailed reports and share their weights. But they rarely share the infrastructure or software they train with or the problems they ran into along the way, and whatever they share is after the fact.
Enter the Marin, a 535 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model that began a three-month training run this week. Unlike all the other big models, this one is fully open, and not just open weights and open source software. The entire training and development process is happening in the open, right now, on 18 trillion tokens of data. All the work and discussion on the project is being done publicly, too.
Marin is a collaborative project built by researchers at Open Athena, a non-profit research lab, and Stanford's Center for Research on Foundation Models.
Check out the code, discussion, and live run dashboard here: marin.community
(Fun fact: Open Athena's VP of Engineering is a @RecurseCenter alum, as are a few other engineers on the team!)
1
14
1,549
🌸 Recurser Jagi Natarajan made Phyllotaxis, an audio-reactive sculpture that now lives in the RC hub.
1
5
25
1,384
🍂 We are still accepting applications for the Fall 2 Batch through the (soft) deadline of September 7!
Come join other curious programmers in learning and building what excites you.
Apply: recurse.com/apply
2
5
18
1,684
Fall 2 runs from Sep 21st - Dec 11th
The Fall 2 half-batch runs from Sep 21st - Oct 30 🎃
Learn more about RC:
recurse.com/
5
333
Recurse Center retweeted
Three takeaways from @geoffreylitt's excellent talk, or how to take a rabbit hole seriously: Optimize for interesting. Find community. Try different types of organizational structures.
The talk was officially titled "Dynamic Documents as Personal Software," but Geoffrey said its unofficial title was "Taking a rabbit hole seriously," because it also chronicled the curious path his career has taken, which he sees as one long rabbit hole he's been going down since coming to the @RecurseCenter in 2018.
Here are the things Geoffrey shared that had an outsized impact on his career and helped him build a life filled with meaningful work:
1. Optimize for interesting. Don't just take the more lucrative or prestigious path; follow your curiosity, and consider going off the beaten path. Do things that are a bit weird. E.g., Geoffrey chose to submit his side project to a niche academic workshop, and later to leave his tech job to work at an independent research lab.
2. Find community. Seek out people who can give you substantive feedback, expose you to new ideas, and nerd out deeply on the things you're interested in.
3. Try different types of organizational structures. There are more types of organizations than you think there are! Look for interesting ones, think about what each one provides you, and consider inventing a new one if you can't find one that bundles the right set of things. Sampling a variety like Geoffrey has (small startups, RC, Ink & Switch, MIT, Notion) helps you learn the benefits and tradeoffs each offers.
We'll be posting the video from the talk online in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
3
7
1,685
Thanks for the excellent talk last night, @geoffreylitt! It was wonderful to have you back at RC.
Three takeaways from @geoffreylitt's excellent talk, or how to take a rabbit hole seriously: Optimize for interesting. Find community. Try different types of organizational structures.
The talk was officially titled "Dynamic Documents as Personal Software," but Geoffrey said its unofficial title was "Taking a rabbit hole seriously," because it also chronicled the curious path his career has taken, which he sees as one long rabbit hole he's been going down since coming to the @RecurseCenter in 2018.
Here are the things Geoffrey shared that had an outsized impact on his career and helped him build a life filled with meaningful work:
1. Optimize for interesting. Don't just take the more lucrative or prestigious path; follow your curiosity, and consider going off the beaten path. Do things that are a bit weird. E.g., Geoffrey chose to submit his side project to a niche academic workshop, and later to leave his tech job to work at an independent research lab.
2. Find community. Seek out people who can give you substantive feedback, expose you to new ideas, and nerd out deeply on the things you're interested in.
3. Try different types of organizational structures. There are more types of organizations than you think there are! Look for interesting ones, think about what each one provides you, and consider inventing a new one if you can't find one that bundles the right set of things. Sampling a variety like Geoffrey has (small startups, RC, Ink & Switch, MIT, Notion) helps you learn the benefits and tradeoffs each offers.
We'll be posting the video from the talk online in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
3
1,104
Recurse Center retweeted
giving a talk tomorrow evening at recurse center in nyc!
luma.com/rc-dynamic
7
7
85
4,389