Ben Whitfield-Heap 🔄

Introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, it's a big jump over Argon which we released just 2 weeks ago. Gemini 4 Carbon is SOTA on cyber, long horizon tasks, ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis V5, significantly improves on usability in domains like coding, and is more aligned.

codebases have always contained slop. we have always been okay with this because code rarely needs to be perfect, outside of mission critical "hard" (eg embedded) software. swe is a unique form of engineering because you're often building something that constantly evolves and is almost organic - user tastes change, your mental models evolve, and features come and go. admittedly, i and many others who've been coding for a long time were initially (like back in 2024) skeptical that agents would write production code. "but what about all the slop that would enter our beautiful codebase?". well, even before, we had human slop, and there was a lot of it! if we're being truthful, most people call "code i didn't write" slop. the reality is that 99% of people (i include myself in that number) don't even know what Good Code looks like, let alone be capable of writing it. i would propose that Good Code is: • correct • bug free • fast and cost efficient to run it has always been exceedingly difficult and expensive to write truly Good Code, because for the longest time (maybe @bendlang will change that), code was not something you could cheaply and formally guarantee to have all 3 of these properties. this is why writing hard software is much more difficult and expensive, because depending on the use case, you may only get one chance and so you have to be right from the start. but the vast majority of software we use does not need to be Good Code to provide value to users. in fact, it is very likely that most software we use is not formally verifiable! we accepted some bugs in exchange for velocity and progress, so we rely on tests and o11y instead and have adopted a more incremental approach. this is a good thing! agents help us move faster, and if you're open to the idea, are capable of helping us write better code. it won't be Good Code (that is still expensive), but it is likely to be much better on average at scale. the new craft of swe is to figure out how to do this. it's your job now! if your productivity with and without agents is not significantly different, you're doing something wrong. but it's not too late to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to learn a whole new skill tree

Let's try run Windows XP inside this tweet, tap to open pieter.com/xp/x

If you tried T3 Code before and didn’t like it, we’d love for you to give it another shot. I highly recommend the nightly version, has a ton of polish and new capability

Announcing Gemini 4 Argon, our new frontier model. Argon is built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows and delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense. We’re also expanding the model’s output token limit to an industry-leading 1M tokens. Argon is currently rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders in the Fairwind Program, with broader availability as soon as possible.