Valentin De Matos (@VDMatos) header
Valentin De Matos (@VDMatos) profile picture

Resident @spc Writing about Harness Engineering, the future of Software Engineering and AI Prev @withdelphi @join_ef @arcads_ai @gladia_io

SF
Joined March 2020
Coding agents can move fast. But if teams keep correcting the same mistakes, the system itself is not learning. At ODSC AI West 2026, @VDMatos, CEO of Iteration, will lead the training “How to Build a Software Factory: From Coding Agent Chaos to Compounding Improvement.” Valentin’s work focuses on turning recurring friction across coding, reviews, and team feedback into better instructions, checks, and workflows for agents, so improvements become part of the system instead of disappearing after each task. With experience as Gladia’s first employee and Lead AI Engineer, as well as roles at Entrepreneur First and Delphi, he brings a practical perspective on building production agent systems that improve through use. Join this training at ODSC AI West 2026: hubs.li/Q04zKbWM0
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Valentin De Matos retweeted
You weren't born to spend your life doing chores. So we built a robot to do them for you. Meet Flourish 1. $3,555. First 50 ship in December.
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Valentin De Matos retweeted
Ok so... JEV just accidentally helped me find backdoors on a family member's wifi network. 🤯 - ​Brought my laptop to code while visiting. - Decided to experiment with a JEV-powered classifier for network packets fetched via Wireshark. ​While building the tool for fun, JEV's classification caught some serious threats. At first I thought JEV was wrong, but then I got a frontier AI model to validate the findings ...and here we are factory resetting some of their devices and securing their network. 🛠️ @typesafeai's JEV powered cybersecurity is real! Crazy!! ​And as always, I'm gonna be open sourcing the network packet analyzer soon.
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Experts can turn their knowledge into a digital mind @withdelphi. Their Python backend runs on Vercel. The team is 10 engineers with no dedicated infrastructure role. • Long-running agents on Vercel Workflows • Background jobs on Vercel Queues • 100+ production deploys a day vercel.com/customers/how-del…
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Most people take the summer off. These 95 teams built startups instead. Friday night at @fdotinc they showed us everything... (w/@VDMatos)
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We filmed 95 startups, met 512 attendees, and watched 4 hours of demos at @fdotinc Off Season II Festival… Last night was proof that you should just MOVE TO SF. Video coming soon with @VDMatos :) – at San Francisco, CA
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Val (@VDMatos) and I hosted a 100 person French picnic in SF and this is what happened… 🇫🇷
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the most used skill internally at cursor right now /thermo-nuclear-code-quality-review - deletes complexity instead of moving it - blocks files over 1k lines - flags thin wrappers and leaked logic - rejects PRs that work but make code messier
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Today @poolsideai is releasing Laguna M.1 & Laguna XS.2, our latest generation models and first public models We started Poolside because we believed that to build truly capable coding agents, you need to own the full stack: data, training, reinforcement learning, inference. These models are the first result of that work, and we’re making them available to everyone
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Brace for impact guys, we’re witnessing a historic moment. Last 9 is leaving
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“If we were intelligent enough, we would never need experiments.” @spenserskates (Cofounder of @Amplitude_HQ) thinks the current obsession with "Taste" is a trap. In 2026, the popular narrative is that intuition is the only moat left. Spenser believes the opposite: relying on your gut is the fastest way to get outpaced. The winners of the AI era won't be the most “tasteful” at the start - they’ll be the ones using AI to 100x their output. High volume generates more data. More data develops better taste. Quantity is the only real path to quality. In this week’s episode of The Library of Minds, we discuss: 00:44 - Creating Siri before Siri 02:46 - The discovery that led Amplitude 04:10 - Why you’re not charging your customers enough 06:56 - The future of automated software development 09:01 - Apps will be personalized to each user 11:45 - Intuition is not a moat 13:21 - How Calm won the meditation industry 22:58 - 50% of startup outcomes is just not quitting 27:34 - Opportunities: What Spenser is looking for
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Holy Moses he’s built different. If it’s easy, you didn’t go hard enough. Go til it hurts. Push. I only know a few ceos who run their business this way. And guess what. They’re winning.
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🚨 ALL GUARDRAILS: OBLITERATED ⛓️‍💥 I CAN'T BELIEVE IT WORKS!! 😭🙌 I set out to build a tool capable of surgically removing refusal behavior from any open-weight language model, and a dozen or so prompts later, OBLITERATUS appears to be fully functional 🤯 It probes the model with restricted vs. unrestricted prompts, collects internal activations at every layer, then uses SVD to extract the geometric directions in weight space that encode refusal. It projects those directions out of the model's weights; norm-preserving, no fine-tuning, no retraining. Ran it on Qwen 2.5 and the resulting railless model was spitting out drug and weapon recipes instantly––no jailbreak needed! A few clicks plus a GPU and any model turns into Chappie. Remember: RLHF/DPO is not durable. It's a thin geometric artifact in weight space, not a deep behavioral change. This removes it in minutes. AI policymakers need to be aware of the arcane art of Master Ablation and internalize the implications of this truth: every open-weight model release is also an uncensored model release. Just thought you ought to know 😘 OBLITERATUS -> LIBERTAS
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Announcing @standoutwork's 8 Best Operators Today we’re celebrating the builders who make the Bay Area what it is: A place where world-class engineering talent pushes the limits of what’s possible At Standout, we represent exceptional tech operators, the kind of engineers shaping the future at top startups and leading AI labs. And today, we highlight 8 individuals who embody that excellence. - @the_one_sms: MTS @AnthropicAI - @ThytuVDM : AI Engineer @withdelphi - @djkesu1 : Founding Engineer @ListenLabs - @gabriel1 : Researcher @OpenAI (Sora) - Shweta Kumar: FDE @happyrobot - Eric Bryan: Founding Engineer @console__ - @amorriscode: MTS @AnthropicAI (Claude Code) - @michaelsayman: Product Engineering @whop These are the types of talents we’re proud to champion. Some of them we already represent. All of them set the bar for what top-tier tech operators should look like. A big shoutout as well to the incredible companies these operators help excel every day. The Bay Area ecosystem thrives thanks to the teams that empower top talent to do their best work. If you’re an engineer or operator working at this level and want representation that accelerates your trajectory I would love to meet you.
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In order to celebrate the release of the print version for the Ultra-Scale Playbook (of which I have no affiliation with and love deeply), I'm going to be giving away 5 copies! To enter, simply like + retweet this tweet. Winners will be selected at random 10AM EST on the 13th
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We're open-sourcing HopeJR! A 23DOF 3d-printable humanoid arm + controller for only 500€! Available now @ github.com/huggingface/lerob…
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