Rachel Thomas

At the same time, many AI education approaches exacerbate the tyranny of metrics: doubling down on trying to quantify everything, working only with discrete decomposable units, or discounting the value of human relationships. 10/

Too many people romanticize the past and the experience of analog school. Getting kids off screens isn’t going to improve their lives– particularly if they only read dull passages in basel textbooks or are endlessly drilled on detached tasks. 9/

Will tutoring change school forever? "There are just too many kids who aren't getting where they need to go," says researcher Liz Cohen

“Students across all grade levels are really hungry for meaningful adult relationships. A lot of them love their teachers but can’t get the level of attention they want from them. This is not the teacher’s fault; this is the system that we created.” 8/ hollykorbey.substack.com/p/will-tutor...

Reliance on metrics is a fundamental challenge for AI Optimizing metrics is a central aspect of most current artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, yet overemphasizing metrics leads to manipulation, short-termism, and other negative consequences. This ...

AI is often too effective at optimizing metrics. It amps up Goodhart's Law even more, leading to a range of unfortunate consequences. 7/

www.cell.com/patterns/ful...

When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. This is Goodhart’s Law. 6/

sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law

Teaching Australia – Gabbie Stroud I AM THIRTY-EIGHT and tired. I’m only a third of the way through my class roll, a list that hurts my heart if I study it for too long. But I know what to do with these students. I’m an excellent teach...

An Australian (now former) teacher: "I’m rarely required to ‘teach’ anymore. Apparently I’m more valuable as an assessor, an examiner, a data collector. I have had to dull my once-engaging lesson sequences... It is mechanical and rigid and driven.” 5/

griffithreview.com/articles/tea...

I grew up in the birthplace of high-stakes testing: 1990s Texas under Gov George W. Bush.

I saw the precursor to No Child Left Behind: art, music, & gym classes cancelled so students could spend more time drilling tedious multiple choice worksheets. 4/

The number of 9 year olds who read for fun almost daily declined from 53% (in 2012) to 39% in 2022.

Atomized reading “skills” are taught without sparking a love of reading. The part is less than the whole. 3/ @karenvaites.bsky.social

Why have books disappeared from many ELA curricula? Some curricula have no books – and strangely, key curriculum influencers don’t seem to care.

For the most popular ELA curriculums in the USA, 3rd-6th graders go the entire year without reading a whole novel.

Reading has been reduced to a discrete set of tasks: decoding words, summarizing, making inferences, identifying main ideas. 2/

curriculuminsightproject.substack.com/p/why-have-b...

fast.ai - I Don’t Want a Learning Dashboard for My Child What analog and AI education both get wrong

Often debates about education are framed as non-tech versus AI approaches, but too often, AI ed tech just magnifies the same failures of traditional school. 1/

My latest post:
www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...

Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai Sinister variations on the positive state of flow

I revisited the work of Csikszentmihalyi on flow and of researchers studying gambling addiction to better understand how ~vibe coding~ impacts us. Read more in my latest post:

www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0... 11/

AI coding agents produce syntactically correct code. However, they don’t produce useful layers of abstraction nor meaningful modularization. They don’t value conciseness or improving organization in a large code base. We have automated coding, but not software engineering. 10/

Part of the appeal of vibe coding is extrapolation about how effective it will be in the future (including its ability to manage ever increasing complexity). But the tech industry has a long history of overpromising & overhyping products. 9/

Dario Amodei said 90% of all code would be AI-written by Sept 2025.
Sundar Pichai & Jeff Dean said everyone would use neural architecture search by 2023.
Geoffrey Hinton said AI would replace radiologists by 2021.
None of these came true. Would you bet your career on tech ceo predictions? 8/

I work at an AI company, and we use AI every day. AI is useful! However, we approach vibe coding with caution and have seen that much can go wrong. Don't completely abandon the development of your current skillset. 7/

With dark flow we lose our ability to accurately assess our productivity levels & work quality. When developers used AI tools, they estimated that they were working 20% faster, yet in reality they worked 19% slower. Study from
@metr.org 6/

Dark Flow, Depression and Multiline Slot Machine Play Mike J Dixon 1,2, Madison Stange 1,2,✉, Chanel J Larche 1,2, Candice Graydon 1,2, Jonathan A Fugelsang 1,2, Kevin A Harrigan 2 Author information Article notes Copyright and License information PMCID: PMC5846824 PMID: 28589480 Abstract Multiline slot machines allow for a unique outcome type referred to as a loss disguised as a win (LDW). An LDW occurs when a player gains credits on a spin, but fewer credits than their original wager (e.g. 15-cent gain on a 20-cent wager). These outcomes alter the gambler’s play experience by providing frequent, albeit smaller, credit gains throughout a playing session that are in fact net losses. Despite this negative overall value, research has shown that players physiologically respond to LDWs as if they are wins, not losses. These outcomes also create a “smoother” experience for the player that seems to promote a highly absorbing, flow-like state that we have called “dark flow”.

Not all highly absorbed focus is flow. Researchers on gambling addiction have coined the term “dark flow”. In a 2014 interview, Csikszentmihalyi defined a concept of "junk flow". 5/

Vibe coding & gambling violate several characteristics needed for true flow:
- lack clear clues on how well you are performing (both provide misleading losses disguised as wins)
- match between challenge level and skill level is murky
- false sense of control 4/

When coding, many of us experience a state of flow: full absorption & energized focus. One's skills are adequate to cope with challenges, in a rule-bound system that provides clear clues on performance

On the surface, vibe coding seems to induce a similar flow. However... 3/

“When [I first got] hooked on Claude, I did not sleep. I spent two months excessively prompting the thing & wasting tokens. I ended up building & building & creating a ton of tools I did not end up using much...”
Armin Ronacher described his experience of "agent psychosis" 2/

Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai Sinister variations on the positive state of flow

Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of complex AI-generated code. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much code must be AI-generated... yet results are far from what was promised 1/

www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...

Thank you 🙏

I had great experiences with close reading as part of this course last fall and using the solveit platform (though you can do it with other platforms, just maybe not as easily. ;-))

It is early days of building the tools for close reading with an LLM. Hopefully, the above ideas & videos provide inspiration of how LLMs can help you go even deeper in your reading! 5/

To retain new information as you read, spaced repetition learning is a useful technique. Create Anki flashcards within an LLM reading dialog. These sync to the same Anki deck you use on your phone & desktop. 4/

answerdotai.github.io/fastanki/

YouTube video by Jeremy Howard How to Actually Understand Dense Machine Learning Papers - Solveit free lesson

Jonno reads an academic ML paper with an LLM.

He sets up context and asks for explanations. Tools allow him to explore the source code repo from within the LLM environment. He then builds a simple demo to develop intuition. 3/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5ak...

YouTube video by Jeremy Howard The Best Way to Read a Book (That Nobody's Doing)

Using an LLM, @howard.fm reads Eric Ries's new book. He sets up necessary context & creates handoff notes to maintain continuity across chapters. Jeremy follows rabbit holes, seeks counterexamples, & asks how the book's principles apply to his own startup. 2/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIqL...

How To Use AI for the Ancient Art of Close Reading – fast.ai Experiments in reading with LLMs

Close reading is a technique for careful analysis of a piece of writing, practiced by many ancient cultures, major religions, & academic scholars. The latest fastai course experimented with using AI to go deeper when reading. 1/

www.fast.ai/posts/2026-0...

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Viruses are weirder, worse, & more preventable than you realise an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

Viruses are weirder, worse, & more preventable than you realize Rachel Thomas PhD rachel.fast.ai/posts/2023-0... @math-rachel.bsky.social

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

A great blog post by @math-rachel.bsky.social on this preprint describing failures of an ML approach for gene annotation:
rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"how challenging (or even impossible) it can be to evaluate AI claims in work outside our own area of expertise"