The retreat for curious programmers.
Brooklyn, NY
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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.
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How might we explore paper and tangible materials, diff explainers, and new practices to understand our code in modern programming? Agents might enable us to interact with our code in surprisingly retro ways.
Localhost is a series of public technical talks in NYC given by members of the Recurse Center community.
🔗 Watch Geoffrey Litt’s full talk, Dynamic Documents as Personal Software:
piped.video/watch?v=MccJdr61…
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Recurse Center retweeted
Phyllotaxis is the arrangement of leaves or seeds in plants, like the interlocking spirals in a sunflower’s seed head.
Jagi Natarajan recreated that pattern in code, then built it with 89 LEDs inside 3D-printed cells, covered with translucent mulberry paper.
A microphone listens to the room, turning the music into waves of light across the display.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
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Can automating an MMO teach us about multi-agent systems?
On October 14th, @maxbittker will present RuneScape Bench: MMOs for Agents.
RS-sdk is a 2026 project to turn an open source implementation of the game, LostCity, into a testbed for new experiments. Its results have implications in many areas: design libraries for coding agents, evals, LLM post-training, game design, simulated economics, and even the future of multi-agent systems, when agents are tasked with trading and trusting one another in a shared world.
RSVP below:
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Localhost is a public series of technical talks in NYC given by members of the Recurse Center community.
RSVP:
luma.com/runebench
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Geoffrey goes over this and many other aspects of his work in this talk, Dynamic Documents as Personal Software:
piped.video/watch?v=MccJdr61…
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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?
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Check out FEED and a great selection of other work for Rhizome’s 30th:
websiteswebsiteswebsites.net…
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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
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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)
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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 👇
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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.
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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…
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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.
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