TL;DR. If you only have five slots: Simon Willison (near-daily, ground truth on every model release [[1]]), Sebastian Raschka’s Ahead of AI (monthly architecture deep-dives, 150k+ readers [[2]][[19]]), Nathan Lambert’s Interconnects (1–3×/week on open models and post-training [[15]]), Gergely Orosz’s Pragmatic Engineer (weekly, original eng-org survey reporting, paid [[25]]), and Ben Thompson’s Stratechery (daily strategy lens, paid [[51]]). Add Hamel Husain for evals and applied AI [[8]], Marc Brooker for distributed systems [[31]], Zvi Mowshowitz for rapid model + policy synthesis [[17]], and Ethan Mollick for “what to do with the thing” [[18]]. Cap at 2–3 newsletters in your inbox; the rest belongs in an RSS reader [[76]]. Drop anything unopened for 30+ days [[75]].
Why the 2026 list looks different
Several canonical names have gone quiet. Don’t burn a subscription slot on a dormant site:
| Source | Status | Last public post |
|---|---|---|
| Lilian Weng — Lil’Log | ⚠ dormant | May 2025 [[3]] |
| Chip Huyen — huyenchip.com | ⚠ stalled | January 2025 [[4]] |
| Christopher Olah — colah.github.io | ⚠ dormant | 2021; output → Anthropic interpretability [[10]] |
| Jay Alammar — jalammar.github.io | ✗ frozen | Moved to Substack [[9]] |
| Adrian Colyer — the morning paper | ✗ dormant | Feb 2021 [[36]] |
| Cindy Sridharan — copyconstruct | ✗ dormant | 2021/2022 [[37]] |
| Dan Luu — danluu.com | ⚠ slowed | Oct 2024 (Patreon may post earlier) [[38]] |
| Charlie Guo — Artificial Ignorance | ✗ news roundups discontinued | Joined OpenAI Jan 2026 [[21]] |
| Sander Dieleman — sander.ai | ⚠ very infrequent | April 2025 [[14]] |
Meanwhile, output has consolidated around a smaller set of practitioner-writers — many of whom converge through Applied LLMs (applied-llms.org), the Pragmatic Engineer, and Latent Space [[41]][[25]][[42]]. An April 2026 third-party ranking of tech/AI blogs corroborates the shift, with 23 of the top 25 entries being single-author publications rather than multi-author/corporate ones [[13]].
1. Long-form AI/ML technical bloggers
Personal blogs, deep posts, individual author. Confirmed active in 2026.
| Author | Site | Cadence | Distinctive angle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simon Willison | simonwillison.net | Near-daily [[1]] | Hands-on tests of every new model the day it ships; “pelican on a bicycle” SVG benchmark; multiple posts per week through April 2026 |
| Sebastian Raschka | magazine.sebastianraschka.com | ~Monthly [[2]] | Visual architecture deep-dives — “A Visual Guide to Attention Variants in Modern LLMs” (Mar 2026), “Components of A Coding Agent” (Apr 2026) [[2]] |
| Andrej Karpathy | karpathy.github.io | Occasional [[7]] | Pedagogical: Feb 2026 “microgpt” — a 200-line dependency-free GPT trainer [[7]] |
| Eugene Yan | eugeneyan.com | Every 4–8 weeks [[5]] | 2–66 min essays on evals, RecSys, and senior-IC career; Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic as of 2026 [[5]][[28]] |
| Vicki Boykis | vickiboykis.com | ~Biweekly [[6]] | Mixes ML-infra (“Querying 3 billion vectors”, Feb 2026) with culture essays (“On Programming Joy and Octocat”) [[6]] |
| Hamel Husain | hamel.dev | Active 2026 [[8]] | Evals and applied AI engineering — “Evals Skills for Coding Agents” (Mar 2026), “The Revenge of the Data Scientist” (Mar 2026) [[8]] |
| Cameron R. Wolfe | cameronrwolfe.substack.com | Several times/week [[12]] | Deep (Learning) Focus — accessible research overviews to tens of thousands [[12]] |
| Finbarr Timbers | artfintel.com | Active [[11]] | Artificial Fintelligence — read by 5,000+ researchers at OpenAI, DeepMind, Midjourney, Google [[11]] |
2. AI/ML newsletter authors
Substack/email ecosystem; mostly solo authors. Subscriber counts are author-disclosed where available.
| Author | Newsletter | Cadence / Audience | Lens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nathan Lambert | Interconnects | 1–3×/week, 300+ posts; Ai2 post-training lead [[15]] | Open models, post-training, RLHF, frontier research |
| Jack Clark | Import AI | Weekly, ~70k readers [[16]] | Frontier-research synthesis; sharpened policy lens since Anthropic Institute launch (Mar 2026) [[66]] |
| Zvi Mowshowitz | Don’t Worry About the Vase | Weekly news rollups + multi-part model breakdowns (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7) [[17]] | Speed + long-term world-model building |
| Ethan Mollick | One Useful Thing | Active; Wharton [[18]] | “How do I actually use this?” — work, education, applied [[18]] |
| Sebastian Raschka | Ahead of AI | 150k+ subs [[19]] | LLM architecture rigour; pairs with the personal blog [[19]] |
| Eugene Yan | eugeneyan.com newsletter | 11.8k+ subs [[28]] | RecSys + LLMs from Anthropic [[28]] |
| Rohit Krishnan | Strange Loop Canon | ~Weekly [[20]] | AI × economics × innovation [[20]] |
| Simon Willison | simonw.substack.com | Mirrors weblog [[26]] | “State of LLMs” updates, agentic engineering patterns [[26]] |
| swyx + Alessio Fanelli | Latent Space | 10M+ cumulative readers/listeners through 2025; 2026 thesis = “coding agents breaking containment” [[24]][[42]] | The AI Engineer beat |
| Gergely Orosz | The Pragmatic Engineer | Weekly, $15/mo or $150/yr; #1 software/AI eng newsletter on Substack [[25]] | Original survey reporting on engineering orgs and AI’s effect on them |
| Azeem Azhar | Exponential View | 100k+ subs [[27]] | 3–5 yr horizon; 2026 thesis = AI-as-workforce, advantage to orchestrators [[54]] |
| The Batch (Andrew Ng / DeepLearning.AI) | deeplearning.ai/the-batch | Weekly team-run [[22]] | Industry + research roundup with Ng’s letter [[22]] |
| Ben’s Bites | bensbites.com | Daily, ~120k subs [[23]] | Builder/startup ecosystem [[23]] |
3. Long-form software-engineering bloggers
The non-AI core — systems, formal methods, career, observability. All confirmed active in 2026.
| Author | Site | Cadence | Distinctive angle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Julia Evans | jvns.ca | Steady [[29]] | Beginner-respecting deep posts on Unix/Git internals; March 2026 tcpdump+dig examples; January 2026 Git data-model series [[29]] |
| Marc Brooker | brooker.co.za | ~Every 2–3 weeks [[31]] | Distributed systems from AWS principal-eng vantage; “SFQ: Simple Stateless Stochastic Fairness” (Feb 2026), “Pass@k is Mostly Bunk” (Jan 2026) [[31]] |
| Hillel Wayne | Computer Things | Returned Jan 2026 [[30]] | Formal methods, software philosophy, exotic tooling [[30]] |
| Will Larson | lethain.com | Near-weekly [[33]] | Engineering leadership + how agents reshape staff-plus work — “Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks” (Apr 2026) [[33]] |
| Charity Majors | charity.wtf | Frequent [[34]] | Observability, SRE culture, management; “Bring Back Ops Pride” (Jan 2026) [[34]] |
| Brendan Gregg | brendangregg.com | Active [[32]] | Performance; joined OpenAI Feb 2026 to focus on ChatGPT performance [[32]] |
| Murat Demirbas | muratbuffalo.blogspot.com | Multiple posts/month [[35]] | Consensus, formal methods, databases, AI-for-systems benchmarks; deep BugBash’26 conference notes [[35]] |
Mostly talks, included for completeness: Kelsey Hightower has shifted from long-form posts to conference talks — at KubeCon Europe 2026 he framed the year’s lesson as “Everyone is a junior engineer when it comes to AI” [[39]].
4. Applied AI — the “builders’ cohort”
The writers an engineer actually shipping LLM features should read. Most converge through Applied LLMs and the Parlance Labs course network [[41]][[40]].
The original “What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs” essays were co-authored by Eugene Yan, Bryan Bischof, Charles Frye, Hamel Husain, Jason Liu and Shreya Shankar [[48]][[41]] — every name on that list runs a high-signal individual outlet:
| Author | Outlet | What they uniquely cover |
|---|---|---|
| Hamel Husain | hamel.dev + Parlance Labs | Evals, error analysis, LLM-as-judge methodology [[8]][[40]] |
| Shreya Shankar | sh-reya.com | Trustworthy LLM-as-judge research; O’Reilly Evals book ships Spring 2026 [[45]] |
| Eugene Yan | eugeneyan.com | RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX [[28]] |
| Jason Liu | jxnl.co + Maven RAG Playbook | RAG-in-production; Instructor (6M+ monthly downloads) [[43]][[44]] |
| Bryan Bischof | O’Reilly: Year of Building with LLMs | Head of AI at Hex (the Magic copilot); co-author of the year-of-building essays [[48]] |
| Charles Frye | Modal | GPU/infra; “What every AI engineer needs to know about GPUs” [[47]] |
Adjacent must-reads in this lens:
- swyx + Alessio Fanelli — Latent Space — the AI Engineer newsletter+podcast and AINews aggregator [[42]][[24]]
- Phillip Carter — Honeycomb — observability-driven development for LLMs; O’Reilly book on observability for LLMs [[46]]
- Hugo Bowne-Anderson — Vanishing Gradients — agents, evals, multimodal, data infra for builders [[49]]
- Dan Becker — Mastering LLMs course with Hamel Husain — 40+ hours organized around evals, RAG, fine-tuning, prompts [[50]]
- Simon Willison’s weekly Substack [[26]] — the highest-cadence hands-on commentator, fits this lens too
5. Strategy, business, and policy commentators
The “what does it mean” lens — split by sub-lens.
Tech-business strategy
| Author | Outlet | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Thompson | Stratechery | Paid; Daily Update + weekly Articles. 2026 essays apply Aggregation Theory to OpenAI/Anthropic — “Aggregators and AI”, “AI Power, Now and In 100 Years”, “AI and the Human Condition” [[51]][[52]] |
| Benedict Evans | ben-evans.com | Free, ~200k subs, ~50% open rate; sharply skeptic 2026 take that “OpenAI lacks moat, network effects or stickiness” [[55]][[56]] |
| Azeem Azhar | Exponential View [[53]] | 100k+ subs; 2026 = year AI feels less like tools, more like a workforce [[27]][[54]] |
Platform / policy reporting
- Casey Newton — Platformer — tone has visibly hardened toward urgency since 2024 (“Why I’m having trouble covering AI”) [[57]][[58]]
- Jack Clark — Import AI + Anthropic Institute (launched Mar 2026) [[66]]
- Helen Toner — CSET, Georgetown — interim Executive Director at CSET; go-to voice on China, evals, AI governance [[67]]
Macro / economist
- Tyler Cowen — Marginal Revolution — frequent short posts plus a 40,000-word AI-augmented book in March 2026 (“Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution”) [[61]][[62]]
- Noah Smith — Noahpinion — openly flipped on AI risk in 2026 (“Superintelligence is already here”, updated bioweapons concerns) [[63]][[64]]
Specialist lenses
- Matt Levine — Money Stuff (free, Bloomberg) — the financial-AI lens: AI-debt, data-center financing, capital flows around AI [[65]]
- Patrick McKenzie — Bits About Money + Complex Systems podcast — fintech-AI plumbing and the engineering economics of AI adoption [[68]]
- Dwarkesh Patel — Dwarkesh essays — pushing harder into written essays in 2026, with a blog prize for big AI questions [[59]][[60]]
- Thomas Ptacek — Fly.io — “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” marked his public flip; continues writing on agents and security [[70]]
- Matt Rickard — blog.matt-rickard.com — daily short-form strategy posts (“The Spec Layer”, “The Model is Not The Product”) [[69]]
- Karen Hao — karendhao.com — leading critical-journalism voice on OpenAI labor, water/power footprint, and AGI as marketing narrative; author of Empire of AI [[71]]
6. How to triage in 2026 — the heuristics
| Heuristic | Source |
|---|---|
| Cap inbox at 2–3 newsletters. One daily briefing + 1–2 weekly deep dives, role-matched. The rest belongs in RSS. | [[76]] |
| RSS reader for everything else. RSS adoption was up 34% YoY in 2026; Substack hit 8.4M paid subs (+68%). Engineer-curated 2026 lists treat the presence of an RSS feed plus an OPML export as a hard prerequisite for a serious source. | [[74]] [[77]] |
| Named author > corporate blog. HN engineers explicitly favour decade-plus individual bloggers (Julia Evans, Rachel by the Bay, Simon Willison, Bartosz Ciechanowski) over corporate posts. | [[72]] |
| No RSS feed = marketing-led. “If the blog doesn’t have RSS, you know they’re probably made from marketers with no input from engineering.” | [[72]] |
| Read the archive, not the latest issue. Archive depth is the load-bearing quality signal — five years of consistent posts > one viral hit. | [[77]] |
| Drop after 30 days unopened. The KonMari-style rubric — drop anything unopened 30+ days, duplicating social media, or off your current goals. Surveys find only 24% of received email is actually important. | [[75]] |
| Open rate is dead as a quality signal. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates ~75% of opens. Trust your own click-throughs and “did I learn something” gut check instead. | [[74]] |
| The slop test. “AI slop” was a 2026 word-of-the-year [[78]]; HN banned AI-generated and AI-edited comments outright [[79]]; DoubleVerify documented a 200-site “AutoBait” LLM content-farm network in March 2026 [[80]]. Detection of formulaic LLM patterns is now a one-strike unsubscribe trigger. | [[78]] [[79]] [[80]] |
| River, not inbox. Current’s Terry Godier: “Email’s unread count means something specific… but when we applied that same visual language to RSS, we imported the anxiety without the cause.” | [[73]] |
| Re-evaluate inherited heuristics. Marc Brooker’s much-shared March 2026 post: many engineering rules are now wrong post-LLM; humility + active re-evaluation applies to your subscription stack too. | [[81]] |
Starter packs by reader type
Decisions, not options. Pick one. Add later if you’re under-fed.
The frontier-research follower (5 slots). Simon Willison [[1]] · Sebastian Raschka [[2]] · Nathan Lambert [[15]] · Jack Clark [[16]] · Cameron R. Wolfe [[12]].
The shipping-engineer (5 slots). Hamel Husain [[8]] · Eugene Yan [[28]] · Jason Liu [[43]] · Latent Space [[42]] · Phillip Carter / Honeycomb [[46]].
The eng-leader / staff+ (5 slots). Pragmatic Engineer (paid) [[25]] · Will Larson [[33]] · Charity Majors [[34]] · Marc Brooker [[31]] · Julia Evans [[29]].
The strategist / exec (5 slots). Stratechery (paid) [[51]] · Benedict Evans [[55]] · Exponential View [[27]] · Platformer [[57]] · Matt Levine’s Money Stuff [[65]].
The “I want one big thinker who’ll have a take on everything” (1 slot). Zvi Mowshowitz, Don’t Worry About the Vase [[17]] — speed-premium short-term updates plus long-term world-model building, in one feed.
What this list isn’t
It’s a 2026 working list, not a permanent record. Half the names will look different in 12 months: Charlie Guo went from independent to OpenAI inside a quarter [[21]]; Brendan Gregg moved from Intel to OpenAI in February [[32]]; Hillel Wayne returned after a hiatus [[30]]; Adrian Colyer hasn’t [[36]]. Re-run the list when an author’s incentives change or their cadence breaks. The point of an explicit reading stack isn’t permanence — it’s that you stop drift-subscribing and stop guilt-reading. Run a 30-day audit; cut what’s not earning its slot [[75]].