Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic. However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories. Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.” Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished. I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas. For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time. Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna. In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph. Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it. In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force. It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.” Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity. The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims. Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs. According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals. Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.” Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics. Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.” And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023. Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship. All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public. If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals. Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.” Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values. And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner). In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule). Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell). Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish. The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude? Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally. These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists? The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain. Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics. In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.” In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police. Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations. Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives. El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only. Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.

# Useful but Little-Known Features of Claude Agent SDK 🌍 Grant your agent access to files outside the working directory with the additionalDirectories option. Essential for monorepos, shared libraries, and any project spanning multiple directory trees. 📌 Title: Granting Access Beyond the Working Directory 🔗 URL: 🧩 Overview `additionalDirectories` is a `query()` option that allows agents to access paths outside the working directory (cwd). By default, agents can only operate on files within cwd. When you specify additional directories, the agent gains read/write access to files in those paths as well. In `acceptEdits` permission mode, edits within additional directories are also auto-approved. This is especially useful for monorepo packages, shared libraries, or cross-project workflows. 🛠 Usage Pass `add_dirs` (TypeScript: `additionalDirectories`) in the query options. ```python from claude_agent_sdk import query, ClaudeAgentOptions, ResultMessage # Grant access to multiple monorepo packages async for message in query( prompt="Update the shared utility functions and fix the imports in the web app", options=ClaudeAgentOptions( add_dirs=[ "/path/to/monorepo/packages/shared-utils", "/path/to/monorepo/packages/web-app", ], permission_mode="acceptEdits", # Auto-approve edits in additional dirs too allowed_tools=["Read", "Edit", "Write", "Grep", "Glob"], ), ): if isinstance(message, ResultMessage) and message.subtype == "success": print(message.result) # Access a shared library alongside the main project async for message in query( prompt="Check the shared library API and update our integration code", options=ClaudeAgentOptions( add_dirs=[ "/path/to/shared-library", ], allowed_tools=["Read", "Edit", "Grep", "Glob"], ), ): if isinstance(message, ResultMessage) and message.subtype == "success": print(message.result) ``` 🏗 Integration into Production Systems - In monorepo setups, list related package paths in `add_dirs` to enable cross-package changes with dependency awareness - Combined with `acceptEdits` mode, file edits (Edit, Write) and filesystem operations (mkdir, rm, mv, cp) in additional directories are auto-approved - Writes to protected paths still prompt even when included in additional directories 💡 Use Cases 📦 Monorepo development: modify shared packages and individual apps simultaneously 📚 Shared library reference: read external library source to verify correct API usage while coding 🔧 Centralized config management: access and update configuration directories outside the project ⚠️ Caveats - Access to paths outside both cwd and additional directories remains blocked or prompted - `bypassPermissions` mode approves all paths regardless of `add_dirs` settings - This expands the agent's security boundary — specify only the minimum necessary paths - `acceptEdits` auto-approval is scoped to cwd and additional directories only ✨ additionalDirectories enables agents to work seamlessly across multiple directory trees, making cross-project and monorepo workflows practical. #ClaudeAgentSDK# #AIAgent#

Don't learn formal methods. Writing proofs by hand is what kept formal methods niche for over 75 years. seL4 took about 20 person-years to prove 8,700 lines of C. Agents take that part now. What's left for you is the spec, and knowing which language fits the job. That's why the history matters. Formal methods means stating what a program or system must do in precise math, then using a tool to check that the code or design meets it. Here's how we got here, what each language is good for, and where I'd start. FOUNDATIONS (1947 to 1979) 1947: Goldstine and von Neumann annotate program flow diagrams with "assertion boxes" stating what holds at each point. 1949: Alan Turing's "Checking a Large Routine" proves a short program correct using assertions. The idea mostly sits unused for over a decade. 1962: Carl Adam Petri's dissertation introduces Petri nets for modeling concurrent systems. 1963: John McCarthy, "A Basis for a Mathematical Theory of Computation". 1966-67: Peter Naur and Robert Floyd independently show how to prove programs with assertions attached to points in the code. 1967: N. G. de Bruijn starts Automath, the first language for computer-checked mathematical proofs. 1969: Tony Hoare publishes Hoare logic, {P} C {Q}. Nearly every contract language since builds on it. 1972: Robin Milner's Stanford LCF. Its Edinburgh successor (1979) introduces ML as its scripting language, the ancestor of Standard ML, OCaml and F#. 1973: Mizar starts in Poland. Formalized math that reads close to a textbook. 1975: Dijkstra's guarded commands and weakest preconditions. 1977: Amir Pnueli brings temporal logic to programs. Patrick and Radhia Cousot publish abstract interpretation, the theory behind sound static analyzers. 1978: Hoare's CSP for concurrent processes. Milner's CCS (1980) and the pi-calculus (1992) follow. 1970s: VDM at IBM's Vienna lab. Jean-Raymond Abrial proposes Z, later developed at Oxford. Boyer and Moore build their theorem prover. TOOLS PEOPLE USED (1980 to 1999) 1981-82: Model checking, invented independently by Clarke and Emerson and by Queille and Sifakis. Turing Award in 2007. 1980s: Synchronous languages Esterel and Lustre in France. Lustre becomes SCADE, which Airbus uses to design flight control software. 1984: Nuprl at Cornell. 1985: Coquand and Huet's Calculus of Constructions, the logic under Coq. 1986: Isabelle (Larry Paulson). Late 1980s: SPARK, a provable subset of Ada. 1988: HOL (Mike Gordon). 1989: Coq's first public release. Renamed Rocq in 2025. 1990: Symbolic model checking with BDDs handles 10^20 states. McMillan's SMV follows. 1991: SPIN model checker goes public (Gerard Holzmann, Bell Labs). 1992: PVS at SRI. Oxford and IBM win the Queen's Award for using Z on IBM's CICS transaction system. 1993: Metamath, a proof language simple enough to check with a few hundred lines of code. 1994: Lamport's TLA. TLA+ follows in 1999. 1994-95: Intel's Pentium division bug costs it $475 million. AMD uses ACL2, Kaufmann and Moore's successor to the Boyer-Moore prover, to prove its K5 floating-point division correct. Intel hires John Harrison in 1998 and uses his HOL Light to verify floating-point algorithms. 1996: Abrial's B-Book. 1997: Alloy (Daniel Jackson, MIT). 1998: Paris Metro line 14 opens driverless, with safety software built in the B method. The KeY project for Java verification starts. 1999: Agda (Catarina Coquand). JML, a contract language for Java. VERIFIERS MEET REAL CODE (2000 to 2019) 2000: Microsoft's SLAM project starts. It ships as the Static Driver Verifier in the Windows driver kit. 2001-02: Separation logic (Reynolds, O'Hearn, Yang) makes pointer-heavy code provable. 2002: ESC/Java. Spec# (2004) and the Boogie verifier (2005) follow at Microsoft Research. 2003: Astrée proves the Airbus A340's primary flight control software free of run-time errors. 2004: CBMC, bounded model checking for C. 2005: Georges Gonthier finishes a Coq proof of the four color theorem. 2006: CompCert, a C compiler proved correct in Coq (Xavier Leroy). Event-B gets its Rodin toolset around the same time. 2007: Agda 2. Idris first appears (Edwin Brady). 2008: Z3 SMT solver (Microsoft Research). Frama-C. VeriFast. 2009: Dafny (Rustan Leino). seL4, the first general-purpose OS kernel with a machine-checked proof that its C code matches its spec. 2010: Why3. 2011: F*. 2012: A Coq proof of the Feit-Thompson odd order theorem is completed. 2013: Lean (Leonardo de Moura, Microsoft Research). P language at Microsoft. 2014: CakeML, a verified ML compiler. Liquid Haskell. Flyspeck finishes a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture. 2014-15: AWS reports TLA+ found bugs in S3 and DynamoDB that testing missed. IronFleet proves distributed systems correct in Dafny. 2015: Iris, a separation logic framework in Coq. Facebook open-sources Infer. 2016: Project Everest starts, aiming for a verified HTTPS stack. Viper. 2017: HACL*, verified crypto written in F*, ships in Firefox 57. Lean's mathlib starts. 2018: AWS Zelkova checks IAM and S3 policies with SMT solvers. 2019: Fiat Cryptography's Coq-generated code lands in BoringSSL, used by Chrome. Prusti for Rust. LLMS MEET PROOF CHECKERS (2020 to 2025) 2020: OpenAI's GPT-f finds shorter Metamath proofs that get accepted into the main library, a first for deep learning. 2021: Lean 4. 2022: Kani (AWS) and Creusot for Rust. Aeneas translates Rust into Lean. The Liquid Tensor Experiment finishes the Lean proof Peter Scholze asked for. 2023: Verus for Rust. AWS releases Cedar, a policy language built with proofs in Dafny and later Lean. LeanDojo gives models a programmatic interface to Lean. Terence Tao's team formalizes the PFR conjecture proof in Lean in three weeks. July 2024: DeepMind's AlphaProof reaches IMO silver-medal standard with proofs in Lean. Sept 2024: Quint 1.0, TLA+ ideas with ordinary programming syntax. Mar 2025: Imandra launches CodeLogician, an agent that turns code into its IML logic and checks it. Apr 2025: AWS publishes how it rewrote its authorization engine, called a billion times per second, in Dafny with proofs. July 2025: Harmonic's Aristotle reaches IMO gold-medal level with formal Lean proofs. Sept 2025: The vericoding benchmark tests LLMs writing verified code from 12,504 specs. Off-the-shelf models pass 82% in Dafny, 44% in Verus, 27% in Lean. LANGUAGES BUILT FOR AGENTS (2026) Feb 22, 2026: Vera. "A programming language designed for LLMs to write, not humans." Feb 25, 2026: Vow. "A Programming Language for Agentic Coding." Mar 9, 2026: Kōdo. "Designed for AI agents to write." Z3-checked contracts, JSON errors with patches. Sept 17, 2026: Bend 2. Dependent types and Lean-style proofs, C-like speed, CPU and GPU parallelism, Python-like syntax. WHAT EACH LANGUAGE IS GOOD FOR Specs and models Z: precise requirements docs. Little tooling today. VDM, B, Event-B: refining a spec step by step into code. Railways and safety-critical control. CSP (with the FDR checker): concurrent protocols. Petri nets: workflows and concurrent processes. TLA+ and Quint: distributed system designs, consensus, race conditions before you write code. Checks the design, not the code. Alloy: fast counterexamples in data models and access rules. Bounded, so finding no counterexample isn't a proof. P: modeling and testing event-driven distributed services at AWS and Microsoft. Model checkers SPIN: concurrency protocols, as abstract models. NuSMV and other SMV descendants: hardware and finite-state control logic. CBMC: bounded checking of C code. Kani: bounded checking of Rust, including unsafe code. Static analysis Astrée: proving embedded C has no run-time errors. Avionics. Static Driver Verifier: Windows drivers using kernel APIs correctly. Infer: memory and null bugs across large codebases. Proof assistants ACL2: hardware and microcode. HOL4, HOL Light: hardware and floating-point proofs. Isabelle/HOL: seL4-scale systems proofs, strong automation. Rocq: verified compilers (CompCert), crypto (Fiat), big math proofs. Slow and hard to learn. PVS: aerospace, much of NASA's formal methods work. Agda: type theory research and teaching. Lean 4: math (mathlib) and AI theorem proving. Hardest of the big three for LLMs off the shelf (27%). Mizar, Metamath: large formal math libraries with simple checkers. Verifying real code SPARK: avionics, defense, rail. Dafny: verified business logic, compiles to C#, Java, Go, Python, JS. AWS uses it for its authorization engine. Easiest for LLMs off the shelf (82%). F*: verified crypto (HACL*, in Firefox and the Linux kernel). Frama-C, Why3: C in safety-critical settings. KeY, JML: Java. VeriFast, Viper: separation-logic proofs about heap-heavy code. Liquid Haskell: proofs added to existing Haskell. Idris: general-purpose programming with dependent types. Verus, Prusti, Creusot, Aeneas: proofs about Rust code. WHY IT NEVER SCALED Formal methods worked. They didn't scale, because a person had to write every proof. Back to seL4. Its 8,700 lines of C needed roughly 200,000 lines of Isabelle proof, more than 20 lines of proof per line of code. IronFleet's verified distributed systems took 3.7 person-years, including inventing the method. So formal methods stayed where a bug costs more than the proof: flight control, railways, crypto, kernels, cloud authorization. Agents change that math. The proof is the tedious part, and an agent will grind on it all night. You also don't have to trust the agent, because the verifier accepts the proof or rejects it. What stays human is the spec. A green proof of the wrong spec is still wrong, so that's where your review time goes. WHERE I'D START I would start with the Verus formal language. The agent is the new part, so I'd pair it with a verifier that isn't. For agents writing verified code. It checks ordinary Rust against specs and proofs written in Rust, then erases them before compiling, so what you prove is what ships. It has peer-reviewed results since 2023, real systems built on it (Kubernetes controllers, OS kernel, etc), and use at Microsoft and Amazon. For other jobs: - Checking a distributed design: TLA+ - Math: Lean - Bend 2, Vera, Vow and Kōdo: worth watching, still very early though. Follow me for more on verification and agentic engineering.

How to become a quant from 0 to $650k/year (PLAYBOOK): by the end, you'll know how to: - build the exact math foundation top firms actually test - ship real projects that separate you from every other applicant - land your first credential and use it to climb the staircase - crack interviews at Citadel, Jane Street and prop shops btw i was quantitative backend developer at Liquid Hedge Fund based in Dubai for almost a year, building systematic trading strategies across perp dexes and prediction markets (right now on a break, working on my own projects) everything below is what actually got me here, in the order it actually worked here's the full 5-stage roadmap: --------------- Stage 1 (year 0): build the math foundation in the correct order the biggest mistake is starting with finance textbooks or trading blogs you don't need to know markets. you need to know math that markets run on how to build it: > probability first - Blitzstein & Hwang, free PDF from Harvard. chapters 1 to 6. conditional thinking is the entire skill > statistics second - Wasserman, All of Statistics. how to tell signal from noise > linear algebra third - Strang MIT 18.06, free at > OpenCourseWare. eigenvalues reveal what actually matters > convex optimization fourth - Boyd & Vandenberghe, free from Stanford. every portfolio problem reduces to this > stochastic calculus last - Shreve Vol 1 and 2. this is where Black-Scholes comes from your first year should feel painful, slow, non-linear most people quit here. that's why the field pays what it pays metric to watch: can you derive Ito's Lemma from scratch on a whiteboard? mistake to avoid: skipping layers because they feel abstract --------------- Stage 2 (year 1): read the papers and implement each one from scratch this is where I separated from every other backend developer trying to get in the 5 papers that shaped every quant desk on Wall Street: > Avellaneda & Stoikov 2008 (market making) > Engle & Granger 1987 (cointegration) > Heston 1993 (stochastic volatility) > Fama & French 2015 (five-factor model) > Cohen, Malloy, Pomorski 2012 (insider clusters) read all five. twice. then implement each from scratch in Python. no frameworks language stack that actually ships: > Python for research, backtesting and 90% of quant work. pandas, polars, pytorch, cvxpy, statsmodels > Rust for new systematic infrastructure. this is what Hyperliquid, prediction market engines, and next-gen HFT stacks are built in > Go for execution infrastructure. broker connectivity, microservices, low-latency APIs > C++ only if you're targeting elite HFT engineering. Jane Street uses OCaml specifically for their trading stack the mistake most self-taught quants make is picking one language and defending it, real desks run POLYGOT. Python for research, Rust or Go for execution what this gave me: 1: real understanding of how each model breaks 2: code on GitHub that recruiters actually respected 3: the ability to explain any of these in an interview without notes Heston was the one that changed my thinking. once I understood why volatility itself follows a stochastic process, options started making sense metric to watch: can you code Heston from a blank file in under 4 hours? mistake to avoid: reading 20 papers superficially instead of 5 deeply (VERY IMP) --------------- Stage 3 (year 2): ship 6 real projects with working backtests this is where most aspiring quants die silently the 6 projects that will land your first interview: > pairs trading bot on 5 cointegrated equity pairs > options pricing engine with Heston implementation > Fama-French factor decomposition scanner > insider cluster detector using SEC EDGAR > mean reversion scanner for S&P 500 > cross-exchange arbitrage scanner for perp DEXs every project needed: - clean GitHub repo with a proper README - working backtest with real historical data - honest documentation of what failed and why - one paragraph explaining the math in plain English the honest documentation is what actually got me noticed. I wrote a section called "what broke" in every README. two recruiters told me later that was the reason they DM'd me metric to watch: how many recruiters DM you after posting these mistake to avoid: hiding the projects where the math didn't work --------------- Stage 4 (year 3): first credential and the interview grind credential path (what worked for me): > cold emailed 40 PhD students. 3 responded. 1 took me on > TA'd a quantitative finance course at a local university > contributed to open-source quant libraries on GitHub > the title didn't matter. having real technical work to talk about mattered interview prep: - the Green Book (Xinfeng Zhou). 200 real interview problems. spend 15 minutes attempting each before looking at hints - QuantGuide(dot)io for probability puzzles at interview difficulty - Brainstellar for brain teasers - Zetamac for mental math. target 50+ correct per minute before applying - LeetCode Blind 75 with focus on dynamic programming the interview is a filter. it's not testing your knowledge, it's testing how you think under pressure with incomplete information metric to watch: how quickly you can solve fresh problems out loud mistake to avoid: memorizing solutions instead of understanding patterns --------------- Stage 5 (year 3-4): compete publicly and climb the staircase organic applications alone hit a ceiling. now you layer public competitions: > Jane Street Kaggle ($100K prize + direct recruiter visibility) > WorldQuant BRAIN (paid alpha signals + institutional pipeline) > Citadel Datathon (winners fast-tracked to interview rounds) the staircase (this is the part nobody tells you): 1: research lab or startup first 2: mid-tier prop shop second 3: elite fund like Citadel, Jane Street, or Two Sigma third nobody jumps directly from zero to Jane Street. everyone climbs attempting the vertical jump and failing doesn't mean the field is closed. it means you tried to skip stairs metric to watch: interview conversion rate at each tier mistake to avoid: applying to elite firms first, getting rejected and giving up --------------- CONCLUSION most aspiring quants die between the math foundation and the first credential because they think they need one more course, one more book, one more year the truth is: the first 3 stages are slow, painful and non-linear but they build the foundation that makes stages 4 and 5 feel like gravity start with probability. read the 5 papers. ship 6 projects. then apply no MIT. no Stanford. no finance degree required Citadel entry level pays $336K to $642K. Jane Street average $1.4M. 5-year top prop $800K to $1.2M the information asymmetry keeping most people out isn't intelligence. it's not knowing what the path looks like. COMPLETE SUMMARY BELOW:

Libraries: free. AI: subscription. Libraries: written by humans with expertise. AI: trained on whatever was on the internet. Libraries: staffed by professionals. AI: confidently wrong. Go to the library.

Libraries are citadels of knowledge and empathy—and they’ve played an extraordinarily important role in my life. I spoke with @SmithsonianSec Bunch about our shared love of books, A Promised Land, and the role storytelling plays in shaping our history.

Presidential libraries in America have a public function: to preserve a former leader’s papers. But they also have a more personal one: to let presidents present their achievements and justify their actions