High-Signal AI Voices to Follow (2026)
🗒️ Description
A ship-proven who-to-follow list for building AI/agentic systems and a second brain. Every name is anchored to a concrete artifact (repo, paper, essay, tool) — not follower counts. The evidence-based successor to a generic “40 LinkedIn profiles” listicle.
Two sourcing passes feed it:
- DR — surfaced by a deep-research fan-out and put through 3-vote adversarial verification (24/25 claims confirmed, 1 refuted).
- LI — a René Remsik “40 to follow” LinkedIn listicle, hand-vetted profile-by-profile via browser automation (2026-07-12). 40 profiles scored 1–5 on ship-proven-substance vs promo; 15 survived (11 keep + 4 situational), 25 cut (~62% were content-marketing / AI-video creators).
Grouped into the domains this vault works in — see Agentic Coding, Context Engineering, Building an AI Second Brain.
Legend
- Src —
DR= deep-research-verified ·LI= LinkedIn hand-vetted. - 🟡 = situational (real substance but noisier/promo-heavy — follow only if the niche fits).
- Star/subscriber counts are lower bounds (already stale at capture).
1. 🤖 Agentic coding, harnesses & context engineering
Ties into Context Engineering, Harness Engineering, Loop Engineering, Agent Skills, and the loop patterns in Swarm Research — Orchestrating Coding Agents.
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic Applied AI team (Hadfield, Rajasekaran, Dixon, Ryan) | Anthropic eng · X @rgb_prithvi · GitHub jerhadf | Authoritative context & harness engineering for coding agents | ”Effective context engineering for AI agents” | DR |
| Simon Willison | simonwillison.net · X @simonw | Near-daily primary-source agentic-coding writing; Datasette, co-created Django | ”Agentic Engineering Patterns”, “Designing agentic loops” | DR |
| Dex Horthy (HumanLayer) | X @dexhorthy · humanlayer.dev | Context engineering + RPI methodology; “12-Factor Agents” | repo advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents | DR |
| Geoffrey Huntley | ghuntley.com | The “Ralph” minimal autonomous-coding loop | ghuntley.com/ralph — ~12h run, 50k+ LOC ported | DR |
| Riley Brown | LinkedIn @riley-brown · YT | Co-founder VibeCode (Claude Code in the browser) | vibecode.dev; 200h agent-team testing | LI |
| Kedasha K. | LinkedIn @kedashakerr · @itsthatladydev | GitHub Developer Advocate, AI dev tools | live builds (Copilot + OpenCV + YOLO, repo), local-AI writeups | LI |
2. 💻 SaaS & indie building
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marc Lou | LinkedIn @marclouvion · X | Solopreneur, 25 shipped startups; builds in public with real code | ShipFast, TrustMRR (MCP, llms.txt, AI-agent-readable pages) | LI |
| Simon Høiberg | LinkedIn @simonhoiberg · YT | Bootstrapped SaaS portfolio; genuinely technical posts | FeedHive, Aidbase, SignupGate | LI |
| Greg Isenberg | LinkedIn @gisenberg · X @gregisenberg | CEO Late Checkout; sharp startup-idea & agent-native essays | ideabrowser.com; Startup Ideas Podcast | LI |
| 🟡 Jonathan Chan | LinkedIn @jonathanchan | Ex-BCG → builder; consulting-craft-as-Claude-skills (engagement-bait-heavy) | Pear marketplace; ships apps with AI | LI |
3. ⚙️ AI automation & agencies
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Saraev | LinkedIn @nick-saraev · YT | Maker School + LeftClick agency + Clairvo SaaS | gives away real n8n/Make automation blueprints | LI |
| Nate Herk | LinkedIn @nateherkelman · YT | Uppit AI; agent-automation tutorials | already in vault → 4 Claude Code Upgrades for Making Money (Nate Herk) | LI |
4. 🧠 Second brain & PKM-with-AI
Directly relevant to this vault’s agent-maintained workflow — see Building an AI Second Brain, Second Brain Design, LLM Knowledge Bases, OpenKB.
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steph Ango / kepano | stephango.com · GitHub kepano | Obsidian CEO; “file over app”; ships agent tooling | obsidian-skills → Obsidian Skills | DR |
| Andrej Karpathy | X @karpathy · GitHub karpathy | The “LLM Wiki” AI-maintained-vault pattern; NN teaching | LLM Wiki gist → Karpathy Skills | DR |
| Brian Petro | GitHub brianpetro | Smart Connections + the “Smart Plugins” ecosystem | obsidian-smart-connections (local-embedding search) | DR |
| Logan Yang | GitHub logancyang · X @logancyang | Copilot for Obsidian — most-starred Obsidian AI plugin | obsidian-copilot | DR |
| Tiago Forte | fortelabs.com | Popularized “second brain” / PARA; now AI-in-PKM | Building a Second Brain, ai-second-brain | DR |
| nhaouari · bramses · pfrankov | GitHub | Shipped, active Obsidian-AI plugins | Text Generator · ChatGPT MD · Local GPT | DR |
5. 🧐 AI research & applied ML
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sebastian Raschka | Ahead of AI · X @rasbt | From-scratch LLM education; running paper list | repo LLMs-from-scratch | DR |
| Nathan Lambert | interconnects.ai · X @natolambert | Open models + RLHF/post-training (led OLMo, Tülu) | The RLHF Book; RewardBench, Molmo | DR |
| Lilian Weng | lilianweng.github.io Lil’Log | Deep, widely-cited surveys (ex-OpenAI VP → Thinking Machines) | “LLM Powered Autonomous Agents” | DR |
| Jay Alammar | jalammar.github.io | Visual ML explainers | ”The Illustrated Transformer” | DR |
| Eugene Yan | eugeneyan.com | Applied ML / recsys in production at scale | eugeneyan.com essays | DR |
| Harper Carroll | LinkedIn @harpercarroll · IG/YT | Stanford CS/AI, ex-Meta ML, ex-Head-of-AI (NVIDIA-acq.) | rigorous AI explainers; harpercarroll.ai course; O’Reilly convo | LI |
| Aishwarya Srinivasan | LinkedIn @aishwarya-srinivasan | ex-Google Cloud / Microsoft DS; Scikit-Learn contributor | AI-engineering, evals & RAG deep-dives | LI |
| Claire Zau | LinkedIn @clairezau · Substack | Lightspeed VC; substantive AI-ecosystem analysis | Lightwork podcast (Ion Stoica, Chatbot Arena); YC-batch breakdowns | LI |
| 🟡 Mariana Antaya | LinkedIn @marianaantaya | quantifAI (ML-eval tool); ex-Microsoft AI PM (self-promo-heavy) | quantifAI; “agent eval ≠ classical ML metrics” content | LI |
6. 📰 AI news, curation & tech media
| Person | Follow on | Known for | Signal — concrete artifact | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Wolfe | LinkedIn @matt-wolfe · YT | Built a real AI-tools hub; high-quality AI-news curation | Futuretools.io; The Next Wave podcast | LI |
| 🟡 Tiffany Janzen | LinkedIn @tiffany-janzen · YT (TiffinTech) | Tech-media creator; strong CEO interviews (sponsor-heavy) | Talk Tech with Tiff (Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Nadella, Benioff) | LI |
| 🟡 Zain Kahn | LinkedIn @zainkahn | Superhuman AI newsletter; ships a product (content is hype-y) | heylemon.ai (voice prompt tool) | LI |
⚠️ How to read this list
- Numbers are lower bounds. Star/subscriber counts were already stale (understated) at capture.
- Follow the person, not the employer. Affiliations shift fast (Lambert left Ai2 → stealth lab; Weng OpenAI → Thinking Machines Lab).
- One exclusion: Viv Trivedy as a claimed originator of “harness engineering” was refuted 0-3 and left out.
- Karpathy spans §4 and §5 — listed once, under second brain.
- The LinkedIn source list ran ~62% low-signal — 25 of 40 cut: content-marketing / faceless-automation / AI-video creators (Pascal Bornet, Nat Choprasert, Awa K. Penn, Konstantinos Synodinos, Vaibhav Hedaoo, Aleksa Spasic, René Remsik, Molly Mahoney, Sirio Berati) and off-domain business/branding celebs (Alex Hormozi, Dan Martell, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeff J Hunter, Jonathan Mast, Austin Armstrong, Hamza Khalid, Camila Markson, Bashar Gulumbe, Simone Ferretti, Rourke Sefton-Minns, Jindrich Faborsky, Brad Gaines, Andrew Codesmith) — plus Blue Viper / Indie Hackers (not individuals).
📖 Coverage gaps (todo)
- todo Pure X/Twitter-primary voices are under-covered — the DR set skews to repo/essay evidence.
- todo Spec-driven development leaders (authors behind GitHub spec-kit, Kiro, OpenSpec-style tooling) were not surfaced — targeted follow-up. See OpenSpec.
- todo Frontier-lab researchers who publish openly beyond Raschka/Lambert.
🔗 Further reading
- Agentic Coding · Context Engineering · Harness Engineering · Loop Engineering
- Building an AI Second Brain · Second Brain Design · LLM Knowledge Bases · Obsidian Skills · Karpathy Skills
- LinkedIn Strategy — how to post; this note is who to read
- Social Media Algorithms — Maximizing Reach in 2026 — how the feed that “teaches you” is ranked
Supersedes the retired AI Voices to Follow on LinkedIn (2026) listicle (moved to
_graveyard/).
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