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INTRODUCING OPENCLI

The OpenCLI specification defines a standard, platform and language-agnostic interface to command-line applications that allows both humans and computers to understand how a tool should be invoked without access to source code or documentation. With the growing interest in MCP (Model Context Protocol) and command-line automation, there's a huge potential in standardizing how command-line applications are described. The specification is still a draft and incomplete. It is maintained under the Specter.Console GitHub organization.

GEMINI NANO IN CHROME 137: NOTES FOR AI ENGINEERS

Gemini Nano is starting to be shipped unflagged in Chrome and will likely be shipped fully unflagged by the end of the year. There are a few APIs available for commonly used patterns, but the main one engineers will be interested in is the Prompt API, which is the most flexible and open-ended one. This article goes through how to set up and use Gemini Nano. It covers the basic important things and pitfalls to be aware of when using the API.

TECH PHILOSOPHY AND AI OPPORTUNITY

While AI is hailed as the route to abundance, the most important financial outcomes have been about scarcity. One of these scarce resources is AI talent. As the work needed to be done is the same across the various companies bidding for talent, it makes sense that the team that the best researchers play for is the team that pays the most. The teams that are destined to lose are the ones who can't or won't offer enough money or mission.

CTOS REVEAL HOW AI CHANGED SOFTWARE DEVELOPER HIRING IN 2025

While AI evangelists promise the technology will make everyone become a '10x developer', the reality is that companies are drowning in AI-generated code that looks perfect but breaks in production. The most valuable developers aren't the ones churning out AI code, but the ones who can think their way out of the problems AI creates. Engineering leaders want developers who can look at AI-generated code and figure out what's wrong with it instead of just accepting whatever the AI produces. AI was supposed to make coding easier, but it's actually making the thinking parts of development more valuable than ever.

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APPLE SAYS COO JEFF WILLIAMS WILL RETIRE FROM COMPANY LATER THIS YEAR

Sabih Khan, Apple's senior vice president of operations, will be taking over the COO role as part of along-planned succession.

HOW I BUILD SOFTWARE QUICKLY

Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand, start with a rough draft/spike, try to soften requirements if you can, don't get distracted, make small changes, and practice specific skills.

THE FIRST VERSION OF COINBASE LAUNCHED WITH JUST A HOT WALLET

Coinbase's v2 key storage system, which has served the company well for years, was coded by two people in about eight weeks.

SVGS THAT FEEL LIKE GIFS

Animations are built into the SVG spec.

CLOUDFLARE: WE WILL GET GOOGLE TO PROVIDE A WAY TO BLOCK AI OVERVIEWS

There currently isn't a clean way to block content from being used in Google's AI Overviews or AI Mode while being fully safe with ranking in the main Google search results.

WAYMO BEGINS OFFERING TEEN ACCOUNTS, STARTING IN METRO PHOENIX

Waymo's new teen accounts will let teenagers from 14 to 17 hail robotaxis and ride alone.

ALPHABET'S ISOMORPHIC LABS HAS GRAND AMBITIONS TO ‘SOLVE ALL DISEASES' WITH AI. NOW, IT'S GEARING UP FOR ITS FIRST HUMAN TRIALS

Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's secretive drug discovery arm, is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs. The company was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures and interactions with a high level of accuracy. The system has helped researchers design medicines faster and more precisely.

JACK DORSEY LAUNCHES A WHATSAPP MESSAGING RIVAL BUILT ON BLUETOOTH

Bitchat is a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks - no internet, central servers, phone numbers, or emails required. It enables ephemeral, encrypted communication - nearby devices form clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range, even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Messages are stored only on-device, disappear by default, and never touch centralized infrastructure. A beta version of Bitchat is currently live on TestFlight.

CREATING THERAPEUTIC ABUNDANCE

The invention of new medicines is limited by our knowledge of cells and molecules that can be manipulated to treat disease. The cost of discovering new medicines is increasing. New technologies have the potential to unlock an era of target abundance and reverse the long decline in research and development productivity. This could be one of AI's most important impacts.

NUCLEAR REACTORS SMALLER THAN A SEMI TRUCK TO BE TESTED IN IDAHO

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has conditionally selected Westinghouse's trailer-sized eVinci test reactor and Radiant's Kaleidos unit to conduct the first fueled microreactor experiments at its Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility at Idaho National Laboratory. The DOME project considers anything under 50 MW of power to be a microreactor - the eVinci is designed to produce 5 megawatts, and the Kaleidos can output 1.2 megawatts. The DoE hopes that microreactors can be used to power small, remote sites. DOME is designed to be up and running by early 2026. It will operate one experiment at a time for six months.

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HANDLING UNIQUE INDEXES ON LARGE DATA IN POSTGRESQL

PostgreSQL has a limitation on unique index entries larger than 1/3 of a buffer page. The 1/3 page size limit exists to ensure efficient page splitting. To overcome the restriction, introduce a new field that stores a hash of the large field. This allows you to store really large data inside databases, even with unique constraints.

ADDING A FEATURE BECAUSE CHATGPT INCORRECTLY THINKS IT EXISTS

Soundslice is a service that scans sheet music from photographs so users can listen, edit, and practice. Over the past few months, the team at Soundslice started noticing that their error logs were full of ASCII tablature, a way of notating music for guitar that the service didn't support. The team discovered that ChatGPT was hallucinating instructions to users and telling them to go to Soundslice and use a feature that didn't exist. Instead of posting a notice telling users that ChatGPT was incorrect, the team decided to build the feature instead.

WHY I USED TO PREFER PERMISSIVE LICENSES AND NOW FAVOR COPYLEFT

Free open source software is usually published under one of two major categories of copyright licenses: permissive licenses, which freely share with everyone, or copyleft licenses, which freely share only with those who are also willing to freely share. Copyleft creates a large pool of code that developers can only legally use if they are willing to share the source code of anything they build on it, making it a very broad-based and neutral way of incentivizing more diffusion. It does not favor specific actors nor create roles for active parameter setting by central planners.

THE BROKEN MICROSOFT PACT: LAYOFFS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

There are stories of people who have been with Microsoft for 20 years, who grew up with the company, and who never had to worry about sudden changes. While the performance management system had its quirks, there was an understanding that if you did solid work, you'd have a place. Workers at Microsoft received below-market-rate pay in exchange for stability, a reasonable work-life balance, and the promise of no layoffs - this is no longer the case. This shift was almost expected: Microsoft's performance management challenges made layoffs a more attractive option than addressing individual performance issues systematically.

OPENAI RAMPS UP STOCK PAY TO $4.4 BILLION TO COMBAT META'S COSTLY TALENT RAIDS

OpenAI is dramatically increasing its employee stock compensation to defend against rival Meta's poaching.

WAYMO ROBOTAXIS ARE HEADING TO PHILADELPHIA AND NYC

Waymo kicked off two 'road trips' to Philadelphia and New York City yesterday - these branded 'road trips' don't necessarily signal a commercial launch, but it has happened before.

APPLE LOSES TOP AI MODELS EXECUTIVE TO META'S HIRING SPREE

Ruoming Pang, the executive in charge of Apple's foundation models team, is departing the company for Meta, who offered Pang a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year.

WHAT WOULD STRIPE L1 LOOK LIKE?

A Stripe L1 should support stablecoin use and Stripe L1 integration for customer payments and merchant settlement.

TECH HIRING IS NOT THE SAME AS IT WAS EVEN A YEAR AGO

Hiring for new graduates in Big Tech is down 25% and -11% for startups.

UNLESS USERS TAKE ACTION, ANDROID WILL LET GEMINI ACCESS THIRD-PARTY APPS

Google is implementing a change that will enable its Gemini AI engine to interact with third-party apps even if users have configured their devices to block such interactions.

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TIKTOK'S ‘BAN' PROBLEM COULD END SOON WITH A NEW APP AND A SALE

The Trump administration says it's close to an agreement for a TikTok sale that satisfies the law's requirements, but it involves a new, separate version of the app. The deal still needs approval from the Chinese government. TikTok staff are reportedly working on a new version of the app for release in app stores on September 5. Under the current timeline, the original TikTok app will leave app stores as the new one launches, and the old one will stop working entirely in March 2026.

OPENAI EXPERIMENTS WITH NEW "STUDY TOGETHER" TOOL ON CHATGPT

'Study together' is a new tool in ChatGPT that guides users through the study process step-by-step. It creates a more interactive, guided study environment by posing more questions and breaking down topics, helping users actively learn rather than just receive explanations. It checks answers and adapts by offering follow-ups or clarifying explanations as needed. There is currently no official timeline for the rollout of the feature - a growing number of users are reporting access, indicating a limited A/B test or pre-release trial.

TESLA LAUNCHES OASIS SUPERCHARGER WITH SOLAR FARM AND OFF-GRID BATTERIES

Tesla's Oasis Supercharger, an EV charging station with a solar farm and off-grid batteries, is now open in Lost Hills, California. The project consists of 168 chargers, half of which are currently operational. It is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies. Spanning 30 acres of land, it has 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh. The charging station can be operated off-grid. The rest of the stalls and a lounge will be open later this year.

UK FIRM ACHIEVES TRITIUM BREAKTHROUGH, COULD BOOST NUCLEAR FUSION FUEL SUPPLY

UK-based private commercial fusion company Astral Systems claims to be the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using a fusion reactor. The achievement addresses a significant hurdle in the development of fusion energy. It clearly demonstrates a potential path to scalable tritium production, which could unlock a wide range of applications and capabilities. The ability to generate tritium within the reactor is crucial - a sustainable fusion energy system needs to produce more fuel than it consumes.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING WITH LLMS IN 2025: REALITY CHECK

Executives at AI infrastructure companies have made bold claims about the technology, but developers often find these claims to fall spectacularly flat. This article looks at how AI is used within the tech industry to see why founders/CEOs are more bullish than devs about AI tools, how widespread usage is among developers, how much time AI tools really save, and more. Many seasoned software engineers were skeptical about AI tools until very recently - now, most are surprisingly enthusiastic and see these tools as a change that will reshape software development.

HOW TO BECOME PASSIONATE ABOUT DELIVERING SHAREHOLDER VALUE

Many engineers believe their jobs are to write good code, thinking that delivering shareholder value is the company's business, not theirs. Delivering shareholder value means making the company stock price go up and stay up. Shareholder value is part of the software design process - engineers should be connected to the financial goals of the company. Not all engineers are working in situations that can affect shareholder value, but those who work in more functional environments have a real opportunity to shape the financial situation of their companies, for good or ill.

THE CODER ‘VILLAGE' AT THE HEART OF CHINA'S A.I. FRENZY

Liangzhu, a suburb in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, is a hot spot for entrepreneurs and tech talent. Lured by the low rents and proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek, people flock to the city to explore their own possibilities. The provincial and local governments started offering subsidies and tax breaks to new companies in the region a decade ago, which helped to incubate hundreds of startups. The region has already birthed tech powerhouses like Alibaba, DeepSeek, NetEase, and Hikvision.

THE COMPANIES BETTING THEY CAN PROFIT FROM GOOGLE SEARCH'S DEMISE

At least a dozen new startups are betting on the rapid demise of Google search and pouring millions of dollars into AI tools. These companies are helping businesses understand how AI chatbots gather information and how to steer them towards brands so that they appear in AI searches. The customer interest is a sign of how AI is transforming search and how companies are trying to get ahead of the changes.

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OPENCODE

opencode is an AI coding agent built for the terminal.

YOU'RE ALL CTO NOW

Developers using AI are transitioning from writing code to managing agents and projects.

ASK HN: WORTH LEAVING POSITION OVER PUSH TO ADOPT VIBE CODING? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

Developers should at least stay to learn how the technology works, whether they agree with it or not - it will either work better than expected, or they will be able to inform prospective employers that they have experience working with it later.

GIT EXPERTS SHOULD TRY JUJUTSU

Jujutsu is a force multiplier for those who understand how version control works - it automates the tedious mechanics of history editing, letting developers focus on the what instead of the how.

YET ANOTHER ZIP TRICK

A schizophrenic zip file can be interpreted in different ways by different parsers, resulting in different content.

LEARN TO LOVE THE MOAT OF LOW STATUS

The fear of being temporarily low in social status stops people from living richer lives.

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