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CODE IS THE BYPRODUCT

Code is the byproduct of understanding.

YOU CAN JUST CHOOSE HOW MANY BUGS YOU WANT NOW

In a complex system, you can basically find as many bugs as you ask the agents for.

THE TASK ISN'T THE JOB

A machine can nail the task but completely miss the job.

“YOUR BENCHMARKS DON'T APPLY TO US"

The benchmarks are answering the wrong question.

EVALUATING AI AGENTS AS PRODUCTS

This study introduces three tasks for AI agents that allow researchers to evaluate efficiency, collaboration, and taste, providing a proxy for how well the agents perform as tools in real coding situations.

OPENAI PREVIEWS ULTRAFAST API TIER FOR GPT-5.6 SOL

OpenAI's UltraOpenAI's Ultrafast API service tier can run GPT-5.6 Sol at 750 output tokens per second, 14 times the speed of Standard. The service is designed for products and workflows in which delays can determine whether an answer remains useful. Access is initially restricted to a select group of customers. Powered by Cerebras, a wider rollout is planned as capacity grows.

X OPEN SOURCES ITS RANKING ALGORITHM, LETTING USERS SEE IF THEY'VE BEEN ‘SHADOWBANNED'

X has open-sourced its 'For You' algorithm and its core ranking engine under the Apache v2 license. The company has also expanded its previous efforts to open source parts of its codebase to add more detail, making it roughly 10 to 15 times larger than it was before. X is providing tools that will let users see for themselves if and how its ranking systems have impacted their account or posts. The tool will be available to a test group of accounts for at least a year as a pilot before rolling out more broadly.

DRIVER SETS RECORD FOR HYDROGEN-POWERED VEHICLE AT MORE THAN 406 MPH

Andy Green set a record for the fastest land speed driving a JCB Hydromax on Tuesday at 406.320 miles per hour. The hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion vehicle took about 72 seconds to get from 50 miles per hour to 400. At 64, Green is the only person to break the sound barrier on land, driving a jet-powered car at an average speed of 763.035 miles per hour in 1997. The JCB Hydromax was not built to rival that record, but to set a new fastest speed for a hydrogen vehicle - the previous record for a hydrogen combustion vehicle was 185.5 miles per hour, set in 2004 by the BMW H2R.

AMERICA WANTS TO MAKE ITS OWN HUMANOID ROBOTS. THAT WON'T BE EASY

China has a near-total dominance of the supply chain, so building a robot entirely free of Chinese parts is not practical. The Chinese robotics industry was built on billions of dollars in state funding. Fledgling robot makers in the US will need substantial financial and policy support to compete. The US humanoid robotics industry is still in its infancy, and makers of non-humanoid robots are struggling to compete with Chinese rivals.

GTM ENGINEER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($175-205K BASE + $40-60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring a GTM Engineer to join our Applied AI team and own our AI-native GTM stack. We're looking for someone comfortable building AI agents and working with Hubspot. Click here to learn more [11]!

DEEPSEEK HARNESS

DeepSeek Harness is now in developer preview, with source code included. Every capability is a plugin that can be swapped or recomposed. Developers can select, swap, or extend any capability in the configuration without changing the DeepSeek Harness source code. Everything the model sees is recorded in an append-only session log.

FOREMAN

Foreman is an eve software factory that puts AI agents on every stage of the development loop and keeps people on the judgment calls. It takes tasks from GitHub and Linear, moves each one through four stations - Classifier, Analyst, Implementer, and Reviewer - and delivers a reviewed draft pull request on the repository. The Classifier triages the task, the Analyst turns it into a plan with acceptance criteria, the Implementer executes the plan in its own sandbox, and the Reviewer independently judges everything against the real diff. Developers just review, mark ready, and merge.

PANGRAM, AUTHORSHIP, AND FRENCH THEORY

Being called out for using AI is the new way of dunking on people and posts. However, this calling out is a social function that isn't just 'AI bad'. People want authorship because it has meaning. Several AI labs have recently made announcements about watermarking outputs for easy AI detection.

THE DEEPSEEK THESIS

Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek, is now richer than both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. His little-known group of researchers has managed to consistently command the world's attention. Backed by the immense wealth of his hedge fund, they keep giving their work away for free. Liang believes that there is an inevitable causal relationship between automated learning and generalized intelligence, and that the pursuit of such advanced machine intelligence is the only problem worth solving right now.

with Azure →

FOREMAN

An overview of Foreman's runtime map that covers what runs where, how the filesystem defines the agent, and the three boundaries that shape the design.

OPENAI'S REVENUE RUN RATE TOPS $40 BILLION AHEAD OF IPO

OpenAI has roughly doubled its run rate from the end of 2025 due to the growth of its AI coding software, momentum from subscription sales and its nascent advertising business, and its core consumer business.

MUSK HINTS STARLINK IS COMING TO FUTURE TESLAS AS CYBERCAB SHOWS INTEGRATED DISH

Elon Musk says that Starlink will eventually be necessary to provide the amount of bandwidth connected vehicles will require.

WRITE FOR PEOPLE

Navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility as more and more explanatory artifacts are being generated rather than written.

INTRODUCING BLUESKY PROTOCOL SERVICES

Bluesky Protocol Services organizes all the documentation developers need within the ecosystem, clarifies the service contracts around Bluesky-provided infrastructure, replaces the old docs site, and gives the team a clean way to ship future releases.

EVEN CLAUDE IS IN THE DARK ABOUT DARIO AMODEI'S WIFE—AND HER INFLUENCE AT ANTHROPIC

Cami Clark keeps a low profile, but is a key adviser to Anthropic chief Dario Amodei.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT AND STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE

SPACEXAI DEBUTS GROK 4.6, OVERTAKING KIMI K3'S PERFORMANCE AND MATCHING GPT-5.6 SOL FOR WORLD'S THIRD BEST ON ARTIFICIAL ANALYSIS

SpaceXAI has released Grok 4.6, a model focused on long-running agents, coding, and knowledge work. The model surpasses Kimi K3 and ties with GPT-5.6 Sol Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. It posts sizable gains over its predecessor across coding, terminal, knowledge-work, and agent benchmarks. The API starts at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, less than half of what GPT-5.6 Sol costs in standard mode.

GOOGLE REVEALS 2026 HARDWARE LINEUP: PIXEL 11, PIXEL WATCH 5, AND PIXEL TAG

The Pixel 11 series looks a lot like last year's lineup, but with some minor tweaks, a few new hardware extras, and even more Gemini-powered AI. The phones are joined by an updated Pixel Watch 5 and the Pixel Tag, Google's first in-house tracker device. The most notable hardware innovation for the new Pixel lineup is the return of a notification LED for the Pro phones. The ring of RGB LEDs is housed inside the flash assembly on the back of the phone and lights up only when the user is using Gemini or when there is an incoming call from specific contacts for both standard phone calls and voice calls in WhatsApp.

WORKERS ARE TEACHING AI-POWERED ROBOTS TO TAKE OVER THEIR JOBS

Tens of thousands of workers in India are being recruited to record their work in first-person. The footage is being fed into AI systems being built to teach robots how to do things. Robotics companies currently lack the data needed to train machines that interact with the physical world. Real footage of humans doing mundane tasks is in short supply because no one cared about it, until now.

NORTHROP'S ROBOT SPACE MECHANIC IS A NEW WAY TO KEEP SATELLITES AT WORK LONGER

Northrop Grumman launched a Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) and three Mission Extension Pods (MEPs) into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July. The MRV is a powerful satellite equipped with two advanced robotic arms. MEPs are simpler satellites that are essentially modular propulsion systems. In 2027, the MRV will use its robotic arms to attach one of the MEP pods to a telecommunications satellite, which should keep it in orbit for years to come.

AI IS REMOVING THE MIDDLE CLASS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster. Bad engineers were always a liability, but there used to be a limit to how fast changes could be implemented. Before, there was a good chance someone would catch their bad decisions before they went too far. Companies can't afford to hire bad engineers anymore. The money will increasingly get funneled towards an increasingly small number of people who can actually be trusted.

WHY TINY JPEGS LOOK DIFFERENT IN CHROME

What looks like a rendering bug is actually a clever JPEG decoding optimization in Chrome. Chrome delegates image decoding and rendering to Skia, which does not always decompress the full image and scale it afterward. It computes the closest fraction with a denominator of 8 and decodes the image at that scale, then scales the image further using a more traditional downsampling algorithm until it reaches the desired size. This is why small images can look thicker on some machines.

WHY YOU CAN'T COPY PALANTIR

Palantir is a vertically integrated outcome-based software solution provider. It offers tech consulting and software services with a unique outcome-based model that lets it bypass the traditional trade-offs of both traditional consulting and software companies. It is vertically integrated because it has an extreme elitist attitude towards using its own software and services, unlike the rest of the market, which is much more polyamorous. There's little hope of any company being able to catch up to Palantir as investors allow the company to do R&D over an extremely long and unspecified time horizon.

CRACKS IN THE AI THESIS

The share of businesses using model serving platforms rose again last month. 6.1% of businesses using AI are now using these platforms. Adoption of OpenAI and, to a lesser extent, Anthropic, has slowed in recent months. Their growth has to come from existing businesses spending on AI, and those businesses are increasingly spending on open source.

INPUT-BASED PRICING VS OUTPUT-BASED PRICING

Input-based pricing charges users for the consumption of some resource, while output-based pricing charges based on a positive outcome.

DEEPSEEK PUBLICIZES EFFORTS TO CHALLENGE ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE CODE

DeepSeek has set up an official social media account and posted job listings for a new team focused on developing AI agents.

GITHUB VS VERCEL VS REPLIT: WHAT DEV PLATFORMS DO WHEN AI CODE IS CHEAP

GitHub, Vercel, and Replit are trying to rebuild themselves around solving hard problems in the software development process other than coding.

and structural ways to fix it. Read the report

9 THESES ON AI

A look at the horizon problem, job losses vs new company creation, specialized AI, system skills, and more.

HOW WE TRACKED DOWN A 16-YEAR-OLD SQLITE BUG

Resolving the issue was a massive, cross-functional effort that involved dozens of people, including Tailscale's engineering and support teams and the core maintainers of SQLite.

THE HUMAN IS THE LOOP

Be intentional about when to use AI and when to leave it out, and try to be honest about what you're actually gaining and losing with your choices.

ATTEND THE LIVE WEBINAR ON AUGUST 27TH (THURSDAY)

SPACEXAI UNVEILS GROK BOT TO WORK LIKE A TEAM OF AI AGENTS

SpaceXAI's Grok Bot is designed to act like a team of AI agents capable of handling a wide range of professional work. The agent can sign into various apps and websites, retain information from prior tasks, and share details and context with other agents. SpaceXAI has been using the product internally across its engineering, growth, and marketing teams. It has helped its sales team find new accounts and draft emails and aided its finance team by pulling receipts from emails.

GEMINI BECOMES GOOGLE'S FASTEST-GROWING PRODUCT EVER AS IT HITS 1B USERS

Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAU). It is the fastest Google product to have managed that feat. Gemini is now in virtually every Google product and service and is core to Google's flagship search experience. The 1 billion MAU metric only refers to users who have opened the Gemini app or visited the Gemini web interface.

AI IS FINDING SPERM WHERE DOCTORS COULDN'T

Scientists from Columbia have created a system that uses AI to locate difficult-to-find sperm. Men with extraordinarily low sperm counts often still have several hidden sperm present. Analyzing samples under a microscope with the human eye often misses these individual sperm cells. The Sperm Tracking and Recovery system may bring hope to the 10% of infertile men affected by azoospermia.

INDIA'S FIRST PRIVATE ROCKET REACHED ORBIT — FROM A COMPANY THAT EXISTED BEFORE THE LAW DID

Skyroot's Vikram-1 became the first privately built Indian rocket to reach orbit on July 18. It reached success on the first attempt and delivered a payload to about 450 km. India has no space statute, and its entire private space industry runs on executive policy. Skyroot is targeting roughly one rocket launch a month from 2027.