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THE WRAPPER AND THE CODE

Apple denied approval of Replit's updates as its app previewed generated apps inside the iOS client, which meant that the reviewed Replit binary effectively contained an unbounded number of unreviewed apps.

THE PATIENT CAPITAL OF RECOGNIZING PEOPLE

The reward for being early on a person is invisible, but the returns for doing it are absurd.

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APPLE TO LET USERS CHOOSE RIVAL AI MODELS ACROSS ITS IOS 27 FEATURES

Apple will allow users to select from multiple third-party AI providers to power features across its software. The change will be implemented in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 this fall. Apple is looking to make it easy for customers to find a wide range of options on its devices rather than building the best AI software or services. The shift will give users more flexibility and benefit partners like Google and Anthropic.

OPENAI FAST-TRACKING AI PHONE FOR 2027 LAUNCH

OpenAI plans to start mass production of its 'AI agent phone' as early as the first half of next year. The device will feature an image signal processor that improves real-world sensing and two AI processors for handling different tasks. The company is also reportedly developing smart glasses, a smart lamp, and potentially earbuds. The device lineup puts OpenAI in direct hardware competition against several Apple product lines.

BLUE ORIGIN MOON LANDER COMPLETES TESTING AT NASA VACUUM CHAMBER

Endurance is an uncrewed lander funded by Blue Origin to advance Human Landing System capabilities in support of NASA's Artemis program. It will demonstrate precision landing, cryogenic propulsion, and autonomous guidance, navigation, and control capabilities in support of future lunar surface operations. Endurance will carry two NASA science and technology payloads under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative to the lunar South Pole region this year. It was developed under a public-private partnership model, with Blue Origin conducting work through a reimbursable Space Act Agreement.

I'M SCARED ABOUT BIOLOGICAL COMPUTING

A few months ago, a company released a video showing how it grew neurons in a lab and got them to play DOOM. The scientists fed visual data to the neurons, which reacted to that data in some way to play the game. This could mean that the company built a human biocomputer and then put it into a simulated hell, playing the same game on a loop. While it was 'just a science experiment', the biocomputer had more neurons than a jellyfish or a worm. There's a large commercial incentive to continue developing the technology, but the ethical implications are still unclear.

CLAUDE CODE IS NOT MAKING YOUR PRODUCT BETTER

At the frontier, it's not clear that spending on tokens produces any economic value at all. The bottleneck at that level is tastemakers. The taste to delete, compress, and refuse is more valuable now that the floor is rising. AI makes it possible for anyone to create generic products, but it won't help the highest-level artisans create better products.

HOW TO WORK AND COMPOUND WITH AI

Provide good context, encode your taste as config, make verification easy, delegate bigger tasks, and close the loop. Every finished artifact becomes context for the next session, and each correction updates a config that reduces future errors. These practices aren't specific to AI - it's how you onboard and work with any new collaborator.

THIS IS AN EMAIL I SENT EARLIER TODAY TO ALL EMPLOYEES AT COINBASE

Coinbase is firing around 14% of its employees. While the company is well capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm, the business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. The market is currently down, so the company needs to adjust its cost structure. The downsizing will allow Coinbase to emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for its next phase of growth.

COGNITIVE SURRENDER

Cognitive surrender is when AI output quietly becomes your output and you feel there is nothing left to check. Cognitive offloading is delegating to AI but still owning the answer. Most software engineers move between the two, but they cross the line without noticing. They are borrowing the AI's confidence and treating it as their own.

OPENAI LAUNCHES GPT-5.5 INSTANT AS NEW CHATGPT DEFAULT

The new Instant model is designed to produce clearer, shorter, and more accurate answers than previous models.

PROGRAMMING IN 2026: EXCITEMENT, DREAD, AND THE COMING WAVE

A big part of software engineering is now communicating with an alien technology we don't - and can't - fully understand.

DESIGNING THE AI-NATIVE ENGINEERING ORGANIZATION

This post contains a lightly edited excerpt from a panel discussion on how companies like Microsoft, 1Password, and Atlassian are adapting to the impact AI is having now and in the future.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [20].

WHEN EVERYONE HAS AI AND THE COMPANY STILL LEARNS NOTHING

Access to frontier intelligence can be rented, but operational control and organizational learning can not.

AMAZON'S DURABILITY

Amazon consistently makes real-world investments at a massive scale that convert its marginal costs into capital costs, and then gains leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses.

MIAMI STARTUP SUBQUADRATIC CLAIMS 1,000X AI EFFICIENCY GAIN WITH SUBQ MODEL; RESEARCHERS DEMAND INDEPENDENT PROOF

Subquadratic claims its first model reduces attention compute by almost 1,000 times compared to other frontier models due to its fully subquadratic architecture, where compute grows linearly with context length.

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ELON MUSK MEGATRIAL KICKS OFF SECOND WEEK WITH SCRUTINY OF OPENAI EXEC'S FINANCES

OpenAI president Greg Brockman took the stand on Monday. Two days before the trial, Elon Musk had messaged Brockman to gauge his interest in settling the case. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, but Musk responded by saying that Brockman and Sam Altman would be the most hated men in America by the end of the week. Musk's lawyers are attempting to paint Brockman as motivated by money at the expense of OpenAI's nonprofit mission.

AMAZON BUILT A MASSIVE SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ITSELF. NOW IT'S FOR HIRE

Amazon has launched Amazon Supply Chain Services, a centralized place for companies to hire Amazon for services such as fulfillment, ocean and air shipping, and truck transportation. The offering puts Amazon in competition with transportation and warehousing giants such as DSV and DHL. The global market for third-party logistics is estimated to be more than $1.3 trillion. The move is a bet that Amazon can do for logistics what Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing.

SPACEX BREAKS GROUND ON SOLAR FAB TO POWER ORBITAL DATA CENTERS

SpaceX is constructing one of the world's most advanced solar cell factories in Bastrop, Texas. The company is vertically integrating the entire fabrication process to produce highly specialized aerospace-grade solar cells. Vertical integration allows SpaceX to insulate itself from global supply chain vulnerabilities while also giving it total control over the physical limits of solar cell efficiency and mass. SpaceX needs a continuous, high-volume supply of bespoke solar arrays to successfully pull off its plans of deploying an orbital cloud network capable of handling AI workloads.

THE ROOMBA GUY'S SECOND ACT: A ROBOT YOU'LL WANT TO SNUGGLE

Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup headed by Colin Angle, the former CEO of the company that invented the Roomba, has unveiled a robot designed by former Disney Imagineers to be cute and appealing. The Familiar is an emotionally intelligent robot trained to respond appropriately to tone of voice, body language, and overall vibe. The company will market the robot to people who want to monitor their loved ones, and it is also keen to sell Familiars to people who would like to support their own well-being. The robot is still in an early prototype phase, so there is no information on pricing or availability.

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FORMATTING AN ENTIRE 25 MILLION LINE CODEBASE OVERNIGHT: THE RUBYFMT STORY

Stripe runs the world's largest Ruby codebase. The pain of not having an auto-formatter was visible in how its engineers worked. In 2022, the company set two engineers from its infrastructure team to work full-time on rubyfmt, a tool that is currently being used to format 100% of Stripe's 42 million lines of Ruby. This post tells the story of how rubyfmt came to be.

REDIS ARRAY TYPE: SHORT STORY OF A LONG DEVELOPMENT

The PR for a new Array data type for Redis took four months to create using AI assistance. AI tools allowed the developer working on the code to venture into a level of complexity they would have otherwise skipped. They helped make tasks easier and less tedious while also providing a virtual workforce that could reveal bugs in complicated algorithms.

GAMESTOP OFFERS TO BUY EBAY FOR $56 BILLION

GameStop has made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for $56 billion, a roughly 20% premium to the company's stock closing price on Friday. GameStop is a much smaller company than eBay and is currently valued at around $12 billion. The company has around $9 billion in cash and a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing to help make the deal possible, but it is unknown how the company will come up with the rest of the money.

AI FOR BIO HAS A FUZZY API PROBLEM

Biology is a uniquely hard application domain for machine learning. Drug discovery doesn't have the kind of clean feedback loops and clean interfaces that make modern ML so powerful elsewhere. Software has clean APIs, and when things break, you can usually trace the failure to a bug and fix the code. Biology's outputs are a lot fuzzier as there are many caveats at every step of the process.

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MENTAL MODEL FOR AGENTIC WORK

This post presents a mental model that applies everywhere in agentic systems that works because the architecture underneath the tools is always the same.

ARE VCS DUMB FOR INVESTING IN CRAZY $1B+ SEED ROUNDS?

Most of these investments won't work out, but the returns from just one of them being successful will justify the losing bets.

IOS 27 WILL LET YOU CREATE CUSTOM WALLET PASSES

A new 'Create a Pass' option will let users generate digital passes from scans of things like movie tickets, concert passes, and gym membership cards.

BECOME A CURATOR FOR TLDR AI (3-5 HRS/WEEK)

TLDR is looking for an engineer/researcher at a major AI lab or startup to help write for 1M+ subscribers. Our curators have been invited to Google I/O and OpenAI DevDay, scouted for Tier 1 VCs, and get early access to unreleased TLDR products. Learn more [21].

DATA CENTERS AT SEA: OREGON'S PANTHALASSA NETS $140M LED BY PETER THIEL FOR WAVE-POWERED AI

Panthalassa has a technology platform that turns waves into reliable, clean power to power onsite AI computing.

Y COMBINATOR'S STAKE IN OPENAI

Y Combinator owns about 0.6% of OpenAI, a stake worth over $5 billion.

HUMANOID ROBOT ACTUATORS: THE COMPLETE ENGINEERING GUIDE

Every step that humanoid robots take results in a shock through the leg actuators - this means roughly one million impacts for every month of operation.

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META PLATFORMS ACQUIRES HUMANOID ROBOT STARTUP ASSURED ROBOT INTELLIGENCE

Meta has acquired a startup that is trying to build humanoid robots. Assured Robot Intelligence is a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence. Its team will join Meta to focus on optimizing models for robotics applications. Investors are skeptical of Meta's spending plans - the company's stock was down following the announcement of the acquisition.

SPACEX HAS SPENT MORE THAN $15 BILLION ON STARSHIP AND IS RACING TO MAKE ROCKETRY RESEMBLE AN AIRLINE SCHEDULE

SpaceX has so far spent more than $15 billion developing Starship. The company's capital expenditure surged nearly fivefold between 2024 and 2025 to $20.7 billion. Of that spend, $12.7 billion was directed at AI initiatives. Starlink is still the company's financial engine, making $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025.

THE COMPANY THAT BUILT TIKTOK'S ALGORITHM IS NOW DESIGNING DRUGS FOR DISEASES PHARMA CALLED UNDRUGGABLE

ByteDance has entered the AI drug discovery race. The company's drug discovery unit, Anew Labs, recently presented its first AI-designed therapy at a major immunology conference. Its work targeted a protein-protein interaction long thought to be undruggable. The unit has published a generative model that it claims can design functional molecules across all scales.

AMERICA'S ELECTRICITY GAP

Power access is incredibly important to tech companies' gamble on AI development. The US was always going to need more power investment to meet its next phase of economic growth and was already struggling to meet rising electricity demand well before the AI boom. The costs of the electricity gap are mounting as power becomes more important to the national economy. More of the US will have to permit the fast deployment of solar and batteries if they want to meet their own increasing electricity needs.