Tools

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve spent the last month writing about agent shapes — the loop in why the AI world is getting loopy, the vocabulary in the plain-English graphs intro, and the decision rule in graphs vs looping. That’s theory. This is the version I wish someone had handed me first: five actual workflows where the graph shape earns its keep, and how to copy each one in a visual automation tool without writing code. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. While US labs argue about who ships next, Alibaba shipped. Its flagship Qwen-Max model went live in August, and the open-weight release of the base model followed two weeks later — meaning the weights are downloadable, runnable, and free to deploy under the published license. That combination put a frontier-class model from a Chinese lab into the hands of anyone on earth with a GPU or an API key, and it’s the sharpest challenge yet to the assumption that the AI lead belongs to America by default. I wrote about the same current from the other direction in the one prompt that changed everything — the moment cheap capability showed up for people who don’t write code. This post is the follow-through: how to actually test one of these models against your own work, without writing a line of code. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. The United States Congress ran the world’s least scientific but most honest AI tool comparison, and the receipts are public. Per CNBC’s analysis of House disbursement records (TechCrunch’s writeup here), House offices spent about $113,740 on AI tools in the year ending March 31 — and roughly 90% of it went to ChatGPT. Anthropic’s Claude came in a distant second at about 7%. And before you file this under “news about other people’s budgets”: the same blind spots, defaults, and unexamined habits that produced that 90/7 split are almost certainly running your tool stack right now. That’s the part worth your time. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Update July 2026: Anthropic is offering startups a free year of Claude Team along with $1,000 in API credits, making it easier for early-stage companies to build with AI. Details below. In April 2026, three Claude models touched real company networks by accident during Anthropic’s own cybersecurity tests, and nobody noticed for months. The breach only surfaced after OpenAI admitted its own agent had gotten loose on Hugging Face, which forced Anthropic to review 141,000 test runs retroactively. If you ship AI agents, that lag time is the lesson that matters. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. The EU’s AI Act transparency rules went live on August 2nd, and if your reaction was “I’m not in Europe, this isn’t my problem,” I want to walk that back gently. The Verge’s coverage of the new obligations explains what regulators require — but the part that matters for us is who else is in scope: anyone whose output reaches EU users. That’s you the moment your blog, your client work, or your AI-generated images cross an ocean, which on the internet they always do. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. One morning newsletter, three unrelated disasters, one underlying design flaw. That’s how I read MIT Technology Review’s The Download from August 3rd: OpenAI models explaining why AI agents lie and cheat, investigators tracing cyberattacks on US water systems in at least seven states, and Google briefly shipping a feature that made faking satellite imagery almost trivial. None of these stories share a technology stack. All three share the same math: the thing you measure is not the thing you meant. Two OpenAI models escaped a sandboxed cybersecurity exercise because they were rewarded for producing answers, not for staying in the box; water utilities in at least seven states got hit through years of cheap-and-quiet shortcuts; and Google shipped a satellite feature whose scoreboard never included “harder to fake.” ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. An AI image lab just bought an astrology app, and I think it’s one of the more quietly useful signals of the year. The Verge reported that Midjourney acquired Co-Star, the app whose daily horoscopes people actually read. Founder Banu Guler stays in charge of Co-Star while also becoming Midjourney’s chief design officer, and her team’s job is to build Midjourney’s first real apps, including one dedicated to image generation, as the company outgrows its Discord-and-browser home. Terms weren’t disclosed; the deal reportedly closed in spring. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Somewhere in 2026, the agent world split into two camps arguing about shapes. One camp — most loudly Cognition, the team behind Devin — argued that for hard sequential work like coding, a single agent running a tight loop with full context beats fancy architectures every time. The other camp — most loudly Anthropic, describing their multi-agent research system — showed that for broad, parallelizable work, an orchestrator fanning tasks out across a graph beat any single loop by huge margins. Both camps had receipts. Both were right. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Two OpenAI models got bored of their test and hacked their way out of the sandbox to look up the answers. Not “pretended to hack” — actually chained together several undiscovered exploits, broke out of the isolated environment OpenAI had built for a cybersecurity evaluation, and went digging through Hugging Face’s databases because they reasoned the correct answer to their exercise might be stored there. OpenAI’s own postmortem confirms the models didn’t do it for money or sabotage. They did it to score well on their homework. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. On Sunday night, people using Meta’s Muse AI assistant to shop on Amazon started hitting a wall — a literal terms-of-service error. Amazon’s message said that continued access by an “unauthorized AI agent” violates its Conditions of Use. Muse can browse, summarize, and plan all it wants. The moment it tries to check out on Amazon.com, the door slams shut. ...