标签：#ai

The Toy Story franchise began with a story about a vintage doll feeling threatened by the arrival of an electronic action figure. Woody and Buzz's rivalry embodied a shift that was happening in the '90s as children's toys were becoming more technologically sophisticated, and while toys have gotten even more tech-focused in the years since, […]

Critical Energy is turning rocket engines into geothermal power plants, and it wants to build 300 GW per year by 2045.

AI is pretty reliable at putting things on your calendar these days, but it hasn't quite cracked answering the related and all-important question of "What should I do this weekend?" Meta's new AI Mode in search could be a useful tool - if it ever learns to stop getting stuff wrong. AI Mode is a […]

Turbo Start Aisle is our agentic e-commerce starter on Shopify and Sanity. Instead of filters...

If you build with AI, three stories this week rhyme into one theme: the hype is colliding with the bill. Here's the builder's read on each — and what I'd actually do about it. 1. Most of a new TikTok feed is now AI slop A Kapwing study reported by Tubefilter hand-checked 10,742 videos across 20 categories and found that 59% of what a brand-new TikTok account sees is AI-generated . Kids content was the worst — 57% slop, with the #CartoonKids tag hitting 97% — and TikTok serves roughly 3x more slop than YouTube. Why builders should care: generation is now free and infinite, so volume is worthless as a moat. The scarce thing is taste and verification. If your product or content can be faked by a feed of bots, it will be. Polish, point of view, and "a human clearly did this" are the new differentiators. 2. Databricks grew 80% — but agents are eating its margins Per CNBC , Databricks' annualized revenue jumped about 80% to ~$6.9B, and its AI products now bring in $1.7B (up from $1.4B). The catch: the CEO says gross margin "will go lower" as customers run more agents. Why builders should care: this is the quiet tax of agentic software. An agent that loops, retries, and calls tools burns far more tokens than a single API call. If you're shipping agents, budget for inference at scale , not the sticker price on the pricing page. Profitability now lives in prompt efficiency, caching, and knowing when not to call the model. 3. 60% of US consumers are turned off by "AI" branding A WordPress VIP survey of 2,000 people, covered by TechCrunch , found that 60% reject "AI" in brand messaging , while 86% still want to check the original sources behind a claim. Why builders should care: "Now with AI!" is starting to read like a warning label. Sell the outcome, not the technology — "2x faster," "fewer errors," "your data stays private" — and cite where your results come from. Trust is becoming a feature you ship, not a slogan you bolt on. The takeaway Feeds are flooded, agents are cost

Lars Faye's Agentic Coding Is a Trap — published Sunday, May 3, picked up on Hacker News at 398 points and 316 comments — is the best single compendium of the cognitive-debt evidence base anyone has put together in 2026. It catalogues the studies. It names the trade-offs. It lands on a personal-discipline conclusion. The receipts are now collected; the careful reader will have spent the weekend nodding through them. Buried in Faye's second paragraph, almost in passing, is the line that does the actual analytical work. Faye describes the agentic workflow as a process in which "someone defines the project's requirements ... generates a plan, and then pulls the slot machine lever over and over, iterating and reiterating with often multiple agent instances until it's done." The link goes to a March post by Quentin Rousseau, CTO and co-founder of Rootly, titled One More Prompt: The Dopamine Trap of Agentic Coding. The metaphor isn't Faye's. Rousseau got there first, in clinical language: the workflow runs on "variable ratio reinforcement — the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive form of gambling" . That is the framing the rest of Faye's piece is downstream of, and it is the framing this article is about. What the receipts add up to Faye's catalogue, briefly. Anthropic's own research note on internal use names what it calls the "paradox of supervision" : effective use of Claude requires the very skills that sustained Claude use atrophies. MIT Media Lab's Your Brain on ChatGPT measured the cognitive impact and labelled it cognitive debt . A Microsoft study covered by 404 Media reached parallel findings for knowledge workers more broadly. A separate Anthropic study on coding skills reported a 47% drop-off in debugging skills among engineers leaning heavily on AI-assisted workflows. Sandor Nyako, the LinkedIn engineering director who oversees fifty engineers, has reportedly asked his team not to use these tools for "tasks that require cri

Google's first new smart speaker in six years starts shipping on June 29th, narrowly missing its promised spring launch window. Preorders for the Google Home Speaker open today, June 17th. Nothing has changed hardware-wise in the nine months since the $99 speaker was announced. It has the same slightly squished round design, with touch-capacitive buttons […]

OpenTelemetry has become the standard for observing modern systems. But when you start building AI applications, traditional traces aren't enough. You don't just want to know that a request happened. You want to know: Which model generated the output? Which provider was used? How many tokens were consumed? What embedding model processed the documents? How much did the operation cost? These questions become even more important when building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Recently while contributing to Mastra, I discovered an observability gap involving RAG embedding operations. This led me to open a pull request that introduced proper OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic mappings for RAG_EMBEDDING spans. The Problem Mastra already exported rich metadata for several AI operations. However, RAG embedding spans were missing standardized GenAI semantic attributes. As a result, observability tools could see that an embedding operation occurred, but they couldn't easily understand: Model information Provider information Token usage Embedding-specific metadata Without standardized semantic conventions, dashboards and tracing systems lose valuable context. This becomes a bigger issue in production environments where teams need visibility into AI workloads. Understanding RAG Embedding Spans A typical RAG pipeline looks like this: Documents ↓ Chunking ↓ Embedding Model ↓ Vector Database ↓ Similarity Search ↓ LLM Generation The embedding stage is critical. Every document chunk gets transformed into a vector representation. If observability data from this stage is incomplete, debugging performance issues becomes significantly harder. Why OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions Matter OpenTelemetry doesn't just define traces. It also defines semantic conventions. These conventions create a common language for telemetry data. Instead of every framework inventing custom field names, everyone follows the same standard. For GenAI workloads this means tools can automatically underst

I Built a Vanilla JS Web App that Scored 100/100 Under Lighthouse’s New "Agentic Browsing" Audit. Here’s What It Means. If you have run a performance audit on PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse recently, you might have noticed a fascinating new line item quietly slipping into the metadata report: Agentic Browsing . When I audited my free tool suite, Paktheta , I managed to hit the ultimate developer milestone— a perfect 100/100 across Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. But seeing that perfect score alongside the label "Agentic Browsing" got me thinking. What exactly is an AI-driven agent experiencing when it hits our sites, and why is this the new gold standard for web performance? Let's dive into what Agentic Browsing actually means for the future of optimization. What on Earth is "Agentic Browsing"? Historically, speed tests like Lighthouse were passive. A headless browser opened your URL, waited for the page to load, recorded metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and closed the tab. It was a linear, predictable, and frankly synthetic snapshot. Agentic Browsing changes the paradigm entirely. Instead of a basic static script, modern auditing platforms use autonomous, intelligent browser agents. Guided by modern AI-driven browser control (using updated instances like HeadlessChromium), these agents don't just stare at your page—they explore it like a real human would. An agentic audit runner will: Identify interactive buttons and click them to test responsiveness. Scan form elements to see if they accept paste commands cleanly. Intelligently look for broken layout shifts (CLS) by dynamically scrolling and triggering micro-animations. Interact with JavaScript components to see if they block the main execution thread. In short: It simulates real, unpredictable human behavior at lightning speed. If your site relies on bloated frameworks that look fast initially but lock up the second a user tries to interact, an a

The Canadian pension giant will acquire an 8.2% stake in CtrlS, a tech giant that operates more than 15 data centers across India.

With this acquisition, DeepL is opening an office in San Francisco to expand its U.S. business.

Let's be real: There's no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That's true even if you've exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it's fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply […]

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI. Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more...

Aditya Kumarakrishnan explains how to move past the "amnesia phase" of AI. He shares a blueprint for engineering leaders to build modular agent frameworks using CoALA, leverage decades of process science for scalable workflows, and "terraform" legacy environments into robust, event-sourced artifacts capable of handling unpredictable, cross-functional agent demands. By Aditya Kumarakrishnan

Pinterest has launched 'Ask Pinterest,' an experimental AI-powered shopping app that lets users seek recommendations and inspiration through a conversational interface.

Hello, I'm Maneshwar. I'm building git-lrc, a Micro AI code reviewer that runs on every commit. It is...

Ask a language model to score a developer portfolio out of 100 and you get a confident number back. Hand it a near-empty page with a name and a broken avatar, and it will often still tell you something like 92. Nice layout. Strong personal branding. The model is being polite, not accurate. That was the first wall I hit building Leon, the reviewer inside getfolio. If the score is not trustworthy, nothing downstream matters: the critique, the suggestions, and the fix button all hang off a number the model invented to sound encouraging. This is the build log of how I stopped letting the model hold the pen. Short version: a deterministic rules engine owns the score, and the language model only owns the words around it. The failure mode: an LLM judge wants to be liked If you have shipped anything with an LLM evaluator you have probably seen this. You hand it a rubric, a JSON schema, even worked examples, and it still drifts upward. Empty inputs get encouraging scores. Weak inputs get the benefit of the doubt. Strong inputs land in the same band as the weak ones, just with longer praise. A few reasons, roughly in order of how much they hurt: Tuning rewards a helpful, encouraging tone. Harsh scoring reads as unhelpful, so the model softens it. The model has no ground truth for what a 70 versus an 85 looks like in your specific domain. It is scoring on vibes. Scoring and explaining are entangled. The model writes the kind explanation first, then picks a number to match the nice things it just said. Run it twice on the same input and you get two different numbers. There is no anchor. For a portfolio reviewer that real recruiters and developers would act on, that was a non-starter. If Leon says 64, an empty page should not be able to reach 64 by accident, and a strong portfolio should not get talked down to it either. The number has to mean something. The fix: rules engine owns the score, model owns the language The architecture splits responsibilities hard. A deterministic e

Originally published on the Sieve blog . Sieve is an open-source (Apache 2.0) context-reduction proxy — I work on it, and I've tried to keep this post about the problem rather than the tool. If you run an LLM agent for real work, the bill is the part nobody warned you about. It starts small, it grows with use, and the worst of it is invisible — most of what you pay for on any given turn is text the model has already seen, or text you never meant to send. There's a temptation to treat this as one problem with one fix. It isn't. An agent's token bill has two distinct causes, and they need two genuinely different kinds of tool. This post is about telling them apart — because once you can, the question stops being "which tool wins" and becomes "which of my two problems am I looking at right now." The bill is mostly things you didn't choose Start with where the tokens actually go, because it's rarely where people assume. When your agent calls a tool, the model doesn't just pay for your request — it pays for the machinery of asking. Anthropic's own pricing documentation spells this out: the tools parameter alone adds hundreds of tokens of schema to every request, the bash tool adds a fixed overhead, and a single web fetch pulls the fetched page straight into your context — "Average web page (10 kB): ~2,500 tokens... Research paper PDF (500 kB): ~125,000 tokens". A tool result you glance at once and never need again can cost more than the entire conversation around it. Now add the part that repeats. On every turn, a typical agent re-sends its system prompt, its full tool catalogue, its persona, and the conversation so far. The variable part of the request — what you actually typed — is often the smallest thing in the payload. The fixed overhead, multiplied across every turn of a long session, is the bill. So the cost has two shapes, and they're not the same shape: Verbose machine output — JSON tool results, logs, search dumps, fetched pages, code listings. Big, one-off, an

The next humanoid robot might not have a head. It might not have legs. It might even sit on a wheeled base and fold down like a deck chair. But, as Genesis AI puts it, "humanoid robots don't need to look human." That explains the look of Eno, the new robot from the French startup […]

GitHub has introduced the GitHub Copilot app, a desktop control centre for agent-native development that aims to keep engineers in charge while AI agents handle more coding work. Mario Rodriguez writes on the GitHub blog that the recent wave of coding agents has brought faster delivery but also "disjointed workflows, more context switching, and too much time spent reviewing agent-generated code". By Matt Saunders