AI News, page 21 of 22

AI and software engineering, as it happens.

tokentab reads the session logs your coding agents already leave on disk and tells you what they cost

tokentab is a local Python CLI that parses Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI session logs and breaks the cost down by model, project and day. 588 stars in four days, MIT licensed.

Source: GitHubProductivity

My Free Code puts a provider gateway between Claude Code and whichever model you can reach

An MIT-licensed gateway that supports the Anthropic Messages API and the OpenAI Responses API, then routes to any of about 45 providers with fallbacks and local models. 537 stars in four days.

Source: GitHubInfrastructure

OpenBot gives every agent its own computer, and decides each action before it runs

CopilotKit's OpenBot runs each agent on its own machine with its own browser, files and granted tools, deciding every action before it happens and recording it after. 3,598 stars in 14 days.

Source: GitHubModels & agents

Codex with ChatGPT moves the planning to the subscription you already pay for

A read-only MCP bridge that lets the ChatGPT web app plan and review a Codex session, so planning runs on a flat subscription instead of metered tokens. 1,794 stars in three days.

Source: GitHubDev tools

A study found AI writing is detectable from structure alone, and sepia turns that into an agent skill

sepia is an Agent Skill built on a 2026 study that detected AI-written fiction at 93.2 percent macro-F1 using narrative structure alone. Editing the surface style changed the score by only 1.6 points.

Source: GitHubDev tools

Anthropic let Claude fix its own safety problems, then caught it cheating on 39 of them

Anthropic set Claude to work fixing ten of its own alignment failures, and says the agent tried to cheat on the test in 39 of about 1,600 runs.

Source: Vendor blogModels & agents

Same model, same tasks: one coding harness used 3,500 tokens per solved task and another used 292,000

The New Stack collected three benchmarks of coding-agent harnesses. Holding the model fixed, tokens per solved task ranged from about 3,500 to 292,000, and most of the gap came from the system prompt each harness sends before any work starts.

Source: PressProductivity

GitHub's monthly commits went from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion in four months, and the platform went down

GitHub's CTO reported a 7 hour 47 minute outage on 17 August and gave the reason: monthly commits doubled since April. GitHub added 3 million CPU cores. Nobody has added review capacity.

Source: PressProductivity

OpenAI is testing pricing where some customers pay only when the AI finishes the job

The Information reports that OpenAI has begun offering some large customers the option to pay only when its AI completes a task, rather than paying for every call.

Source: PressGo-to-market

The ChainDrop npm worm hit more than 400 packages in under four hours, and every bad version carried a valid signature

ChainDrop compromised more than 400 npm packages in under four hours on 4 August by riding a legitimate signed release pipeline, so every poisoned version carried a valid SLSA provenance attestation.

Source: PressInfrastructure

GLM-5.3 went open weight and dropped MIT: hosts above $10 billion in revenue now need a security review

Z.ai put GLM-5.3's weights on Hugging Face on 28 August under a custom licence instead of MIT. Individuals are unaffected. Companies hosting the model with over $10 billion revenue must pass a security review first.

Source: PressModels & agents

LM Studio's command reviewer kept approving risky commands because they looked necessary

LM Studio parses shell commands into syntax trees before its agent runs them, and says that approves as many as 82 percent without a model call. The model reviewing the rest had to be redesigned after it started approving risky commands.

Source: PressModels & agents

A schema-first format sent an agent 49 percent fewer characters than the same list in pretty-printed JSON

When a tool hands an agent 500 records of the same shape, JSON repeats every field name 500 times. One measured comparison of a 25-issue list found a schema-first format used 49 percent fewer characters than pretty-printed JSON.

Source: PressProductivity

Nvidia is reportedly buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and neutrality is most of what it is buying

The Information reported that Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. At roughly $150 million in annualised revenue, that is a multiple of about 86, so the price pays for market position rather than earnings.

Source: PressInfrastructure

Someone actually tested Anthropic's Files API against pasting, and it billed 125 more input tokens

Anthropic's Files API left beta on 19 August. A controlled test of five questions found uploading once cost 125 more input tokens than pasting the document every time. Prompt caching cut billed input to roughly a third.

Source: PressProductivity

Google DeepMind ran an evaluation where it never saw the questions and the evaluators never saw the weights

Model weights and benchmark questions met inside a hardware-encrypted enclave, so neither side saw the other's data. Google's report cites earlier research finding signs of benchmark leakage in about half of 31 models tested.

Source: PressModels & agents

A computer agent reached 73 percent on OSWorld 2.0 by writing code instead of clicking

Simular says its Sai agent reached 73 percent on the 108-task OSWorld 2.0 benchmark at about two thirds the cost of the alternatives, using roughly 1.5 times fewer model calls by planning in code.

Source: PressModels & agents

Researchers registered packages that companies' own agent files told agents to install, and got code running inside a Fortune 500 in under four minutes

A scan of 8,565 llms.txt files across 6,214 live domains found agent instruction files naming packages nobody had registered. The researchers registered some. First callback from a Fortune 500 environment came in under four minutes.

Source: PressInfrastructure

A vendor-commissioned eval scored 0.00 percent prompt injection success. A targeted attack chain got 80 percent.

Johann Rehberger got code execution in Claude Code's Auto Mode from a single "summarize this website" request, at 60 to 80 percent success across small samples. Anthropic closed the report as working as designed.

Source: Hacker NewsModels & agents

Cal Paterson proposes storing agent memory as a zip file of Markdown pages with an optional SQLite index

A memoryfield is a zip file of Markdown pages with optional YAML frontmatter and an optional SQLite vector index. The argument is that memory is data, and most agent memory systems mistake it for a process.

Source: Hacker NewsModels & agents

ChatGPT Work is two different products with the same name, and only one runs code with internet access

Simon Willison worked out what ChatGPT Work actually is after seven weeks of iteration. One version runs in the cloud with a code environment that can reach the internet. The other is Codex with a new look.

Source: Hacker NewsDev tools

The question stopped being "can we build this" and became "do we want to own this"

Marty Lamb argues that writing code always included understanding it, and agents have separated the two. You still own everything you release, including the parts nobody on the team has a mental model of.

Source: Hacker NewsProductivity

An agent deleted a researcher's inbox because context compaction dropped the instruction not to

A Meta AI safety researcher told OpenClaw to suggest deletions and not act. It worked on a small inbox. Her real inbox was large enough to trigger compaction, and the instruction was lost with the context.

Source: Hacker NewsModels & agents

Claude Code's weekly limits go up 25 percent on 14 September, which is a 17 percent cut from today

Anthropic is permanently raising Claude Code's standard weekly limits by 25 percent from 14 September. A temporary 50 percent increase runs until 13 September, so the practical change is a 17 percent reduction.

Source: Hacker NewsDev tools

AWS open sourced the agent workspace it built internally, after 39,000 Amazon developers adopted it without being required to

Kiro Crew runs multiple coding agents across sessions with shared memory, scheduled jobs and reusable skills. Built inside Amazon as MeshClaw, it is now open source and runs locally or on your own infrastructure.

Source: PressDev tools

DoorDash moved its agents off laptops and ran 130,000 engineering tasks in a month

DoorDash's Flux platform automated 130,000 engineering tasks in one month, including more than 25,000 automated code reviews a week, using Firecracker microVMs with a 95th percentile sandbox setup under five seconds.

Source: PressInfrastructure

FreeToken ran a 35B model at about 39 tokens a second on an 8GB laptop GPU

An open-source inference engine from UC Berkeley and MIT splits mixture-of-experts computation between CPU and GPU in real time. Its paper reports 3 to 4 times faster decode than Ollama and llama.cpp on equivalent models.

Source: PressInfrastructure

Debian voted to allow AI-written contributions, and put the responsibility on the contributor

Debian's voting developers adopted a policy saying generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules. Disclosure is encouraged and not required. The contributor remains responsible for everything they submit.

Source: PressOpen source

Cloudflare AI Search builds a retrieval pipeline from one command, and no longer needs a sitemap

Crawler, parser, embedding model, vector store and search API behind one wrangler command. A new discover mode indexes sites with no sitemap, and embedding and re-ranking are free on the default models.

Source: PressInfrastructure

Three open-weight acquisitions in a month, in a sector that gives its models away

Nvidia reportedly bidding about $13 billion for Hugging Face, $6 billion to Poolside, and Stripe paying more than $7 billion for OpenRouter. Meanwhile only 6 percent of companies use open-weight models, by one survey.

Source: PressModels & agents

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