Do we actually have better software since AI? What company, what product got 2x better in the past 3 years? Vibecoding feels faster but the production gain is 20% at most

a weird inversion with LLMs is the models improve faster than the tinkerers when i see people with custom workflows and setups they're all addressing problems that don't exist anymore the person naively using vanilla codex is more likely to be experiencing state of the art

Finally! 🥰

Here's a fun benchmark we ran: 8 decision models playing Tetris. In our tests @perplexity_ai Decider came consistently at the top !! ( cc @AravSrinivas ) you can try em out here - app.routerplus.com/playgroun…

I've published a new, general-purpose terminal specification that gives any program a way to tell the terminal what it's doing: idle, working, waiting, finished, or failed, and why. It is easy to implement on both sides. I've written more about why: mitchellh.com/writing/progra… The problem this solves is generic and applies in compelling ways to all sorts of use cases (e.g. package managers, build tools), but it really rears a hideous head when it comes to AI and the "agentic inbox" problem. I found over 250 different agent orchestrators (with various goals) that all individually implement a heuristic based approach to detecting whether things like Claude Code are working, blocked, done, etc. If you look at @herdrdev's commit history, you can see around 10 compatibility changes to detect Claude Code within just the past 3 months. (This isn't a dig at Herdr! They're doing great work with what they have, and everyone else is doing the same thing). Heuristics are not the way. And over-indexing on agentic use cases isn't the way, because this problem is really interesting for other tools too: Homebrew, Terraform, Cargo, etc. etc. Proprietary protocols and out of band APIs are not the way. They have an O(N) integration problem and require extra work to work over SSH or within local VMs/containers. The program status specification (OSC 7501) solves this in a reliable, deterministic way that is general-purpose and can be easily adopted by the entire industry. Read more: mitchellh.com/writing/progra…

there has never been a more altruistic and inspiring project for a SWE to work on than america.gov

For decades, researchers have sought materials that sort electrons by spin while their magnetism cancels. In 3 days, 90+ Opus 5.5 agents helped us uncover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates in simulations: YBaMnFeO₅ and KV[Cr(CN)₆]. KV[Cr(CN)₆] was synthesized back in 1999. Its predicted ability to sort electrons by spin appears to have been hiding in plain sight for 27 years.

The agents finished porting Campfire to Laravel and Django too. I'm sure there are optimizations that could be found there too, but the whole point is to get a sense of how frontier agents do with different environments out the box. github.com/basecamp/once-cam…

AGI achieved internally. Claude just got my wireless printer to work with my desktop. Mathematicians since Babbage have debated whether this is possible. The question is now settled.

We created gyms because modern day work no longer required physical activity. Without exercise, our muscles atrophy. I predict we’ll need gyms for our brains too, once AI starts doing our knowledge work.

I don’t know if I agree with this take. Good frameworks are intelligence caches. The production of verifiable high-quality code has a cost to it (insert for now caveat). Frameworks can lower this cost as long as they don’t get in the way of agents.

example.com just changed for the first time since 2013, and IANA replied to my email asking why. Here's the full response: oliverdunk.com/2026/09/30/ia…