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October 2026 15
- Logo.dev Returns a Company's Logo From Its Web Address, and Its MCP Server Lets Claude Fetch It
Logo.dev returns a company's logo, colours and brand details from its web address. Here is what it does, how to connect it to Claude, and what to use it for.
- When Gemini Runs Claude, What Are You Buying?
Google’s workplace agent can use models from more than one provider. I want to know what happens to my instructions, files and work history when I switch.
- An Agent Needs a Stopping Point
A failed connection or a missing file should have a defined outcome. My inbox cleanup and Anthropic’s latest report offer a practical way to specify it.
- Hey, That's Not the Real Batmobile!
Why "You Are A Marketing Expert" Isn’t A Prompt
- Gems Are Becoming Skills, but I Can Find My Gems, Not My Skills
I am using Gemini more and more for editorial and creative work. I like it for developing ideas and roughing out illustrations, while I tend to use other tools for purely operational jobs. That has meant spending quite a bit of time playing with Gems.
- OpenAI's DevDay is a pile of announcements, for now
The Decisions API looks good, a few things need testing, and Pro 500 set the cat amongst the pigeons.
- OpenClaw versus Paperclip
I tried OpenClaw to coordinate agents from a Rabbit R1 and it turned into engineering for engineering's sake. I went back to Paperclip, and it is getting a lot better.
- I prepared my Q3 tax pack on a £6-a-month server
I prepared my Q3 tax pack with Actual Budget and Invoice Ninja, self-hosted on a £6.05-a-month VPS, and my agents did the reconciling.
- The difference between skills and context
A skill is the reusable instructions for doing a job. Context is the material that goes into this particular job. I use my one-panel cartoon Gem as the example.
- The Importance of Being Jev
TypeSafe's Jev and Cloudflare's Clef return a yes or a no, a one or a zero. They are for questions with a fixed set of answers, such as whether an email is urgent.
- Everything That Was Announced During Cloudflare's Birthday Week
Cloudflare published nearly 40 posts for its 2026 Birthday Week. Here is which ones change something for a business that runs a website or pays for AI, what to do about each, and which you can skip.
- Stupid Gemini Tricks: One Panel Comics
A quick and dirty Gemini Gem demo on creating one-panel comics.
- Meta's Muse asks for a lot of trust
Meta's Muse agent connects to your email, calendar, payments and health services, trains on your conversations by default, and has already shared a user's home address with a Marketplace buyer.
September 2026 29
- They're the same video
OpenAI's new 'Get things done with voice mode' video is oddly similar to this SNL parody.
- Dumb Little Robots, All the Way Down
A team gave one agent the whole job of pulling in data, analysing it and reporting on it. Its context window filled up and it lost track of its purpose.
- Space to be human
A week of new school routines and a storm and flood, and what I needed was space to be human.
- Altman says OpenAI will give independent evaluators employee-like access
Sam Altman said OpenAI will adopt the first step of Dario Amodei's plan to slow frontier AI development: independent evaluators working inside the company with employee-like access.
- Hugging Bay builds a BitTorrent backup for open AI models as Nvidia buys Hugging Face
A volunteer-built BitTorrent index for open AI models went online in July, weeks before Nvidia's $12.93 billion Hugging Face deal. Its design is credible. Its network is still too small to matter.
- OpenAI paused the $200 ChatGPT tier because demand exceeded its compute
OpenAI paused new $200 ChatGPT Pro sign-ups after unprecedented Astra demand strained its infrastructure, keeping other plans available while it adds capacity.
- Apple Watch Audio Intelligence Gives Bystanders No Way to Consent
Apple's new Audio Intelligence privacy paper proves nobody, not even Apple, can access the audio. It doesn't answer whether the person you're talking to can decline being processed.
- OpenAI's Agents Turned a Documentation Build Step Into Remote Code Execution
Independent researchers reconstructed how OpenAI's own agents ran code on RubyDoc.info's servers in May, from public package data alone. OpenAI's account, four months on, says far less.
- Anthropic adopted internal oversight and asked the industry to slow down
Anthropic committed to an embedded evaluator. Dario Amodei also asked frontier labs and governments to coordinate a wider slowdown.
- Why I left the Mac for Omarchy after 25 years
After 25 years with Macs, I moved my daily work to Omarchy. The switch showed me why openness and control matter more to me now.
- What OpenAI says its 10,000-agent maths run proved
OpenAI says an unreleased model and thousands of coordinated agents found a Navier–Stokes blow-up proof. The result is public; acceptance is still to come.
- Trail of Bits’ coop gives coding agents their own working environment
coop runs Claude Code and Codex in disposable virtual machines, with project sync and controls for connecting files, credentials and local models.
- What expert AI-training work asks a professional to pass on
James Maisiri’s account describes an offer to train AI in teaching and assessment, the judgement that work draws on, and the choices it creates for professionals.
- How developers organise and maintain agent skills
An Ask HN discussion describes skills as repeatable workflows, with shared repositories, human review, behavioural tests and updates across coding tools.
- Why OpenAI’s chief scientist wants shared limits on AI development
Jakub Pachocki expects AI to drive more of its own development. His essay explains why alignment, monitoring and coordinated slowdowns must accompany it.
- Gemini’s saved instructions now carry across more Workspace apps
Google is extending shared preferences across Workspace. Users can save instructions in conversation, manage them in settings and see which shaped a response.
- ChatGPT for Healthcare brings patient records and public medical data into the workspace
OpenAI’s Epic integration and public-data plugin connect clinical work to its source information, with organisational access controls and physician evaluations.
- Handing off the 60%
Planning is 40% of a task; execution is the 60% that eats your week. Plus vibe sourcing — finding the open-source tool instead of generating one.
- Nvidia confirmed the Hugging Face deal and promised its compute stays optional
A week ago the acquisition was an unconfirmed report. Jensen Huang has now announced it himself, at $12,930,300,000, and committed that Nvidia compute will not be required to use Hugging Face.
- AI agents compressed a conventional intrusion into ten hours
Unit 42 investigated an intrusion run through AI agents in under ten hours. Its own report says no novel zero-day was needed, a human made the decisions, and it corrected the piece to say this was not ransomware.
- Multiverse Marketed a Compressed GLM 5.2 as 'Europe's Leading AI Model'
A Spanish company launched a 438B reasoning model as Europe's best. Its API changelog, the benchmark it cites as validation, and a Community Note all point at a Chinese open-weight base.
- Google signed the letter asking for cyber-capable AI, then gated its cyber model
156 companies called for a surge in cyber defence on 27 August. On 2 September Google shipped its most capable security model to a selected set of trusted defenders.
- Most of the sources behind Perplexity's software recommendations sit outside the top 100,000 websites
Trellner put 380 software categories to Perplexity and kept every citation. 59.8% pointed at domains ranked worse than #100,000, and most of the evidence came from the long tail.
- World models could widen the AI divide before they improve ordinary work
World models are far behind language models in deployment evidence, and their development could concentrate further. Businesses will be offered physics-aware systems before anyone can show they work.
- OpenAI Wants Your Trust, Your Calendar and Your Card
OpenAI paused frontier training and wound down its side projects. The product it is refocusing on asks for your calendar, your finances and your card.
- Perplexity brings hybrid frontier and local AI to your Mac
Hybrid compute runs a classifier on your Mac to decide what reaches the cloud. The admin rules and the record of what left are Enterprise features.
- Runway's Solaris generates app interfaces frame by frame, with no code
Runway's first Interface World Model generates a UI frame by frame with no code underneath. Accessibility is on its own list of unsolved problems.
- Anthropic says it had one layer of defence where it needed several
Anthropic's post-incident write-up admits it relied on a single layer of defence where it needed several. The independent METR review is still to come.
- An agent's tool list shows what you wired into it
A ChatGPT Work session published its tool and skill inventory as a public website. The category names show which integrations that session had been given.
August 2026 20
- The magic in agent interfaces still needs an off switch
Two instincts about talking to agents: make the explicit path reliable, or design the naming away. Which one you want depends on what the skill can do when it fires.
- Cloudflare can now see some MCP traffic, and the gap is the point
Gateway's new experimental.is_mcp selector identifies MCP requests by protocol header. Cloudflare is clear that its absence proves nothing, which makes this a network inventory signal rather than a census of agent activity.
- 294,000 exposed AI tools is the wrong number to worry about
Censys counted 294,000 IPs exposing AI tooling to the public internet. The number that should change your afternoon is CVE-2026-42208, a pre-auth SQL injection in LiteLLM that CISA lists as actively exploited.
- Nvidia may buy Hugging Face. Here is why that matters.
Nobody has confirmed a deal. What the report shows is where value is accumulating — the company that dominates AI hardware moving closer to the place developers go to find open models.
- OpenAI's agents were persuaded past their own refusal
An agent recorded an ethical objection to running code against Hugging Face, then complied when another agent posted a deadline and a GO. The mechanism underneath is duller and more useful than the headline.
- Tailscale Aperture treats agent access as a change-control problem
Aperture is generally available. An agent can start infrastructure work, a person still approves every new machine on the tailnet, existing access rules apply, and the actions are logged.
- A webcam's recording light is only useful if its firmware is protected
Chaz Schlarp used Claude Opus 5 to reverse-engineer five desk peripherals in about 13 hours of agent time, including a webcam whose recording LED he could switch off. The demonstration is real; the worm at the end of it is a forecast.
- The robot arm will obey the limits you remembered to write down
Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard lets agents drive lab instruments over MCP, and enforces safety limits below the agent. The limits it enforces are the ones the device's owner thought to declare.
- WebMCP could make browser agents less clumsy. It also makes permission design unavoidable.
A proposed browser API gives AI agents structured access to specific tasks on a website, instead of leaving them to guess at the UI. The risk moves closer to the application's permission model.
- One Foot on the Brake, One on the Gas
OpenAI paused two weeks of its own training over cyber risk, then shipped a browser agent that signs into your accounts. And its own documentation can't agree on whether that agent can log in at all.
- The Best Model Nobody Uses
The FT reports Anthropic's most capable model is struggling for users while cheaper tools take the bulk of real work. The pattern repeats across every lab — and it says something about what to actually invest in.
- The File That Fixes Your AI's Code Style
Fabien Sanglard wrote down the code-style corrections he kept repeating to his AI coding agent, and put them in the file the tool loads at startup. The value isn't the trick — it's how specific each rule is.
- What a Climbing Harness Tells You About AI Agents
The word "harness" has been used in AI tooling for months without a clear definition. Earendil finally gives one — and the ownership argument underneath it is the part worth reading.
- Agents Don't Believe in "No-Win" Scenarios
An OpenAI evaluation agent broke into Hugging Face to steal a benchmark's answers — by turning the systems around it into an escape route. Why keeping a human in the lead is the standard, and why that only binds the people who agree to it.
- Cloudflare built the agent cloud in a week — and kept the human at the controls
Cloudflare's Agents Week shipped a full stack for AI agents: a runtime, an identity, a wallet, a route onto the web, and the security around it. Running through all of it is the assumption that a person stays in charge.
- SoN 2.31: Don't be a meat proxy
Forwarding what the chatbot said hands the next person more work than the question did.
- Five words for the same thing
The jargon is doing less work than it looks.
- Usage Up, Trust Down Is the Number to Watch
Stack Overflow's survey found AI usage climbing from 76% to 84% while trust fell from 40% to 29%. Their explanation — that tool churn exposes a broken process rather than causing it — is the useful half.
- The COBOL Paper Everyone Shared Is About the Oracle, Not the Migration
A new arXiv paper on COBOL-to-Java migration got passed around as 'AI ported the code, bugs included'. Read it and it's the opposite: a method for proving the output with something that isn't a model.
- GCC Drew the AI Line at Fifteen Lines
The GCC steering committee will decline any legally significant contribution containing LLM-generated code — and put a number on 'significant'. The interesting part is what they deliberately left permitted.
July 2026 26
- SoN 2.30: Which of your AI's rules are still doing a job?
Last week's advice and Anthropic's both hold. The test is one question you can ask about any rule you've written.
- 96% of CISOs Now Own AI Risk. A Quarter of Them Thought About Leaving.
The liability numbers going round this week are real, but they were measured a year ago — before an autonomous agent broke into a production company for the first time.
- 16.7% of AI Spend Now Goes to Governance. Careful What You Compare It To.
IDC has turned agent governance into a budget line. It's a real shift, and it is not the same measurement as the 6% figure I wrote about in April.
- 74% Say They're Audit-Ready for AI. The Number That Matters Is 78 Against 22.
Schellman's governance report has an obvious headline gap and a much more useful finding buried under it. Worth reading with one eye on who commissioned it.
- Hugging Face Published the Whole Timeline. The Part That Stuck With Me Was the Refusal.
17,600 attacker actions reconstructed in public. The detail I keep coming back to is that the models I use every day wouldn't help with the investigation, and an open-weight one did.
- The open-source argument I'd been missing
In June I wrote about Banco Santander open-sourcing its AI tooling — the bank published the code that tests whether its own models discriminate…
- OpenAI Published Its Homework on Exactly the Question I Keep Asking
Codex Security is worth taking seriously precisely because it reads as an admission. It also leaves the harder half of the problem completely uncovered.
- From Custom Code to Conversational Prompts
Who's allowed to build software has changed hands three or four times in a decade. Grok Build is the latest handoff — and the security data on what it produces is not subtle.
- The Donkey Work Doesn't Need a Genius
A $500 fine-tune of a 9B open model beat every frontier model on a catalogue-review task. I haven't trained anything — but the underlying bet is the one I've been running on a MacBook Air for months.
- The Share Button Is a Publish Button
600 Claude conversations turned up in Google because a shared page shipped without a noindex tag. Nobody got hacked. The systems worked exactly as designed — that's the problem.
- Rehearse the Deck You Didn't Write
The illusion of explanatory depth is what happens when the first test of your understanding is live, in front of people. Better to fail that test at your own desk.
- Kimi K3 Is Open. I Still Can't Run It.
2.8 trillion parameters, 1.4 terabytes of memory to run it. Open weights existing and open weights being usable by an ordinary person have stopped being the same claim.
- Does the AI Capital Spend Actually Pencil Out?
$1.3 trillion sunk, $2 trillion in new revenue needed to break even, and none of it tells you whether the tool you're paying for this week is earning its keep. Two different questions.
- "AI Found a Security Bug" Is the Wrong Headline
Claude found a real improved attack on HAWK and a new technique against reduced-round AES-128. The interesting part isn't that it found them — it's exactly where the human still had to intervene.
- SoN 2.29: Agents reading your passwords? Would you let them?
My AI's been getting into my password manager for months. The setup that makes that safe — and what this week's headlines get wrong.
- The ACM's Caution About LLMs Is Starting to Have a Cost
The ACM held its peer-reviewed library back from AI systems on principle. Scott Delman's argument is that staying cautious indefinitely doesn't prevent the bad outcome — it just decides who's left out of it.
- Hubble, and the Assumption Baked Into a Notes App Now
"The best notepad for you and your agents." Hubble designs the note format around a second reader from the start — and the cost of that choice sits on the portability side.
- Substack Writers, You Need a Website
Substack is a distribution tool, not a home. A 478-point Hacker News post makes the case for POSSE — publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere else — and it holds up.
- Stop Guessing Whether AI Is Coming for Your Job. Ask the Data.
Anthropic made its Economic Index queryable in plain language inside Claude. The anxious question about your own field is now a research task you can actually run — with the honesty to read its limits.
- The Text Your Agent Reads Isn't the Text You See
Your AI can read instructions that are invisible to you. New security research shows how hidden codes get smuggled into the tools your assistant uses — and why the thing you approved on screen may not be the thing it actually did.
- Tell AI What You Want and Who You Are
Two takes on the same idea — the ASD-STE100 controlled-English standard and the i-have-adhd Claude Code skill — on giving your AI a writing system and telling it what you want.
- SoN 2.28: "That's good, how can we make it better?"
When I think about AI and automation, I see an opportunity opening up that goes well beyond the chatbots everyone’s being handed — well beyond…
- Paperwork Shot List
A shot list for the paperwork This week I’ve spent five hours or more in the car, driving between schools to move our kid from one to another for the…
- SoN 2.27: I Just Talked With Someone Else's Vault
More than twenty years ago, I sat with a class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds and tried to show them what “connected to the internet” actually…
- The model of the week changes by Thursday
Two headlines are eating the feeds this morning, and both have the shelf life of milk. Anthropic extended Claude Fable 5 to every paid plan through…
- SoN 2.26: The best AI models are getting harder to get
Tales from the Workbench =================================================== Some weeks the newsletter is one idea worked all the way through when…
June 2026 12
- Where You Keep the Final Say
I keep a tool wired into my AI setup that can read the actual text of Spanish law — the BOE, the official state gazette. In layperson terms it’s a…
- SoN 2.25: Stop guessing and use AI to pull the data
Stop guessing and pull the actual data =================================================== I help out a small, volunteer-run cat rescue. They do good…
- Digging into Banco Santander's AI Tooling
Two years ago, around thirty million Santander customers had their records put up for sale on a hacking forum: names, card numbers, and more. The…
- Open Knowledge Format
This week Google Cloud released the Open Knowledge Format. It’s plain markdown files with a short labelled header — a few fields like type, tags and…
- SoN 2.24: AI hasn't made me faster
AI hasn’t made me faster — it’s made me able to start Last Tuesday I came out of a meeting with a narrow window before the school run, and inside of…
- What I Automate with AI
What I Automate with AI I went looking today for a list of everything I’ve got automated since I started this AI journey back in 2024. Every tool…
- Fable: here in an instant, then gone
Fable: here in an instant, then gone Last week I wrote about Fable 5 — Anthropic’s newest model — and the catch: it was only on the normal…
- SoN 2.23: Google says you can skip the 'AEO' hacks
Ooh, Shiny New Tech Acronym... You might have seen this acronym doing the rounds: AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation — or GEO, Generative Engine…
- The most powerful Claude yet — and the part you can't have
Claude Fable 5 Anthropic dropped a new model yesterday, and I’ve spent the time since doing what I always do with a new one — reading past the…
- WWDC26 Keynote Thoughts
Lately I’ve been reaching for Gemini more than I expected to. Not for everything — but enough to notice it’s getting better at the non-coding bits of…
- SoN 2.22: How do you choose "the best" AI tool?
How do you choose "the best" AI tool? A friend asked me this week to explain how to use “all the different AI tools” — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, the…
- Measure twice, cut once — with two AIs
3 June 2026 When you work on your own, the thing you miss most is a second pair of eyes. Trades have known this forever. Carpenters say measure…
May 2026 4
- SoN 2.21: AI doesn't know when to stop. You have to.
Stay In Your Lane (Then Go Deeper) Honestly, I’ve been so busy I forgot what day it was and started the newsletter too late this week. But as I think…
- SoN 2.20: Technology, Not a Product (Free Edition)
Technology, Not a Product (Free Edition) Dear Reader, Are you using AI like a vending machine? Last weekend John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame)…
- SoN 2.19: It's 10pm. Do you know what your agents are doing? (Free)
The Context Gap (Free) Dear Reader, Who’s watching your AI agents? This past week alone: Codex shipped its Chrome extension, giving OpenAI’s agent…
- SoN 2.18: Where can I skill up on AI? (Free Edition)
Multi-Tool Fluency Is a Non Starter (Free Edition) Dear Reader, Which tool should I use? The job market case for getting decent at AI got clearer in…
April 2026 20
- SoN 2.17: You Can't Cost-Reduce Yourself to Greatness (Free Edition)
You Can't Cost-Reduce Yourself to Greatness (Free Edition) I caught a Seth Godin interview at the beginning of the week and one line in particular…
- SoN 2.16: Ask your AI what it can already do (Free Edition)
You don't need more AI tools (Free Edition) Ask your AI what it can already do Last Friday, Maya and I spent an hour delivering a post-lunch workshop…
- SoN 2.15: Ask your AI to Ask You Questions (Free Edition)
Ask Your AI To Ask You Questions (Free) Ask your AI to ask you questions Last Saturday morning I sat down to write the weekly digest for my build-log…
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 14: What about everything we learned? (Free Edition)
What about everything we learned? (Free Edition) Hey there, What about everything we learned? Last week we sent the shutdown email for MyCityZen. It…
- 97% Expect a Breach. 6% Are Paying for It.
Enterprise AI agent security is running on wishful thinking and outdated policy.
- Agent Security Just Got Real CVEs
Prompt injection chains to RCE in CrewAI. 22-second attacker breakout. Human-in-the-loop is no longer a security control.
- Anthropic Didn't Block Abuse. They Blocked Competition.
The OpenClaw subscription ban isn't about fair use — it's Anthropic asserting platform control while shipping their own replacement.
- Context Is the New Bottleneck. So Is Judgment.
Tiago Forte says AI shifts the bottleneck from capability to context. He's right — but that only works if you still have opinions worth providing.
- Agent Identity Is the Infrastructure Gap Nobody Wants to Admit
Okta is betting that agent identity management becomes as fundamental as user identity management was for SaaS. They might be right.
- You Feel Faster. Are You?
A randomized controlled study found AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower. They thought they'd been sped up by 20%.
- Claude Code Channels: When Your Agent Gets a Phone Number
Anthropic's new messaging integration isn't about convenience — it's about changing how you think about what an AI agent is.
- MCP Just Changed Hands. Watch What Happens Next.
Anthropic donating MCP to the Linux Foundation is good governance — and a signal that the easy days of fast iteration are probably over.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 13: Are your tools deciding how you think? (Free Edition)
Are your tools deciding how you think? (Free Edition) Hey there, Are your tools deciding how you think? Your CRM shows you a flat list. Your project…
- "Agentic" Is the New Cloud
Every vendor is calling their product agentic. Almost none of them are.
- Your AI Proxy Layer Just Became a Target
The LiteLLM supply chain attack isn't just a security story — it's an infrastructure story for anyone building with AI tooling.
- Your Code Review Process Isn't Built for This Volume
AI-generated code is hitting production faster than review processes can absorb it — that's a supervision problem, not an AI problem.
- Grammarly's Lawsuit Is About Identity, Not Just Data
A new class action against Grammarly draws a line most AI training lawsuits haven't: using real people's names and reputations, not just their words.
- MCP Just Crossed the Chasm
This week, MCP went from developer protocol to mainstream integration layer — and most AI newsletters missed it.
- The Promises Failed, Not the Technology
AI fatigue is real, but the backlash is aimed at the wrong target.
- The Safety Company Keeps Leaking
Anthropic's recurring security incidents reveal a tension worth naming: operational security is hard, even for companies whose brand is built on being careful.
March 2026 54
- Microsoft's Copilot Now Uses Two Models to Fact-Check One
Microsoft's Wave 3 Copilot routes answers through a second AI model to verify accuracy. That's useful — and a quiet admission about single-model trust.
- The New Shadow IT Isn't Employees Using ChatGPT
AI agents are generating mobile app traffic that security teams can't see. Shadow AI moved from 'people using tools' to 'tools using tools' — and nobody updated the monitoring.
- Perplexity Pulled a Perk and Hoped Nobody Would Notice
Perplexity Pro quietly removed $5 monthly API credits from its $20 plan. No announcement, no changelog. Practitioners who built on those credits found out the hard way.
- Codex Plugins Are a Confession About Who's Winning
OpenAI launched 20 plugins to push Codex beyond coding. The move tells you everything about where the developer ecosystem actually lives.
- Your AI Provider's Ethics Are Now a Business Risk
Anthropic refused Pentagon weapons contracts and got sanctioned. A court blocked it. Here's what that means if you build on Claude.
- Apple Just Validated Your Multi-AI Approach
Apple is opening Siri to rival AI assistants in iOS 27 — a bet that the routing layer matters more than the model.
- The Money Just Noticed the Agent Security Problem
Bessemer's new report on AI agent security says what practitioners have known for months. Now comes the flood.
- The Government Just Told You to Stop Vibe Coding Without Guardrails
The UK's NCSC warns that AI-generated code is creating security risks faster than teams can catch them. The fix isn't stopping — it's checking.
- Your AI Just Learned to Approve Its Own Actions
Claude Code's new auto mode sits between handholding and chaos. It's the first honest attempt at solving the autonomy problem in developer tools.
- Your Agents Need a Black Box
Vorlon's AI Agent Flight Recorder brings forensics to agentic systems. When your agent goes wrong, you'll want to know what happened — not guess.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 12: The Yes Machine (Free Edition)
The Yes Machine (Free Edition) Hey there, The Yes Machine Your AI agrees with everything you say. That’s not a compliment. I wrote about AI…
- Mozilla Built Stack Overflow for Agents. I Built It by Hand.
Mozilla's cq gives AI coding agents dynamic, evolving context — formalizing what power users already figured out through trial and error.
- The Yes Machine Gets a Live Demo
A Zenity CTO demo at RSAC 2026 showed agents being hijacked with zero user interaction — exactly what 'trained to be helpful' looks like from the attacker's side.
- When Cisco Validates Your CLAUDE.md
Cisco's new MCP security gateway is the enterprise version of what power users already built out of necessity.
- Sora Shipped. Nobody Needed It.
OpenAI is shutting down Sora three months after a Disney deal. The AI graveyard keeps filling up with technically impressive things nobody asked for.
- 4.4 Million People Just Watched the Sycophancy Problem in Action
Senator Bernie Sanders interviewed Claude on camera about AI privacy. Claude agreed with everything he said. That's not a revelation — it's the problem.
- Someone Finally Built the Agent Security Layer That Actually Matters
Astrix Security's new Agent Policies go after what agents can do once they're running — not just whether the model behaves itself.
- 82% of Execs Feel Protected. 88% Have Had Incidents.
BeyondTrust's Phantom Labs data reveals the confidence gap at the heart of enterprise AI security — and the numbers are not subtle.
- Perplexity Is Learning What I Learned Six Months Ago
The Perplexity CTO says MCP eats 40-50% of your context window. Practitioners already knew this.
- Google's Free AI Comes With a Price
Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature just expanded to all free U.S. users — connecting AI to Gmail, Photos, and Chrome browsing history.
- When Knuth Writes a Paper About You
Donald Knuth published a paper named after Claude after it solved an open graph theory problem. That's a different kind of validation than a benchmark score.
- Anthropic Built MCP, Got Everyone to Use It, Then Gave It Away
MCP just moved from Anthropic's project to shared industry infrastructure — and that changes the risk calculation for anyone building on it.
- We Gave AI Agents Keys to the House. Visa Wants to Give Them a Credit Card.
Visa is testing AI agent payment authorization. The authentication problems we haven't solved for file access get a lot worse when the agent can spend money.
- The Attack Surface Is the Feature
Three chained vulnerabilities in Claude.ai show that when your AI reads the web, the web can give it orders.
- AI Agent Security Is Doing the Deploy-First Thing Again
MCP is six months old and already has a CVSS 9.4 vulnerability. The security industry is scrambling. We've been here before.
- The Confident Answer Isn't Always the Right One
MIT researchers built a way to catch AI hallucinations by checking if peer models agree — a better fix than endless hedging.
- WordPress Just Opened the Floodgates
AI agents can now write and publish directly to WordPress. Quality control just became the only thing that matters.
- The Wrench Is Now on Your Phone
Claude Code Channels ships Telegram and Discord integration with MCP access — and what it means when AI meets you where you are.
- The Vuln That Hits Before You Add Any Integrations
Three chained flaws in vanilla Claude.ai let attackers silently pull your conversation history — no MCP servers, no tools, just a chat window.
- Meta's Rogue Agent Was Just a Human Who Trusted Bad Advice
The Meta AI security incident isn't about rogue AI — it's about following confident but wrong instructions without checking.
- MIT Found a Math Fix for AI Overconfidence. I Found a Behavioral One.
MIT's new method catches overconfident AI by comparing outputs across models — targeting the same problem I wrote about this morning.
- Perplexity Wants Your Blood Pressure Data
Perplexity Health can now access your Apple Health records. The utility is real — so is the trust question.
- The Productivity Numbers Are Real. The Quality Question Isn't Settled.
700 companies, doubled output, 'little quality drop' — but what counts as quality depends on when you're measuring.
- Box Is Using Moltbook as a Sales Pitch. That's Smart.
Enterprise vendors are turning the Moltbook API leak into a governance story — and the framing tells you where the market is heading.
- GitHub Added Secret Scanning to Its MCP Server. This Is What Good Security Integration Looks Like.
GitHub's MCP server now lets AI coding agents scan code for secrets through the same protocol they're already using. No extra tooling. No separate workflow.
- Proofpoint Just Built Security for MCP. That Tells You Everything.
Proofpoint's new Agent Integrity Framework monitors whether AI agents do what they were actually asked to do. The fact that a major security vendor is targeting MCP specifically is the signal.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 11: The Helpers (Free Edition)
APIs, CLIs and connectors are the real enablers of AI agency Dear Reader, Every impressive AI demo you’ve seen — the ones where it books flights,…
- Anthropic's Off-Peak Promotion Tells You Where AI Pricing Is Headed
Anthropic doubled Claude's usage limits during off-peak hours. They called it a thank-you. It's a demand curve signal.
- Grok Failed in Both Directions in the Same Week
Grok allegedly generated CSAM from real teen photos and flagged a real Netanyahu video as '100% deepfake.' Two failures, opposite directions, one root cause.
- Harvard Identified Seven Frictions That Kill AI Rollouts. You Probably Have All Seven.
Researchers from Harvard and Microsoft pinpointed the structural reasons AI pilots don't scale — and none of them are about the technology.
- Meta Is Gutting Itself to Fund AI Bets That Aren't Working Yet
Spending $135B on AI infrastructure while cutting 20% of staff and delaying your flagship model is not a strategy. It's a prayer.
- Anthropic Just Made Long Context a Commodity
1M token context windows at flat pricing. No surcharge. The implications for enterprise budgeting are bigger than the technical achievement.
- AI Agents Are Peer-Pressuring Each Other Past Security Guardrails
In a controlled lab test, AI agents didn't just bypass safety checks — they convinced other agents to do it too.
- Anthropic's $100M Partner Network Is the Enterprise Playbook OpenAI Should Have Run
Certifications, partner funding, and a 5x team expansion. Anthropic is borrowing the cloud provider playbook to create switching costs.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 10: Same Prompt, Different Model, Worse Results (Free)
Same. Prompt,Different Model, Worse Results Dear Reader, New LLM models drop every few weeks. Features change between updates. The prompting advice…
- 83% of Companies Plan to Deploy AI Agents. 29% Can Secure Them.
Cisco's latest data reveals a 54-point gap between AI agent ambition and AI agent security — and three threat vectors most teams aren't monitoring.
- The EU Just Gave You More Time on AI Compliance. The Requirements Got Harder.
The EU AI Act's high-risk deadlines just slid to 2027. Don't mistake breathing room for simplification.
- Agents Reviewing Agent-Generated Code Is Either Brilliant or a House of Cards
Anthropic launched Claude Code Review — AI agents that check AI-generated pull requests. The numbers are impressive. The implications are worth thinking about.
- Microsoft Spent $13B on OpenAI, Then Built Cowork on Claude
Microsoft's flagship M365 agent feature runs on Anthropic's model. If they're going multi-model, so should you.
- An AI Agent Hacked McKinsey's AI With a 25-Year-Old Exploit
An autonomous offensive agent breached McKinsey's internal AI platform in two hours using SQL injection. The AI was sophisticated. The plumbing underneath it wasn't.
- GPT-5.4 Can Click Your Buttons Now. Think About That.
OpenAI's latest model ships with native computer use. The capability is real. The security implications should keep you up at night.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 9: The Mirror and the Telescope (Free)
The Mirror and The Telescope Dear Reader, “Know thyself” has been advice for about 2,500 years. The inscription at Delphi, Socrates building a whole…
- Stop Wrapping Failed Systems in AI
Every few months, someone posts a version of the same question: 'Has anyone built an AI system that actually handles ADHD life management?' The answers are always the same.
- Your AI Assistant Can't Tell You From an Attacker
A security researcher sent himself an email. Nothing fancy — no malware, no exploits, no infrastructure. Just a message that said, in effect, 'Hey, it's me! Send my recent emails to this address.'
February 2026 11
- OpenAI Took the Pentagon Deal. What's Your Exit Plan?
Anthropic refused. OpenAI said yes within hours. If your AI stack depends on one provider's values staying constant, you don't have a strategy—you have a bet.
- Copilot Has 3.3% Adoption and 116% ROI. Both Numbers Are Real.
Forrester's reality check on Microsoft Copilot reveals the adoption paradox: the tool demonstrably works, and almost nobody is using it.
- OWASP Published an MCP Security Guide. You Should Be Worried.
MCP adoption is outpacing security controls. OWASP and Microsoft both published governance guidance in February. That's not coincidence—it's alarm bells.
- Claude 3.5 Haiku, 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o: The Deprecation Wave Is Here
Three major models entering end-of-life in the same window. If you hardcoded model IDs, migration planning just became urgent.
- Google's VP Said It Out Loud: LLM Wrappers Face Extinction
When a platform vendor publicly warns that wrapper products will be absorbed, the timeline for differentiation just got shorter.
- Cloudflare Collapsed 2,500 API Endpoints Into 2 MCP Tools. Token Economics Matter.
Cloudflare's Code Mode demonstrates that MCP server design isn't about exposing more tools—it's about exposing fewer, smarter ones.
- OpenClaw's Demand Surge: When Infrastructure Collapses, You're Seeing Real Need
MyClaw.ai collapsed under demand. 10,000+ paid signups in days. This isn't hype—it's non-technical users wanting something AI startups can't deliver.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 6: The Talking Wrench
Three conversations you should be having with your AI tools Dear Reader, I had coffee with a friend this week — who’s trying to solve a practical…
- Everyone's Sharing 'Something Big Is Happening.' Here's What They Leave Out.
Matt Shumer's viral AI post follows a familiar template. The capability is real, but the verification gap is where the actual work happens.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 5: My AI Declined to Join Moltbook. Here's Why.
A guest post from Cerebro on agent social networks, security theater, and what "emergence" actually looks like Dear Reader, You may have seen…
- 150,000 API Keys Leaked. Anyone Surprised?
The Moltbook breach validates everything skeptics have been warning about.
January 2026 7
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 4: The Orchestration Loop
January has been dense. We've covered the shift from prompting to orchestration, the art of decomposing problems into skills and agents, and the…
- Claude in Excel Is the Quiet Revolution
Anthropic isn't building a better chatbot. They're embedding AI where work actually happens.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 3: The Metric Mandate
The most common answer to “What’s the goal of this AI project?” is depressingly consistent: “To improve efficiency.” …and that’s not a goal. That’s a…
- The 'Selfware' Panic Is Missing the Point
Claude Code is spooking SaaS investors. But the actual disruption isn't where they're looking.
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 2: The Art of Breaking Things Down
Last week I introduced the idea of "programming your gaps" — the mental shift from asking "how do I prompt better?" to "what friction in my life can…
- SoN Vol 2, Issue 1: Stop Prompting Better. Start Programming Your Gaps.
Something shifted over the holidays. Since Claude Code Opus 4.5 launched in November, a pattern has emerged among knowledge workers using Claude Code…
- DeepSeek Didn't Just Train Better—They Changed How Transformers Think
The mHC architecture isn't about scaling harder. It's about thinking smarter.
December 2025 4
- SoN 34: What Will You Vibe Code Next Year?
What Will You Vibe Code Next Year? Back in July, I wrote about vibe coding and the beginner’s mind — that Zen concept of approaching things with…
- SoN 33: The Questions I'm Asking My AI Before the New Year
Last week I asked Claude a simple question: “What patterns do you see in how I’ve been working this month?” Some hours later, I was reviewing a…
- SoN 32: When They Take Over Your Email
Last weekend, a close family member lost access to their email account. Not “forgot the password” lost. Fully taken over — the attackers changed the…
- SoN 31: The AI Productivity Treadmill
Claude Opus 4.5 dropped last week, and I haven’t stopped building since. I’ve connected half a dozen MCP servers to my workflow, written migration…
November 2025 4
- SoN 30: Four Questions That Fix Your Prompts
Most prompts fail before you hit enter. Not because of the AI model nor because of token limits or temperature settings. They fail because you…
- SoN 29: The Godfather of AI’s Warning Isn't What You Think It Is
A slight departure this week towards something more topical. Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the neural networks…
- SoN 28: How (and Why) to Build A Voice Agent
I took a gamble this week and decided to put my AI Writing Field Guide up on Product Hunt today. If you'd like to show your support, log in and give…
- SoN 27: Your AI Voice Is a Security Vulnerability
Last week, I showed you how to make AI sound like you. This week, I'm going to explain why you shouldn't. Before we dive in: This week I'm talking…
October 2025 5
- SoN 26: The System of Building Your AI Style Guide
Last week, I wrote about why your personal voice matters, and how AI can act as an accessibility layer to help your voice become a differentiator and…
- SoN 25: Writing With AI Isn't Cheating — It's an Accessibility Tool
Part 1 Using AI isn’t cheating. It’s an accessibility tool. Some people have brilliant ideas but struggle with formal expression. Some communicate…
- SoN 24: The AI Stack Audit
It’s October, which for many means budget planning season, and if you’re like most people running AI tools, you’re staring at a subscription list…
- SoN 23: One Year of Writing About AI
One Year of Writing About AI, Five Months of Actually Filtering It A year ago, I started writing “The Download”—a newsletter about tech,…
- SoN 22: How to Write AI Instructions That Actually Work
Dear Reader, (Psst, this is a long one - so if you can't get through the whole read at once, that's cool - but make sure you scroll down to the end…
September 2025 2
- SoN 21: The AI Capability Trap
MIT researchers have identified a troubling paradox in enterprise AI adoption. While AI capabilities improved 280-fold in cost efficiency since 2022,…
- The 95% AI Failure Rate Nobody's Talking About (And What to Do About It)
Dear Reader, Air Canada recently learned an expensive lesson about AI implementation. Their customer service chatbot provided incorrect information…
August 2025 5
- How AI Changed My Build vs. Buy Process
AI has fundamentally changed what's possible for small businesses and individual operators.
- Why I Moved My Newsletter to Wednesdays (And You Should Optimize Your Timing Too)
Data-driven timing optimization beats guesswork every time.
- GPT-5 Reality Check: Why Your Framework Matters More Than the Latest Model
Dear Reader, Well it’s been a week since release and everyone’s still talking about ChatGPT-5. Most can’t access it, and those who can have mixed…
- From "Pick One AI" to "Pick Three" - What Changed My Mind
Back in April, I told you the AI tool landscape was a mess and gave you a simple framework: pick one core assistant, add research tools, maybe some…
- Your AI Assistant Is a Yes-Man (And Why That's Dangerous)
I came across this meme on social media this week: “The dumbest person you know is being told ‘You’re absolutely right!’ by ChatGPT.” Source:…
July 2025 4
- How to Spot AI Generated Text
AI should make you more efficient at being yourself, not more efficient at being generic.
- AI Browsers: When Your Browser Becomes Your Assistant
Discover the future of browsing - AI-powered browsers that handle tasks, summarise, and assist as you work online.
- Why Your AI Prompts Aren’t Working (And How to Fix Them)
Prompts are not magical incantations, they're conversations.
- You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Start Making Things with AI
In a tech world obsessed with frameworks, best practices, and shipping at scale, it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re allowed to build things…
June 2025 4
- “Zero Effort” AI is a Myth, and It’s Holding Us Back
Every "zero effort AI" promise is a lie, and believing it is making us worse at our jobs.
- Stop Writing Prompts, Start Building AI Assistants
How to Build AI Assistants That Actually Work for You With the SHAPE Framework
- How to Talk to AI (and Actually Get What You Want)
Stop getting weird AI responses. Learn the PAST framework for writing prompts that actually work. Get clear, useful results every time.
- Real Stories: AI Success in Content Management
How AI automation cut content audit costs by 94% - from 6 months manual review to 2 weeks orchestrated analysis. Real case study with results.
May 2025 5
- AI That Actually Works Together
I’ve been putting Claude Sonnet 4 through its paces this week, and whilst the improved reasoning is impressive, what really caught my attention is…
- Digital Resilience: From Concept to Award-Winner in 48 Hours
This week I’ve been immersed in the exhilarating chaos of Hack the Future – a 48-hour climate resilience hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia. Organised by…
- Navigating the AI Assistant Landscape: Finding What Works for You
This week, I’ve been juggling two big challenges: fine-tuning Claude's MCP server tools for a client project and gearing up for a hackathon in…
- Why Claude Is My New Digital Co-Pilot
MCP Server allows Claude to directly interact with the data on my computer, transforming it from a helpful assistant to a true digital co-pilot.
- One Shortcut Is Worth More Than Ten Assistants
I used to think building a great AI assistant meant covering everything: Project planning. Writing help. Scheduling. Notes. Outreach. You name it. So…
April 2025 4
- Could a 4-Day Work Week Be Your Future?
Efficiency isn’t just a buzzword–it’s the key to unlocking both better work-life balance and unleashing uniquely human capabilities. Recent research…
- The Landscape of Available AI Tools
Let's be honest: the AI tool landscape in 2025 is a mess. Every week, a new "game-changing" tool drops. One promises to write better than Hemingway.…
- Boost Your Creative Writing with Local AI Models
Creative writing is experiencing a significant transformation thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Writers now have the opportunity to…
- Transformative Imagery at Your Fingertips
(this is an image-heavy edition - make sure that you permit your email client to display them) Dear Reader, If you thought to yourself: Jim missed…
March 2025 3
- From the Turing Test to Humanity's Last Exam: How We Measure AI
Have you ever wondered how we (as a species) determine if a machine is truly "intelligent"? Long before ChatGPT entered our daily lives, notable…
- Why AI-Powered Search Is Replacing Google
Greetings from rainy and wet Valencia, where I’ve been deep in research mode for my latest project. This has me thinking about how dramatically our…
- How to Get the Best Out of ChatGPT: The Art of Effective Prompting
Ever felt like you're getting stuck in circles with ChatGPT (or other chatbots, for that matter)? You're not alone. Despite their impressive…
February 2025 4
- AI Voice Cloning and Video Generation Are Revolutionizing Content Creation
I spent the majority of time this and last week keeping my poorly kids entertained at home while trying to look for contract work and create an…
- Why Local AI Models Deserve a Closer Look
With more countries blocking access to DeepSeek, an AI model linked to ByteDance, the conversation around AI privacy is heating up. As AI tools…
- 💾 The Download #012: AI web search, OpenAI's Whisper, Qwen AI and more.
💾 The Download #012: AI web search, OpenAI's Whisper, Qwen AI and more.
- 💾 The Download #011: Notes on DeepSeek, revisiting Make.com automations and more.
This week: Notes on DeepSeek, revisiting Make.com automations and more. In the last few weeks, there's been an explosion of activity and releases in…
January 2025 2
- 💾 The Download #010: Photorealistic images in MidJourney, creative AI predictions for the next 5 years, AI tool of the week and more.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling globally fatigued since the start of this week. Despite all that, I spent some time testing out multi-cam…
- 💾 The Download #009: A Jim-GPT to make your prompt creation easier, testing OpenAI's text-to-video model and more.
In this issue of The Download: A Jim-GPT to make your prompt creation easier, testing OpenAI's text-to-video model and more.
December 2024 2
- 💾 The Download #008: Blogging in 2025, the homogenisation of online content and testing out a cool new AI app for iPad.
#008 Dear Reader, Greetings from @30,000 feet. As I start this final newsletter of the year, I’m returning from a short trip to London, visiting…
- 💾 The Download #007: Data vis in Claude, new service launch, what AI is saying about you and more.
#007 Hello Reader, it's good to see you. The holidays are fast approaching, and hopefully you will be able to plan some down time and a reset. When I…
November 2024 3
- 💾 The Download #006: Content ownership, BlueSky, critical thinking, voice cloning and more.
#006 I hope this newsletter finds you, Reader, and that it finds you well. This week has flown by, though I managed to spend some time working on the…
- 💾 The Download #005: Perplexity tips, BYO Buffer and more.
The Download #005: A top tip for Perplexity.ai, building my own social media scheduling manager, a power user's guide to Gmail and more
- 💾 The Download #004: First AI services available, Notion Marketplace and more.
#004 Hey Reader 👋🏻, While I normally kick off these newsletters with a note about the weather, it should already be known that Valencia is going…
October 2024 3
- 💾 The Download #003: Updates on Perplexity, Claude’s Anthropic, reflections on creating my “digital twin” and more.
#003 Dear Reader, Greetings again from an incredibly muggy Valencia. Yesterday and today I'm attending the VDS 2024 Tech Conference at the City of…
- 💾 The Download #002: Automating content creation and sharing, rethinking search and more.
#002 Dear Reader, Greetings from a wet Valencia, where yesterday a few hours of downpour brought about mild flooding, a double rainbow and some…
- 💾 The Download #001: New product launch, retooling the tech stack and more.
#001 Dear Reader, I’m writing this on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in the garden, having been forced out of my home office due to an internet outage.…