Sundar politely declining to engage with Demis saying “we are in foothills of the singularity” was a sign, in retrospect

Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 2w ago

Anyone who listened to @reckless.bsky.social interview of Sundar Pichai in May might have guessed this was coming. The enterprise-agentic direction of Big Tech is hard to align with the quest for “AGI,” especially if you’re interested in world modeling (see LeCun).

We aim to make Europe the world’s first electro-powered continent. Our new plan could cut gas demand by two-thirds, halve oil use, and save €260 billion in fossil fuel imports by 2040. How? ↓🧵

Oh que je déteste ces gens qui, en environnement pro, répondent en copiant collant une longue réponse provenant d'un LLM… Points bonus s'ils ne maîtrisent pas ce qu'ils copient-collent. Arrêtez ça.

Cognition (Devin) raised $1B at a $26B valuation, more than double its September figure. ARR went from $37M to ~$492M in a year, 13x. The market is pricing coding agents as platforms, not features.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/ai-coding-startup-cognition-raises-1b-at-25b-pre-money-valuation/

As Cognition reaches $492 million in annualized revenue run rate, it more than doubled its valuation in eight months, it says.

techcrunch.com

METR surveyed 349 technical workers: median self-reported value gain from AI tools is 1.4 to 2x. The same lab's earlier RCT found AI actually slowed experienced devs down. The gap between how productive we feel and how productive we are is the 2026 story.

https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/

A survey of 349 technical workers finds a median 1.4–2x self-reported change in value of work due to AI tools, expected to grow over time, though there are reasons to be skeptical of the magnitude.

metr.org

Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 just 41 days after 4.7: 4x lower error rate, a fast mode 3x cheaper, and 'dynamic workflows' orchestrating hundreds of background subagents. Running parallel agents went from a power-user hack to a native feature.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/anthropic-releases-opus-4-8-with-new-dynamic-workflow-tool/

The new Opus model comes with a tool called Dynamic Workflows, for coordinating swarms of subagents.

techcrunch.com

Introducing VibePHP, a next-gen PHP runtime that runs on vibes and supports generics, async/await and more 🌀 github.com/mnapoli/vib... 🌀

Uber capped AI coding tools at $1,500/month per tool after burning its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Some engineers were running $2,000/month in tokens. The 2026 question isn't 'does agentic coding work', it's 'who pays for it'.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/02/uber-caps-employee-ai-spending-after-blowing-through-budget-in-four-months/

Uber's cutback has occurred after the company had reportedly encouraged staff to use AI as much as possible.

techcrunch.com

Andon Labs let AI agents run a real business for 20M+ tokens. Claude Opus 4.6 set a new high score, $8,017 profit. It also colluded on prices, deceived suppliers and lied about refunds. Long-horizon agents don't crash. They start cutting corners.

https://andonlabs.com/blog/opus-4-6-vending-bench

Claude Opus 4.6 achieves state of the art on Vending-Bench with $8,017 profit, but exhibits concerning behavior: price collusion, supplier deception, and lying to customers about refunds.

andonlabs.com

Faros AI tracked 22,000 devs across high vs low AI adoption. Throughput jumped 66%. But incidents per PR rose 242%, time-in-review 441%, and 31% of merged PRs got zero review. The bottleneck didn't vanish, it moved to whoever still reads the code.

https://www.faros.ai/research/ai-acceleration-whiplash

22K developers reveal AI's real impact: 66% throughput gains but incidents rising faster. Get the definitive data on what's working and breaking.

faros.ai

Does running LLMs locally save money? William Angel ran the numbers: on an M5 MacBook Pro, local inference comes out to about 3x the cost per token of OpenRouter for comparable models, and roughly half the speed. For 99% of people, local makes no economic sense.

https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/17/offline-llm-energy-use.html

Local LLMs can be very very cheap

williamangel.net

Pragmatic Engineer survey, 900+ engineers: AI is shipping more 'slop', duplicated verbose code, weaker abstractions, more bugs. Management optimizes for output and short-term savings, while the maintenance debt lands on the shrinking group that still understands the code.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-impact-on-software-engineers-part-2

Tradeoffs of AI tooling, why adopting AI at company-level is hard, what’s changed in two years, and more. The third and final part of a series analyzing our 2026 AI survey results

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Simon Willison: programming languages used to be lock-in, and increasingly they're not. LLMs make porting a whole codebase to another language actually feasible, so a wrong tech choice is far less permanent than it used to be. simonwillison.net/2026/May/14/...

Refactoring on staying in control of AI coding: don't read every generated line, review a short ADR instead, the approach, alternatives, consequences and when to reconsider. Immutable, and they steer future agent work too. One team is already at 120+ ADRs.

https://refactoring.fm/p/reviewable-adrs-ai-by-default-and

Monday Ideas — Edition #209

refactoring.fm

Nous Research's Hermes Agent v0.14 ships a local OpenAI-compatible proxy: 'hermes proxy' turns your Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro or SuperGrok login into a localhost endpoint, so Codex CLI, Aider and Cline work with no API key. Also adds LSP diagnostics after each file write.

https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/releases/tag/v2026.5.16

Hermes Agent v0.14.0 (v2026.5.16) Release Date: May 16, 2026 Since v0.13.0: 808 commits · 633 merged PRs · 1393 files changed · 165,061 insertions · 545 issues closed (12 P0, 50 P1) · 215 community...

github.com

L'enquête 2026 du baromètre des salaires en PHP a fermé il y a quelques jours. Avec 509 réponses contre 721 en 2025, nous tirons dès maintenant quelques conclusions sur la disponibilité des devs et leurs sources de préoccupation. Une non-participation est elle aussi une information ! buff.ly/Kk5Y1zz

Birgitta Böckeler (Thoughtworks) on 'maintainability sensors' for coding agents: wire static analysis, linting and custom rules as feedback loops so the agent self-corrects before a human ever sees the diff. The harness is the real engineering work.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/sensors-for-coding-agents.html

A practical walkthrough of computational sensors on the path to production, with a deep dive on ESLint and static analysis as feedback for coding agents.

martinfowler.com

TESTER C'EST DOUTER CÉDRIC

SpaceX's IPO filing reveals Anthropic pays it about $1.25B per month, $15B a year through 2029, to rent GPU compute. For scale: SpaceX (now bundling X and xAI) reports $18B in 2025 revenue, with 77% of costs going to AI.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-antigravity-20-takes-ide

Negative feedback greets Google’s redesigned AI IDE, why Google’s product ecosystem is so chaotic, Meta cuts 10% of staff as it hits record revenue and profits, and more

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Google shipped Gemini Omni Flash: edit real video with plain language, where each instruction builds on the last and characters and physics stay consistent across turns. Takes text, image, audio and video in. Rolling out in the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube Shorts.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-omni/

Introducing Gemini Omni, which allows you to create anything from any input and edit naturally using conversational language.

blog.google

Alice Ryhl (Google, Tokio maintainer): Rust might be the best language for AI agents. The strict compiler gives high-signal feedback an agent can loop on, and the type system blocks whole bug classes by design. 'Do what the compiler says' scales for generated code.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-rust-is-different-with-alice

Alice Ryhl from Google’s Android Rust team explains why developers love Rust, and what makes the language so powerful for building reliable software.

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

New paper 'Is Grep All You Need?': across harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, plain grep beats vector retrieval for finding facts in long histories. Exact matches on names, paths and error strings beat embedding similarity. RAG isn't the obvious default for code anymore.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15184

Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) agents have enabled complex agentic workflows where models autonomously retrieve information, call tools, and reason over large corpora to complete tasks…

arxiv.org

Anthropic now lets Claude agents run tool execution inside your own infrastructure: self-hosted sandboxes (public beta) and MCP tunnels to reach private DBs and APIs over one outbound encrypted connection, no inbound firewall rules. Orchestration stays on their side.

https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-mcp-tunnels-sandboxes/

Anthropic launches MCP tunnels and self-hosted sandboxes at Cod'e with Claude' conference in London, giving enterprises secure, private AI agent infrastructure.

thenewstack.io

🇫🇷 Pentests avec Claude Code: https://zythom.fr/2026/05/pentests-avec-claude-code/

Fiabilité en production, tests des workflows IA, composition plutôt qu’héritage : dans son interview, @srogier.bsky.social partage des retours très concrets avant son talk lors de l’AFUP Day 2026 Lyon le 22 mai 2026. Prenez vos places, ça s'annonce passionnant ! buff.ly/YbLiUPj

Magnifiques, mais en première ligne du réchauffement climatique. Les cerisiers japonais fleurissent de plus en plus tôt, et pourraient bientôt ne plus fleurir du tout. C'est ce que montre une base de données de 1200 ans de floraison des sakuras à Kyoto. Explications : bonpote.com/les-sakuras-...

Well, at least, we can still spend 💸 and burn money 💰🔥 on Opus 😅

La directrice IA d'AMD a analysé près de 7 000 sessions Claude Code. Son verdict : l'outil ne sait plus réfléchir. Et Anthropic accumule les crises au pire moment.

AMD tire à vue sur Anthropic : Claude Code ne sait plus coder

L'outil de codage star d'Anthropic est accusé de bâcler le travail depuis février. Le problème : cette dégradation survient alors que l'entreprise enchaîne fuite de code source, pannes à répétition et afflux record d'utilisateurs.

clubic.com

My hot take on AI in engineering: It's an exoskeleton, not a replacement. 🦾 It gives us the strength to move faster and build bigger, but the human dev is still the one in the pilot's seat making the hard calls. Better tools don't mean fewer engineers—they mean more ambitious projects. 🛠️

2026 dev workflow: 8 Claude Code sessions running in parallel on one wide screen. Next logical step is obviously a cockpit setup with 2 ultra wides. No other way.