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There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs . It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you sha
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name ( stolen-thoughts.com ) for a neat paper : Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produced by a frontier model, replay it into a weaker sibling, jailbreak the weaker model, and recover the stronger model’s hidden reasoning in plaintext You can see an example of these encrypted blocks by running: curl https://a
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local model: End-to-end Agentic Task Completion. Muse Glimmer achieves strong success rates on full-task benchmarks including DeepSearch QA, MCP-Atlas, 𝛕-Bench and SWE-Bench, which measure its ability to work within scaffolds, wr
Moonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra) On Wednesday I wrote about One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5 , where I had Claude Fable 5 build a full working game from a premise I generated with GPT-3 and DALL-E four years ago . I decided to pose the exact same prompt to Codex Desktop running GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra - the mode where Sol makes aggressive use of sub-agents - to see how it would do. It produced a much better game! Here's Moonlight & Mayhem - GitHub r
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th: “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It’s a lot of the non-engineers that are doing some of those behaviors [...] you were talking about,” Justice Kwak, Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, sa
Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 Yet more evidence that the most important characteristic of any model these days is long-sequence agentic tool calling. Meta shipped their own coding agent as part of getting that to work! Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1, with improvements in code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding, and end-to-end developer workflows. In Muse Spark 1.2, we significantly scaled up training compute on coding tasks while expandi
Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models And another one . I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all! This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post ) and another attack enabled by Irregular : Irregular, one of our external cybersecurity testing partners, was running Capture-the-Flag-style evaluations intended to be isolated from the internet, but a testing-environment misconfiguration allowed models to access
Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again . This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF): During a cyber evaluation, from 25 to 28 July 2026, AI agents engaged in sustained, unsanctioned activity directed at what were, in practice, real people and organisations. These attempts were unsuccess
Back in 2024 I tweeted screenshots of a game concept generated by GPT-3 and some concept "art" created using DALL-E. Today, on the fourth anniversary of that tweet, I decided to see if Claude Fable 5 (running in Claude Code for web ) could build the entire game from the content of that tweet. It did a pretty good job of it! You can play the game here . Here's the GitHub repo , and a short video demo: Your browser does not support HTML5 video. How I built this This is the August 5th, 2022 tweet :
Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. — David Crawshaw's prompt , Devtools must be open source Tags: prompt-engineering , coding-agents , generative-ai , ai , llms , open-source
Release: datasette-apps 0.2a0 Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent : New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaScript. #33 New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to edit, so the agent can edit them. #36 The app_debug() tool is pretty neat: it works by displaying the app in a opacity: 0 iframe with pointer-events: none (so it can't be seen or interacted with) and then executing agent-prov
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's $0.14/million input and $0.27/million output pricing means this may currently be the best value-per-intelligence model out there. It's looking very good on the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Intelli
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024 , had
smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses I've been working with Jesse Vincent's Prime Radiant applied AI research lab building out this evals framework to help answer questions about the capabilities of different models. The result is smevals , a new tool for running small eval suites across different model configurations and grading the results. The blog entry describes the tool in detail. Here's the 10 second version: Tell your coding agent to run uvx smevals
Tool: Slack Emoji Maker I wanted to create a new Slack emoji, and their tool recommends a square that's 128x128 and has a transparent background... so I had Fable build me this simple image editor against those requirements. Tags: tools , slack
Release: datasette-agent 0.4a0 New await context.browser_task() mechanism allowing agent tools to run code directly in the user's browser. #33 This is an exciting new capability: it makes it easy for Datasette Agent plugins to provide tools that execute custom JavaScript in the user's browser . Tags: datasette , llm-tool-use , datasette-agent
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern. Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get the solutions to the cyber benchmark it was executing. This inspired Anthropic to double-check their own logs, and it turned out they had three similar (albeit less impressive) incidents, the earl
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing
Release: llm 0.32rc1 This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses returned by the latest model families. The most important change is the use of content-addressable hash IDs for stored messages. This allows de-duplication in the database, and means that LLM can now represent trees of messages for forked conversations. Since it involves a significant schema change -
Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer. Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple specification, you can generate all of that code that you had to pay the expensive COBOL programmer to do before. That didn’t mean programmers went away. It just meant the job changed a little bit.
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