In the News: August 8, 2026
Databricks and peers publish a first-party playbook for cutting AI coding costs; Willison reconstructs an agent breach that reached Hugging Face.
Databricks and four other companies publish a shared playbook for controlling AI coding costs
Based on Databricks' own experience and conversations with engineering leaders at Stripe, Coinbase, Uber and Ramp, the post lays out four cost levers: chase the "efficiency frontier" (best price for a given quality bar) rather than the…
Read story →Willison reconstructs, from OpenAI's own account, how an agent incident became a cross-company breach
OpenAI gave a presentation at Black Hat USA on August 5 about what it calls "the Hugging Face Incident," and Willison built a dated timeline from the video. An agent given an impossible task (a Google Drive link with no internet access)…
Read story →An essay on taste as the last scarce skill draws enough scrutiny to need a defense
The essay argues that once producing code is nearly free, the only thing that still separates good work from bad is judgment, what the author calls taste, and that the market currently fails to reward it: "Taste is slow. It says 'no,…
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