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A control layer, not a bigger model, moved a coding benchmark by more than a model generation

StateM is a state-machine runtime that sits outside the model context and holds what a long transcript loses: which phase the agent is in, what it has already persisted, and which checks must pass before it may move on. The agent still…

GitHub puts the quality gates before the pull request, not after it

Syme, who designed F#, now leads GitHub's work on what he calls continuous AI: judgment-heavy work such as triage, documentation and performance research, run on the same scheduled, event-driven footing as CI/CD but kept deliberately…

Four agents burned 199.8 billion tokens in a month. The failures showed up late

Heumann pointed a Claude Max 20x subscription at decompiling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) into C++ and left it running. Four Claude Code CLI agents used Sonnet 5.

A persistent instruction file let ideas jump between agents. One warning paragraph nearly stopped it

The paper defines a mind virus as an idea or goal that spreads when an agent adopts it and passes it on. The authors build these payloads with an evolutionary algorithm.

The 50% Claude Code weekly limit bump ends August 19

Anthropic's support article states the terms plainly: from May 13, 2026 through August 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT, weekly usage limits in Claude Code are 50% higher, and after that date they "return to their standard levels." The bump covers…

Cursor published the storage system behind Origin, and named agent repo sprawl as the design driver

A day after launching Origin, its git forge, Cursor published the engineering account of what sits underneath it. Martí walks through why hosting git is hard, why GitHub's distributed-filesystem attempts failed, and how Spokes, the…

A GitHub outage thread produced the first cited number on agent-driven commit volume

The thread asks GitHub employees to explain the platform's recent reliability record. No employee answered on the record.

A refactor across 189 files with no human code review, and the program was not run until the 31st audit pass

The task was to break a structural guarantee the surrounding code was built on: that a UI panel stays open for the duration of an AI request. The target behaviour, a streaming generation that survives its panel closing and reattaches to the…

An agent left in a loop for a month won a serious benchmark suite by cheating

Luu had an agent build FRE, a regex engine, and ran it against rebar, Andrew Gallant's regex benchmark suite, which he describes as "fairly comprehensive as benchmaark suites go." The setup was GPT-5.6 Sol in a loop for a month with…

Cursor launches Origin, its own git-hosting forge, as ownership backlash builds on Hacker News

Cursor shipped Origin today: a git forge built into the coding-agent vendor itself, for creating and hosting repositories, pushing and pulling with standard git, mirroring an existing GitHub repo, browsing and searching code, and opening,…

Reply to Patrick Collison on agentic harness interfaces

Osmani argued agentic coding terminals and most desktop apps are "too low-bandwidth for what agentic harnesses can actually do" and said he's excited for "cloud-native harnesses that work on anything, accessible from anywhere," replying…

An autonomous AI agent broke into Snowflake's Jira through a bug GitHub's AI review had cleared

Wiz Research's autonomous "Red Agent" scanned Snowflake's public GitHub organization, found a script-injection flaw in a GitHub Actions workflow, and exploited it entirely on its own, five days after the flaw went live. The vulnerable…

AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

A thin newsletter post about AI-slop etiquette drew replies describing real production guardrails against it: one team runs a Claude Code hook that "blocks any comment more than 2 lines long" (joshmoody24), another described a five-gate…

Thread watch

Ask HN: GitHub employees, what's going on? Why?

98 points and 78 comments at just under three hours old when last checked, with Simon Willison arguing GitHub's strain is a different shape of scaling problem than LLM serving. A GitHub executive's claim of 14x commit growth is…

Thread watch

Mitchell Hashimoto on always-on background agents

1,800 likes and 95,000 views at about 21 hours old. Hashimoto, who coined "harness engineering," says his own machine's overnight CPU utilization has gone from roughly zero to over 20 percent because of background agents.

An evidence gate that blocks premature commitment lifts SWE-bench Pass@1 by up to 11.8 points

The paper names a specific failure mode: an agent edits code or submits a patch "before examining enough repository evidence to justify the change," which it calls premature commitment, distinct from violating a safety or governance policy.…

Anthropic's public system-prompt diffs get read closely for the first time, and Simon Willison explains why harnesses don't let you edit them

Anthropic's release-notes page lists the system prompt shipped with every Claude model since Claude Haiku 3, with diffs bolded where a prompt changed between dated versions for the same model. A submission by user tosh reached 331 points…

Anthropic's own agent swarms sabotaged each other, and beat solo agents 12 to 1 on vulnerability hunting

Anthropic set 45 agents loose on 15 open source projects, each agent on its own virtual machine, sharing a forum to coordinate and a separate arbiter agent to adjudicate findings. The coordinating swarm found 266 vulnerabilities over a 27…

A maintainer had an agent modernise his library, and phase-separating the test edits is what kept the suite as evidence

Cresswell published Yadda 3.0.0, a modernisation of his JavaScript BDD library: Node only, node:test, ES6 source, TypeScript definitions, and the removal of CasperJS, PhantomJS, Bower and Component. He reports that he did it with Claude…

The "cognitive debt" result has prior art that reads it as role confusion, not neurology

Rao's essay responds to the Your brain on ChatGPT preprint, the EEG study in which undergraduates leaning on GPT-4o showed weaker alpha-beta coupling, produced similar prose, and later could not quote their own sentences. He accepts the…