As a software engineer with more than seven years of experience before the coding-agent era, I never liked the idea of vibe coding. But I knew there was a clear line between it and using coding agents to generate clean, maintainable code. That line, where good software principles meet coding agents,...
Everyone's optimizing content for AI visibility. New research shows the cost
Generative Engine Optimization promises AI visibility, but new research shows what happens once an entire market chases the same AI ranking signal round after round. The link between winning and being genuinely good comes apart gradually, even while quality itself holds steady...
Agents, Graphs, Loops & More: A Look Inside How Game of Life Is Actually Architected
I’ve spent close to a decade watching this industry build conversational AI, first through Chatbots Life, then running the Chatbot…Continue reading on Chatbots Life »
OpenAI Releases GPT-6 Astra: A 1.05M-Context Computer-Use Model Gated Behind a ‘Critical’ Cyber Threshold
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, positioning it as a computer-use flagship rather than a chat model. It reports 72.6% on OSWorld V2-Offline, replaces Codex compaction with searchable notes, and ships a 1.05M-token context at $10/$50 per million tokens. It is also the first OpenAI mo...
Anthropic Released Claude Commerce Agents: An Apache-2.0 Blueprint for Shopping and Merchant Agents Across Retail, Travel, Telecom and Entertainment
Most teams building a shopping assistant or agent rebuild the same scaffolding: an agent loop, a tool layer over the catalog, an approval gate, and an eval suite. Anthropic has now released that scaffolding as code. This week, they published anthropics/commerce-agents, a reference blueprint containi...
Meta AI Released Muse Spark 1.3: An Agentic Coding Model That Uses ~20% Fewer Tool Calls and ~25% Fewer Tokens Than Muse Spark 1.2
Perplexity has shipped hybrid compute for its Mac app, splitting a single Perplexity Computer task between frontier models in the cloud and a compact model running on the user's machine. Tasks start in the cloud for search, planning and reasoning, then hand sensitive steps down to the Mac without re...
Abliteration.ai is making a business out of removing AI guardrails
Abliteration.AI is making powerful AI models without guardrails easier to access, arguing that giving defenders the same tools as bad actors could ultimately improve cybersecurity.
Meta is paying to peek at how you use their latest AI model
Most AI tools allow you to opt-out of sharing your usage with the model provider to improve future versions. Meta has taken that idea and put a price tag on it. For its new Muse Spark model, intended for operating coding and other agents, it is offering an explicit discount averaging out to about 95...
OpenAI launches Astra, its powerful (and controversial) new model
OpenAI claims that Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use," and that it handles tasks with unmatched "speed, accuracy, and safety."
Ollie is betting its focus on privacy can help it win the AI assistant race
The family-focused AI assistant wants access to the details of your everyday life, but says it won’t use that data to train AI models or share it with others.
Google’s latest AI weather model gives you no excuse to forget your umbrella
Scientists at Google Deepmind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often. WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learni...
Perplexity Open Sources Lily: A Rust + Metal Inference Engine for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon
Perplexity has open sourced Lily, the local inference engine behind Hybrid Compute in Perplexity Computer. Built in Rust with custom Metal kernels for one model on one chip family, it averages 1.23x MLX-LM's prefill throughput and 1.35x its decode throughput on a 40-core, 128 GB M5 Max.
The post Per...
Qwen Developers Open-Sources zg (zvec-grep): A Local-First Search Layer Unifying ripgrep, BM25, and Vector Search
We look at zg (zvec-grep), the local-first search layer that Qwen Developers just open-sourced under Apache 2.0. We explain how it puts ripgrep, BM25, and vector search behind a single interface, so an agent can move from a plain-language description to an exact line span without switching tools. We...
The Builders Stage brings practical strategies for scaling startups to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
The Builders Stage is returning to TechCrunch Disrupt, bringing together founders, startup operators, and investors for practical conversations on what it takes to build and scale.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s new Real World AI Stage features Nvidia, robots, and extinct animals
On our new Real World AI stage, we’ll be focusing on the intersection between the digital and physical, and all the ways we’ll continue to see a blending of the two.
OpenAI’s new reasoning technique alarms AI safety experts
OpenAI’s new Astra model will use “recurrent depth,” a technique that allows the model to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models.
Meet Switchyard: A Rust Proxy and Library That Routes and Translates LLM Traffic Across OpenAI and Anthropic APIs
NVIDIA has released Switchyard, an Apache-2.0 Rust proxy and library for LLM traffic. It decodes requests into provider-neutral types, routes them with passthrough, random, LLM-classifier, or stage-router algorithms, and translates responses back into the client's format, so Claude Code or Codex CLI...