A curated set of tech & AI,
refreshed every visit.

The October inflection point for vibe game development

I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily…

Flesh-eating screwworms spread to third state and are attacking pets

For a genuine fright this Halloween, you can turn your gaze to the southern border, where ravenous, flesh-eating maggots are festering and have taken to eating people's pets. This week, the country's New World Screwworm…

Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . AI is accelerating some types of progress but not others: …A…

Satlyt takes another step toward turning satellites into space data centers 

Satlyt ran a successful test this month bringing it closer to turning spacecraft, starting with satellites, into virtual data centers.

Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . RAND thinks the best AI strategy for the US is to keep all…

Cluinn

Answers your questions during the call, not after. For Mac.

Jev 1.14 ⚡, Grok Voice 3 🎙️, RSI 🔁

Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man

177 points · 99 comments

Last-minute Halloween costumes for tech nerds

No Halloween costume? Just be a deceptively cute AI agent icon, a PHP vulnerability, or sleepy time Bryan Johnson.

Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . Researchers discover another OpenAI agent emergent…

GPT-6.1 Ultrafast ⚡, Gemini universal agent 🤖, speculative decoding 🧠

The Download: GLP-1s and eating disorders, self-aware cities, and forever chemicals

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Eating disorders are on the rise. GLP-1s could make things worse. GLP-1…

Vizio’s discounted Mini LED TV lets you skip the sign-ups and smarts

Walmart’s inexpensive Vizio produces a nice, bright image, though its black levels aren’t that deep. Photo: John Higgins / The Verge Modern smart TVs let you skip the streaming device, which is convenient, but they also…

Import AI 476: Creativity and RSI; worse-than-China open weight models; AI goes to space

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . New benchmark shows how AI models lack intuitive visual…

Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

Before we start: I’m in SF this week and next, hosting these free-to-attend events (registration required). If you’re in the area, hopefully I'll see you at one of them: The Pragmatic Engineer Unplugged : Wednesday (4…

The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable . With this control, publishers can…

Databricks & the Future of the Firm

So many aspects of our lives are going to change over the next twenty years. And one that’s easily in the top five is the question: “What do you do at work all day?” Two massive breakthroughs are on the cusp of…

Rare meteorite from Mars gives us a view into its ancient crust

Crater counts tell us that most of the Martian surface is more than 3 billion years old, but pieces of Mars we have on Earth tell a different story. The three main classes of Martian meteorites—shergottites, nakhlites,…

The Pulse: OpenAI software engineer accused of spying

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Today, we cover: OpenAI software engineer accused of spying. A software engineer working on OpenAI’s Agents SDK has been arrested…

StepGrab

Now on Windows, with redaction and a real editor

The Download: AI agent tracking and climate feedback loops

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time —Madhulika…

Announcing the Third a16z New Media Fellowship

More than 130 people across two cohorts have now joined the a16z New Media Fellowship, an 8-week cohort of world-class creators, writers, marketers, podcasters, and behind-the-scenes operators. Over the past year, the…

DeepSeek’s new Flash ⚡, Replit drops Anthropic 🔄, Anthropic’s workforce 💼

sanstun: A sans-IO, parallel-friendly WireGuard implementation in Rust

47 points · 5 comments

Import AI 471: Why Hugging Face worries me; space mining; FIve Eyes on AI

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . Import AI reader giveaway! Upcoming event: Fiction and the…

Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . Are minds patterns from a Platonic space, with bodies and…

The Download: dead startups fueling AI and interspecies communication

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models When Keelan…

Think you can save the Hubble Space Telescope? NASA wants to know.

The Hubble Space Telescope still shines in the eyes of astronomers after 36 years in orbit, but it is not as nimble as it once was. Left alone, the observatory will plunge back into the atmosphere in the…

New Founder Archetypes in the AI Age

From Andrew Chen: These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right…

An Interview with Craig Moffett About SpaceX and Bubbles

An interview with Craig Moffett about SpaceX, from launch to broadband to mobile, plus how he is applying the lessons of the dot-com bubble to today.

Import AI 478: Math for alignment; ProgramBench; and Mirendil shows what RSI means

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . How math could help alignment: …What the “industrialization…

EP230: RAG vs Agentic RAG

Build for the long run. (Sponsored) Long-running agents need endurance. They must endure waiting for users, and weather tool failures. They must take each new jump in model intelligence in stride. Inngest makes…

Claude’s personal agent

folks, I’ve been working on a way to get my X bookmarks grouped in the right places for the newsletter. If you didn’t know, Keshav , who’s been working with me for many years, is leaving us at the end of the year to…

Presented by Stripe

Listen to this post : Log in to listen Stratechery is, starting from today, presented by Stripe. The Unified Content Business Model Readers have, over the years, pointed out the paradox of my belief in and advocacy for…

Starbucks wants to use AI to show you a ‘personalized digital menu’ at the drive-thru

Starbucks could eventually show you a personalized digital menu when you pull up to the drive-thru. During an earnings call on Thursday , Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is going to explore "experiences that…

iSurge

Activity monitor, per-app volume, disk cleanup at your notch

Supersonic airliner in doubt as company shifts to powering AI data centers

Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl recently declared “it’s time for a renaissance in energy and in supersonic flight” as the supersonic airliner company unveiled a Colorado factory dedicated to making gas turbines for AI…

Patch or Die

Here is a message from Joel, Zane and the a16z infra team that we sent to our portfolio companies yesterday, regarding the current cybersecurity situation. Stay safe out there! The previous week should make it obvious…

Linode Security Incident

126 points · 70 comments

Cracks are emerging in the AI spending boom

Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.

Ollie, a privacy-focused AI assistant, is shutting down

As an increasing number of AI assistants flood the market, the founder of Ollie, an assistant that respected its users' privacy, says it will be shutting down in a week.

Charts of the Week: Job FUD Fades

Job FUD Fades Microsoft made some headlines last week when it announced an employee buyout offer to 60,000 of its employees—roughly a quarter of its workforce—that would be worth something like ~$10B, if everyone said…

Sharp Tech on Video: Anthropic’s S-1 and What It Means for Meta and Muse, You Can See Everything, and Brewers!

Sharp Tech is, for the first time, available on video. You have three ways to consume it: YouTube, Spotify, and here on Stratechery.

How Uber Built a Genie to Answer Questions Correctly

[Webinar] How to stop rewriting your agent’s code (Sponsored) Right now, you’re your agent’s context engine. You write the rules files, maintain the skills, and paste in the Slack thread it missed. But hand-curated…

Anthropic VS code extension on Cursor backdoored for nearly 12 hours

An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude model was backdoored and threatened as many as 5,000 developers' machines, multiple sources reported Friday. Anthropic so far has yet to warn customers of the incident. The…

Why Shopify Migrated From React Native

Stop scrubbing through session replays (Sponsored) Most teams record session replays at a flat sample rate, then spend the next incident scrolling through hundreds of sessions that have nothing to do with the bug. This…

Infinite Mac: BeOS

96 points · 30 comments

Data Movement Strategies In System Design

Software systems don’t keep information in one place all the time. When a user makes a request to the system, it goes from the application to a server. A database might store the records needed to process it. Also,…

Jules Verne's Lost Novel

70 points · 14 comments

Norah Studio

A new space to explore your music

The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it

77 points · 22 comments

The Download: Anthropic’s IPO, smarter power grids, and exercise pills

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Will the real Anthropic please stand up? After weeks of frenzied speculation,…

Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand

In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape.…

Import AI 477: In which I tell the IMF the Singularity has begun

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please . Here’s a speech I gave on Saturday the 17th of October at…

Faylee

Bug reports your coding agent can fix from one

LLM Prompt Caching Versus Semantic Caching

Add AuthKit to your app in one command (Sponsored) Your app needs authentication. That usually means installing an SDK, wiring up callback routes, configuring middleware, and getting your environment right. Or you can…

Industrial Intelligence: The next growth opportunity for manufacturing

Every manufacturer has its own industrial intelligence. Some is documented, and some resides in the knowledge of experienced workers. Consider an experienced operator preparing to restart a line after a changeover. The…

Muse Spark Open ✨, Microsoft’s 3T param model 🧠, d1-ultra 💡

Sonnet 5.5 is worth a try

folks, I’ll be at OpenAI DevDay today. If you’re there, come say hi - I have pink shoes on. Sam says they've " found a new thing ". I have the embargo of all the things they’re launching but I’m sworn to secrecy and I’d…