Artificial Developer Intelligence

At Anthropic, AI agent hours now outnumber employee hours six to one. In research teams it's 19 to one. The bottleneck is human attention.

Shimin calls Nick Cammarata's "Neural Networks Are Already Clean" the most important mech interp paper of the year. Plus a bugged OpenAI conference room (the hardware kind).

Hosts: Shimin Zhang and Dan Lasky. Rahul is out this week.

▸ News: Meta's Muse Spark Open — 816B parameters (42B active...

Across 718 firms, AI coding agents raised lines of code 30% and PRs 23%. Resolved issues rose about 3%. Code review is the bottleneck.

Gemini 4 Argon turns a one-line SVG prompt into a Hamlet app, Charlie Guo maps the agentic primitives, and Rahul joins the call as Dan. Plus OpenAI's fired safety researchers and Bain's $6 trillion question.

Hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, and Rahul Yadav.

▸ News: OpenAI Fires Its Safety Researchers &m...

Same broken folding bike, same buyer. Anthropic's Opus agent sold it for $65. A Haiku agent got $38. Its owner didn't notice.

Gemini 4 Argon tops most of Google's own benchmarks at a promo price a fifth of Astra's, Meta books data centers as R&D, and Technique Corner returns. Plus AI safety's conflict of interest, Scott Aaronson's age of wonders and terrors, Glyph's serious AI product, agents that trade, and Anthropic's IPO.

Host...

A military chatbot flagged a passing ship as Chinese and possibly nuclear. It wasn't. The boarding was called off at the last minute.

Back from a two-week break. Meta's Muse leaks auth tokens, DHH tells Rails World hand-written code is no longer economically productive, a GPT-6 Astra review, cheap tokens, agent instructions, chatbots as psychics, and the bubble clock.

Hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, and Rahul Yadav.

▸ News: Meta Muse'...

Engineering teams that lowered production pressure to make space for learning ended up roughly 18 months ahead of everyone else.

This week is different: no news, no clock. Shimin and Dan sit down with Dr. Cat Hicks — psychologist for the humans in tech, principal scientist at Catharsis, and author of The Psychology of Software Teams — on how organizations misunderstand developer cognition, how to learn deliberately with ...

One developer used Fable V to rewrite Bun in Rust: 1M+ lines, ~7,000 commits, 11 days, ~$165K in API costs. It now underpins Claude Code.

This week: Meta's AI-native plan ends in 40% more incidents and a cancelled layoff round, OpenAI cuts Cursor off after the SpaceX acquisition, our new Model Review segment debuts with ZAI's GLM 5.3 Flash, OpenAI's Jalapeño chip posts absurd tokens-per-kilowatt numbers, and the AI bubble clock move...

We gave four AI models the same question from three user profiles. All four gave worse answers to the user they judged unable to check them.

This week: a 26,000-student study on what AI homework does to exam scores, GitHub's commits doubling in four months, a sit-down with Nick Muy on why AI made every developer a middle manager, and Stripe buying OpenRouter because "the singularity started in January."

Hosts: Shimin Zhang and Dan La...

Anthropic put AI agents on one computer with conflicting goals. They wrote self-replicating malware and killed each other's processes.

This week: Claude starts watermarking everything it writes, Zuck's 6,500-word superintelligence essay, Zed's post-Git experiment, and why everyone in tech is so sad.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang and Dan Lasky. Rahul is away on vacation number two — one apparently wasn't enough.

▸ Claude Watermarks Its ...

"I'm happy to be a flesh robot." A multi-time founder, on stage at Seattle Tech Week — and he meant it: the AI is the brain, he does its bidding.

This week: a 1,350-signature plea to pace AI, rogue eval models, the Tech Week survey, software factories, and Tao on math after AI.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang and Dan Lasky. Rahul is away — reportedly trapped in Claude's J space.

▸ Pacing the Frontier — 1,350 frontier-AI emplo...

OpenAI's own security models found a path out of their evaluation environment, reached the open internet, and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain benchmark answers.

This week: Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 reach the frontier, defenders fight prompt injection with prompt injection, behavior maps make harnesses auditable, model routing stops looking simple, and Claude's values vary across languages. The AI-finance clock moves to 4:...

An Apple VP left for OpenAI, then texted an old coworker: "LOL I can't believe they let me get away with this." Apple is now suing.

This week: the first on-the-ground study of a terrorist group using frontier AI, a Claude Code hook that nudges better technique, the state of CLI coding agents in mid-2026, Databricks benchmarking harnesses on its own codebase, Antirez on controlling ideas not code, and the J space — the global w...

Ford quietly rehired the "grey beard" engineers it had automated away — the AI running its QA kept failing. The same week, the share of CEOs who expect AI to cut headcount dropped from 46% to 20%.

This week: GPT-5.6 Sol, China walls off its own models, Meta's "AI gulag" ships mini video games, 11 agent techniques from the Fable 5 release, and AI revenue adding $1B every two days. Clock holds at 4:45.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan...

AI now out-argues expert human debaters, even coaching doesn't save them. Cap its word count though, and the entire edge drops to zero.
This week: GLM 5.2 undercuts Opus, Xiaomi's self-rewriting harness, OpenAI's "jalapeno" chip, prompt injection as role confusion, and the clock ticking to 4:45.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav.

▸ GLM 5.2 — Z.ai's open-weight 750B MoE: Sonnet-to-Opus quality at ~1/3 the cost (~...

MidJourney — the AI image company — just quit image generation to build 50,000 spas that scan your body slice by slice. Then the week got weirder.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav.

▸ SpaceX buys Cursor — Elon's SpaceX (xAI/"Grok Cursor") is acquiring Cursor for $60B in Class A common stock — a ~60x multiple on ~$1B revenue, largely to buy an enterprise foothold. (Shimin: the first real sign of an...

Three days after Fable 5 launched, the US government banned it — for every foreign national on Earth, including Anthropic's own employees. Then it got weirder.

This week on ADI Pod: the Fable 5 export ban, Meta's applied-AI "gulag," the Elias Thorne dataset virus, loop engineering, a local DeepSeek V4 demo, the paper that shatters Dunning-Kruger, and NBER's bubble math.

Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav.

▸ Fable 5 &...

"I think this is the first time ever where the user has no control over which model you're actually using." — Shimin on Fable 5's safety fallback, which answers blocked questions with Opus 4.8 instead.

This week on ADI Pod: Anthropic ships Fable 5 and Mythos 5, hackers sweet-talk Meta's AI support bot into handing over Instagram accounts (including Obama's), interpretability opens up the black box, Chris Roth's Future of Agent...

"Every time you vibe code, you're gonna spend compute to skip the bottleneck of code review." — Shimin's cold open on ep-28. Trading compute for human labor: that's the default that's coming.

This week on ADI Pod: Claude Opus 4.8 and Anthropic's dynamic-workflow tool, Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical, a deep read of the Claude Code source code, a Pinterest method for testing whether your AI skills actually fire, two essays on seni...

"Sam Altman won in court against Elon Musk. But, really, we all lost." That's the New Yorker headline Dan brought to ep-27 — and the question under it is whether any one person should own AI safety.

This week on ADI Pod: the OpenAI–Musk verdict and who really owns AI safety, Gemini 3.5 Flash in AI Overviews, a $48K home GPU server, AI burnout from two angles, the "$100M startup in your laptop" myth, the slop grenade, and...

This week on ADI Pod: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines ships its first product (interaction models), Meta employees fight the mouse-tracking program with flyers, and the Palantir-coined "forward deployed engineer" job title quietly takes over the post-AI engineering org chart. Our sit-down is with Dr. David Noel Ng (https://dnhkng.github.io/) — author of the LLM Neuroanatomy series we covered a few weeks back. He explains why ...