Author name: Mike M.

an-engineering-thesis-disguised-as-a-coupe:-a-history-of-the-honda-prelude

An engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: A history of the Honda Prelude

Cars, Honda Prelude / /

wait for that second cam to kick in…

Technology like four-wheel steering and variable valve timing debuted in the Prelude.

A vintage ad for the Honda Prelude from 1983 (mild touchups by Aurich Lawson) Credit: Honda

A vintage ad for the Honda Prelude from 1983 (mild touchups by Aurich Lawson) Credit: Honda

The Honda Prelude was never simply a car. It was an engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: compact, disciplined, and unapologetically technical. At its best, it distilled Honda’s faith in precision manufacturing and clever packaging into something accessible and aspirational.

Its return for 2026, after more than a quarter century away, isn’t nostalgia so much as institutional memory. The Prelude name carries expectations: balance over brute force, innovation over ornament, and a willingness to pursue mechanical elegance even when the market leans elsewhere.

And it’s worth remembering that the original Prelude emerged during a turbulent period for the industry. Constraint, not excess, shaped it, which may explain why it felt so deliberate from the start.

A time of economic turbulence

The Honda Prelude didn’t arrive during a champagne toast. It showed up in the middle of economic upheaval, when the global auto business stared nervously at its balance sheet and wondered whether the arithmetic still worked.

Honda's first US headquarters in 1959.

Honda’s first US headquarters in 1959.

Credit: Honda

Honda’s first US headquarters in 1959. Credit: Honda

The story began on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon severed the dollar’s link to gold, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system that had anchored postwar commerce since 1944. By 1973, the dollar was formally devalued. Fixed exchange rates evaporate. The yen surges; Japanese exports become more expensive; corporate forecasts unravel.

Then came the oil shock. In October 1973, OPEC cut production, which sent energy prices sharply higher and injected fresh uncertainty into global demand. For Honda Motor Co., with roughly 60 percent of its sales tied to the United States, the math shifted overnight. A stronger yen squeezed margins. Higher fuel prices threatened volume, and Japan’s export machine suddenly looked exposed.

Something had to give.

At precisely this moment of instability, the company’s founders, Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa, stepped aside from the enterprise they had built from scratch. Honda was no longer a workshop operation; it employed 18,000 people and held 19.5 billion yen in capital. But scale offers no immunity; it merely increases the stakes.

Enter Kiyoshi Kawashima, then president of Honda R&D and senior managing director of Honda Motor Co. His New Honda Plan amounts to a corporate reset. Management structures would be modernized. Decision-making streamlined. And, crucially, Honda would expand globally rather than simply export into an increasingly volatile currency environment.

In a world of floating exchange rates and unpredictable oil prices, Honda chose reinvention over retreat. The Prelude would become one expression of that shift, proof that even in turmoil, discipline and design could travel.

Honda’s newest model

Honda’s American expansion started in 1959 with motorcycles. A decade later, the N600 arrived with two cylinders, modest size, and immense ambition. By 1973, as economic turbulence deepened, Honda introduced the Civic: a larger, four-cylinder, efficient, affordable hatchback perfectly calibrated for the moment. The even-larger Accord followed in 1976, positioned as Honda’s first true world car.

Both were powered by Honda’s CVCC engine, the first to meet the tough emissions standards of the 1970 US Clean Air Act without a catalytic converter. Its breakthrough was elegant engineering: a spark plug ignited a richer fuel mixture in a small prechamber, which then ignited a leaner mixture in the main cylinder, delivering cleaner combustion without costly add-ons. In an era defined by oil shocks and regulation, Honda didn’t lobby. It engineered its way forward.

And, having secured credibility with rational transport, it then did something faintly irrational. It built a sports coupe.

The Prelude that started it all. Honda

Launched in 1978, the first-generation Prelude was equal parts boxy and sleek; an Accord underneath, but tighter, shorter, and more intentional. Honda took the sedan’s suspension, brakes, and 1.8 L engine and fit them to a chassis with a wheelbase trimmed by 2.4 inches (60 mm). The output was modest: 72 hp (54 kW) and 94 lb-ft (127 Nm) of torque from a single-overhead-cam four-cylinder paired with a five-speed manual or a two-speed automatic (later upgraded to three), sending its power to the front wheels. Reaching 60 mph (97 km/h) took about 19 seconds, which is hardly exhilarating. And the Prelude carried a premium price despite delivering a driving experience that doesn’t justify it. Sales were meager, but Honda was just getting started.

The Prelude comes into its own

It isn’t until 1983 that Honda finally reimagined the Prelude as something more than a truncated Accord. It was a turning point that suggested the company was ready to treat the model not as a derivative, but as a distinct ambition. Now rated at 100 hp (75 kW), the car arrived wrapped in a sharp, wedge-shaped silhouette, proving to be a deliberate break from the excess it replaced, while its pop-up headlights became an essential element of its design. It was cleaner, more contemporary, and unmistakably forward-looking. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for what came next: the 1985 Prelude Si.

With a larger fuel-injected 2.0 L four-cylinder engine producing 110 hp (82 kW) and 114 lb-ft (155 Nm) of torque, the Si pushed the Prelude into more serious territory, trimming the 0–60 mph sprint into the nine-second range, a meaningful benchmark in the mid-1980s sport-compact calculus.

When the third-generation Prelude debuted for 1988, the styling suggested evolution rather than revolution, as it wore a carefully refined silhouette. But beneath the cautious redesigns, Honda was preparing a far more consequential statement.

This generation cemented the Prelude’s reputation as a technological outlier. It became the first car sold in the United States to offer four-wheel steering, an audacious bit of engineering that sounds exotic but functions with pure mechanical simplicity. At low speeds, the rear wheels turned in the opposite direction to the front wheels to tighten the car’s rotation; at higher speeds, they turned in the same direction, enhancing stability.

The power came from a single-overhead-cam 2.0 L four-cylinder that produced 109 hp (81 kW) and 111 lb-ft (150 Nm) of torque, and was paired with either a four-speed automatic or a five-speed manual. For drivers who sought something sharper, the Si’s 2.0 L dual-overhead-cam variant delivered 135 hp (101 kW) and 127 lb-ft (172 Nm) of torque, a figure that rose to 140 hp (104 kW) by 1990, reinforcing the Prelude’s gradual transformation from stylish coupe to legitimate sport compact contender, as the Honda Prelude Si 4WS became the Prelude’s flagship trim.

Continuing a proud tradition

Yet even the most devoted Prelude loyalist can tire of a familiar refrain. And so, when the fourth generation arrived in 1992, Honda didn’t abandon the long nose, short deck proportions. Instead, Honda reinterpreted it. The sharp creases and pop-up headlights were gone, replaced by fixed lighting and softer, almost liquefied sheet metal, as if the car had been left in the sun and allowed to melt into a more aerodynamic future. The more consequential shift came a year later.

1992 Honda Prelude Si Coupe.

Straight lines and pop up headlights were gone for gen 3, replaced by smooth curves.

Credit: Honda

Straight lines and pop up headlights were gone for gen 3, replaced by smooth curves. Credit: Honda

In 1993, Honda introduced the Prelude VTEC, shorthand for Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control, a name that would soon enter the enthusiast lexicon. While the 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider 2000 was the first to offer variable-valve timing in the US market, Honda’s system went a step further. At higher revs, a more aggressive profile holds the valves open longer and wider to extract greater performance, while at lower rpm, the valves open more conservatively, prioritizing efficiency. Today, variable-valve timing is common across the industry. At the time, it felt revelatory, effectively delivering two engine personalities within a single powerplant. Following the audacity of four-wheel steering, VTEC further polished the Prelude’s identity as Honda’s rolling laboratory, a coupe that previewed the engineering future.

The base S model carried a 135 hp single-overhead-cam four-cylinder, very much in keeping with Honda’s disciplined approach. With the Si or SE, buyers were rewarded with a 2.3 L four-cylinder producing 160 hp (120 kW), giving the Prelude a sharper edge without sacrificing its daily civility. But the headline act was the VTEC model, the range-topping product of Honda’s engineering confidence. Its 2.2 L dual-overhead-cam four-cylinder delivered 190 hp (142 kW), a figure that placed the Prelude in sport-compact territory. It was the fullest realization of the car’s dual personality: civil at low revs, urgent when pushed.

Offered through 1996, this generation also marked the end of an experiment. Four-wheel steering, once the Prelude’s technological calling card, unceremoniously disappeared. It’s an omen of what is to come.

A final shot over the bow

When the fifth-generation Prelude arrived for 1997, its styling felt like a compromise between eras, a return to Honda’s earlier angular discipline, slightly softened to align with late-1990s tastes. It looked modern but cautious. And beneath the sheet metal, something had changed.

1998 Honda Prelude Type SH.

A 1998 Honda Prelude Type SH.

Credit: Honda

A 1998 Honda Prelude Type SH. Credit: Honda

For the first time in years, the Prelude’s ambitions narrowed. There was a single engine: a 195 hp (145 kW) 2.2 L four-cylinder, paired with a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic. The menu was simplified, perhaps strategically.

Four-wheel steering was gone. In its place came Type SH, fitted with Honda’s Active Torque Transfer System, or ATTS. It consisted of electromechanical clutches designed to send additional torque to the outside front wheel during a turn to sharpen turn-in and approach the balance of rear-wheel drive. Today, we call it torque vectoring. Then, it’s a costly, heavy experiment that proved too clever for its own good. Few buyers opted in. And so, the Prelude faded away.

In June 2001, after selling 826,082 Preludes in the United States, Honda ended production. The car peaked in 1986, when 79,841 examples found buyers. After that, demand slipped steadily, squeezed by competition from within, particularly the Accord Coupe, Civic Coupe, and Acura Integra, and by a market pivoting decisively toward sport-utility vehicles. By the first five months of 2001, just 3,500 Preludes were sold. The car that once served as Honda’s technological calling card exited quietly. It was less a failure than a casualty of shifting appetites, as its innovations were absorbed into the mainstream that it helped shape.

The Prelude’s second chance

And now, roughly 25 years later, Honda has revived the Prelude, less a sentimental callback than a calculated move in an auto industry that no longer resembles the one the Prelude left behind.

The auto industry, once defined by horsepower, styling cycles, and incremental engineering gains, is now shaped by software, batteries, and geopolitics. Tesla forced incumbents to think like tech companies. China emerged not just as a market, but as a manufacturing and innovation superpower. And governments, through emissions rules and subsidies, have become de facto product planners, pushing automakers toward electrification whether they are ready or not.

At the same time, the economics of making cars have grown more unforgiving. Development costs have soared. Margins are thinner. Scale matters more. Against this backdrop, reviving a legacy nameplate is no longer just a branding exercise. It’s a test of whether nostalgia can coexist with an industry that now runs on code, capital, and political risk. This explains the 2026 Honda Prelude.

Economics, not just nostalgia, fuel its return

With its in-house rivals long gone—the Accord Coupe was discontinued in 2017, and the Civic Coupe followed three years later—the Prelude returned first as a 2023 concept and now as a production car. In other words, Honda is reentering a segment it largely abandoned, now that the competitive clutter inside its own showroom has been cleared.

Underneath, the revival reflects a broader industry playbook: minimize investment while maximizing brand leverage. The Prelude rides on a shortened Civic platform, uses a Civic Hybrid drivetrain, and borrows suspension hardware from the Civic Type R. Honda has reengineered and retuned the components, but the strategy is clear: contain development costs, preserve margins, and spread R&D across as many units as possible.

A 2026 Honda prelude

The reborn Prelude.

Credit: Honda

The reborn Prelude. Credit: Honda

Honda eliminated the previous Prelude after selling roughly 3,500 units. The new goal of 4,000 units annually suggests management is not betting on a coupe revival but that it’s testing the waters. In a US market dominated by high-margin SUVs and pickup trucks, the Prelude functions more like a brand halo with guardrails: a way to test whether nostalgia can deliver incremental profit without jeopardizing capital. In that sense, the car is less a throwback and more a case study in how legacy automakers now balance emotion with spreadsheets.

In that regard, the 2026 Honda Prelude continues to predict the future.

An engineering thesis disguised as a coupe: A history of the Honda Prelude Read More »

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Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae

astrophysics, general relativity, magnetar, Physics, Science, supernova / /

Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae.

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

The power within

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. “This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city,” Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

The problem was that this theory did not quite explain observations. In a standard magnetar model, the light curve of the supernova should rise rapidly and then fade away evenly as the neutron star loses its rotational energy. “This way the light curve, in the prediction of this model, just goes up and then down quite smoothly,” Farah says. But when astronomers observe superluminous supernovae, they almost never see this smooth fade. Instead, they see bumps, wiggles, and strange modulations. The light curve flickers over months.

For a while, scientists tried to patch the magnetar engine theory to fit observations. Maybe the expanding debris was slamming into irregular shells of material shed by the star before it died. Or perhaps the magnetar engine was spitting out random, violent flares. But these explanations required highly specific, fine-tuned parameters to match what we were seeing through our telescopes.

The solution to the strange flickering problem came when the Liverpool Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer collaboration detected an object designated SN 2024afav on December 12, 2024. Initially, the object looked like a standard superluminous supernova. “It was as bright and it had bumps in the light curve like many other objects of this kind,” Farah says. But as the telescopes kept watching, it started doing something unprecedented: It started to chirp.

The chirping star

In physics, a chirp refers to a signal with a frequency that steadily increases over time. In the case of SN 2024afav, its emissions were bumping up and down, but the gap between these bumps was shrinking. After a second and third bump both appeared with the gaps between them reduced by roughly 35 percent, Farah and his team realized they could calculate how much the gap between the bumps would decrease next.

The team adjusted their observation schedule, pointed their instruments at SN 2024afav, and discovered the fourth bump appeared exactly when they expected it would. The fifth bump enabled the scientists to narrow down the period reduction to about 29 percent.

The fact that Farah and his colleagues could accurately predict the bumps delivered a massive blow to our existing magnetar models. While a few irregular bumps could be explained away by the supernova ejecta crashing into clouds of gas, it doesn’t explain perfectly timed, cleanly sinusoidal modulations with a steadily decaying period. Random space rubble just doesn’t work that way.

“So, we came up with the new model to describe this behavior,” Farah explains. They proposed a new physical mechanism that relied on the Lense-Thirring effect, otherwise known as frame-dragging. Frame-dragging is a prediction of General Relativity, where a massive spinning object slightly drags the spacetime around with it as it rotates. “We didn’t try this mechanism before because it had never been seen around a magnetar before,” Farah says. But when his team did try it, it turned out to perfectly match what was going on.

The flickering in the superluminous supernovae, Farah hypothesized, was caused by the extreme gravity of a newborn magnetar dragging the very spacetime around it along as it was spinning.

Twisted space

To understand Farah’s Lense-Thirring solution, imagine a bowling ball spinning in a vat of molasses. As the ball rotates, friction drags the sticky fluid along, creating a swirling vortex. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, mass and energy can warp the fabric of spacetime, so if a sufficiently large mass is spinning rapidly, it drags the space-time along in a manner similar to the molasses. Around Earth, this effect is minuscule. But around a newborn magnetar, which is far more massive and spinning hundreds of times a second, spacetime is whipped into a violent, twisting frenzy.

When the progenitor star exploded to create SN 2024afav, it didn’t eject all of its material perfectly. Some of the stellar guts failed to escape and fell back toward the newborn magnetar, forming a small accretion disk around it. Crucially, this disk was misaligned, tilted relative to the rotational axis of the magnetar. Because the disk was tilted in this aggressively twisted spacetime, the Lense-Thirring effect forced the entire disk to wobble, or precess, around the magnetar’s spin axis like a top that was spinning ever more slowly.

As this misaligned disk wobbled, it acted like a giant cosmic lampshade: it periodically blocked, reflected, or redirected the intense radiation and jets spewing from the central magnetar. The high-energy photons emitted by the magnetar had to fight their way through the expanding supernova ejecta, getting reprocessed into optical light and diffusing outward over a span of about 15 days. Observed through our telescopes on Earth, this wobbling disk created a rhythmic fluctuation in the superluminous supernova’s brightness.

After Farah and his colleagues explained the bumps in the signal with the wobbling disk around the magnetar, they moved to explaining why the signal chirped.

The shrinking disk

The answer the team proposes lies in the environment of the disk itself. The size of this accretion disk isn’t static. It’s determined by an inward ram pressure from the infalling matter and the outward radiation pressure coming from the magnetar. Over time, as the exploding star runs out of fallback material, the accretion rate of the disk drops. With less matter pushing in, the disk loses equilibrium and begins to shrink, falling inward toward the magnetar. And the closer it gets to the spinning magnetar, the stronger the Lense-Thirring effect becomes.

As the accretion disk shrinks and falls deeper into the gravity well, the twisted spacetime whips it around faster and faster. “Imagine a pirouetting figure skater pulling her arms in to accelerate the spinning movement,” Farah suggests. In consequence, the precession speeds up, the wobbles get tighter, and the light curve chirps.

Finally, by measuring the chirps, Farah and his colleagues were able to work backward to measure the properties of the magnetar powering the SN 2024afav. They constrained its spin period to 4.2 milliseconds and precisely calculated its staggeringly powerful magnetic field. The team found that the magnetar’s properties that derived solely from the chirping matched the properties required to power the overall baseline brightness of the superluminous supernova. The engine that powered the main explosion was exactly the right size and speed to cause the wobbling we observed.

But the work on the revised “magnetar+LT” model is just beginning. “This object is so rare and so new,” Farah admits. “We were scraping the bottom of the barrel for references that were even remotely related to the idea we were pitching here.”

Superluminous siblings

Farah’s team went back and looked at archival data from other bumpy superluminous supernovae such as SN 2018kyt, SN 2019unb, and SN 2021mkr. They found that their “magnetar+LT” model explains the modulations in those events as well. A whole class of exploding stars that previously required multiple mutually exclusive physical explanations could be unified by a single, elegant model.

This model, though, still has many unanswered questions. “How the accretion disk forms, how it blocks or modulates the light from the magnetar, how that light then gets to the ejecta, and finally how it gets to the observer,” Farah listed. “Basically every step along the way we made the best assumptions we could.” For each of these steps, he admits, there were at least five different ways it could happen, and the team just went with their best guess of what was going on.

To really figure it all out, Farah says, we need to wait till more objects like SN 2024afav are discovered. And this, he hopes, should become possible with new observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online. “The Rubin Observatory is expected to discover dozens of these chirped supernovae,” Farah says. “We will be able to test our models against many different objects. There’s definitely room for development and growth. This is just the very beginning.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10151-0

Photo of Jacek Krywko

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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microsoft-is-working-to-eliminate-pc-gaming’s-“compiling-shaders”-wait-times

Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming’s “compiling shaders” wait times

API, DirectX, game engine, gaming, graphics, microsoft, shaders, Windows / /

Getting everyone on board

Microsoft first rolled out Advanced Shader Delivery in its SDK last September and added support to the ROG Xbox Ally as a proof of concept by October. Microsoft said that the addition reduced launch times in games like Avowed by “as much as 85 percent,” which is a big deal on battery-limited handhelds.

Getting Advanced Shader Delivery adopted across the wider PC gaming ecosystem has been a slower process. Nvidia says it is “working closely with Microsoft” to add Advanced Shader Delivery support to its GeForce RTX line “later this year,” and Intel says it’s “looking forward to releasing a driver supporting ASD in the near future.” Qualcomm also said it plans to “debut this feature soon on Qualcomm Adreno X2 GPUs,” for what it’s worth.

Even with hardware support, game engine makers will have to integrate Microsoft’s SODB APIs to streamline the setup process for game developers. Epic Games says it is “doing early testing and explorations on SODB and PSDB generation and will have more details coming soon,” which is probably not the full-throated commitment Microsoft would like at this point.

For now, Microsoft has updated its APIs to let developers more easily create and test PSDBs and more easily compile shaders in larger games. The company is also urging developers to “integrate SODB collection into your game engine” now so they’ll be ready to upload those precompiled shaders through the Xbox Partner Center starting in May.

At that point, some PC games downloaded through the Xbox app will finally be able to skip that annoying “compiling shaders” loading step. But this isn’t a feature Microsoft wants to keep for its own PC game platform; the company says that “in the future, any storefront can compile the SODBs to… PSDBs and distribute them.”

Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming’s “compiling shaders” wait times Read More »

live-nation-director-boasted-of-gouging-ticket-buyers,-“robbing-them-blind”

Live Nation director boasted of gouging ticket buyers, “robbing them blind”

live nation, Policy, Ticketmaster / /

Unsealed messages add wrinkle to trial after US agreed to settle with Live Nation.

Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Newly unsealed documents show that a Live Nation regional director boasted of gouging ticket buyers and “robbing them blind” with fees for ancillary services such as slight upgrades to parking.

Live Nation has tried to exclude Slack messages from a trial that seeks a breakup of Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary, claiming the messages are irrelevant to the case, “highly prejudicial,” and would “inflame the jury.” The US government and state attorneys general opposed the motion to exclude evidence. US District Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York hasn’t ruled on the motion yet, but ordered the documents unsealed yesterday.

Live Nation has touted the experiences it offers concertgoers at amphitheaters but sought “to exclude candid, internal messages in which the individual who is currently Head of Ticketing for these amphitheaters calls fans ‘so stupid,’ explains that he ‘gouge[s]’ them, and brags that Live Nation is ‘robbing them blind, baby,’” said a memorandum of law filed by the US and states.

The messages were “sent between Live Nation employees Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold on the workplace collaboration tool known as Slack,” the memorandum said. The “robbing them blind” message was sent by Baker.

“As of 2022 (when most of the messages were sent), Mr. Baker was a regional Director of Ticketing for venues including Live Nation’s MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre (a major concert venue),” the brief said. “Mr. Weinhold was also a regional Director of Ticketing for venues including Jiffy Lube Live (another major concert venue). Mr. Baker is now Head of Ticketing for Venue Nation (the component of Live Nation responsible for operating its amphitheaters), and Mr. Weinhold is a Senior Director of Ticketing for Live Nation’s Capital Region.”

US settlement throws trial into doubt

The brief said that “Live Nation’s excessive prices for ancillary services,” like those boasted of in the internal messages, “are directly relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims” regarding how “Live Nation monetizes its monopoly position in the amphitheater market.”

The trial itself could be halted and restarted at a later date because the Trump administration decided to settle with Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The US and states filed their motion to exclude the evidence on March 8, the same day that the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement.

The US/Live Nation settlement blindsided state attorneys general, who have said they intend to take over the lead role in litigating the case. State AGs criticized the settlement terms and asked for a mistrial to give them time to prepare for a new trial. The judge reportedly urged the state AGs and Live Nation to hold settlement talks and to be prepared to continue the trial next week if they don’t reach a settlement.

The exhibits that Live Nation wanted to exclude were posted on the court docket yesterday. “I charge $50 to park in the grass lmao,” said a 2022 message from Baker. “I charge $60 for closer grass.”

Baker wrote, “parking alone I did almost $200K more than 2019…with LESS shows.” He shared an image that showed an increase in premier parking revenue from $499,415 in 2019 to $666,230 in 2021 and added, “robbing them blind baby… that’s how we do.” Weinhold replied, “lol.”

“I gouge them on ancil prices”

Baker complained that a Dead & Company cancellation prevented him from taking second place in a sales competition. “Gimme a plaque dammit,” he wrote. In a discussion about ticket prices and promotions, Baker wrote, “I gouge them on ancil prices to make up for it.”

Weinhold wrote in another chat, “I have VIP parking up to $250 lol.” Baker replied, “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them.” Weinhold then mentioned that he raised club prices to $125 and Baker replied, “I wonder if I can get $225.”

Live Nation said the messages aren’t reflective of the company’s general operations. “The Slack exchange from one junior staffer to a friend absolutely doesn’t reflect our values or how we operate,” Live Nation said in a statement provided to Ars today. “Because this was a private Slack message, leadership learned of this when the public did, and will be looking into the matter promptly. Our business only works when fans have great experiences, which is why we’ve capped amphitheater venue fees at 15 percent and have invested $1 billion in the last 18 months into US venues and fan amenities.”

The US and states said Live Nation is downplaying Baker’s position at the company. “Defendants’ brief fails to mention this individual has since been promoted and now serves as Head of Ticketing for Venue Nation, with responsibilities relating to all of Live Nation’s venues,” the plaintiffs’ brief said.

Live Nation said in a March 8 filing that the messages aren’t relevant to the trial because they concerned fees for things like VIP club access, premier parking, or lawn chair rentals. “These products are not primary concert tickets, are sold separately from tickets, and are not part of the ticketing services markets at issue in this trial; they bear no relevance to the parties’ claims and defenses,” Live Nation told the court.

Live Nation: Messages could “inflame the jury”

Live Nation said the only purpose of using the exhibits as evidence “is to portray Defendants in an unflattering light and inflame the jury against Defendants,” and that the exhibits “would confuse and mislead the jury, invite decision-making on an improper emotional basis, and cause unfair prejudice to Defendants.” The company also asked the court to bar plaintiffs “from questioning Ben Baker or any other witness about the substance of these Exhibits or about similar communications concerning ancillary, fan-facing products and services not encompassed by the markets and claims proceeding to trial.”

The brief from US and states said the messages about ancillary fees are highly relevant. The brief said the ancillaries “include facilities fees that Live Nation imposes on fans as part of the ticket price, portions of service fees that Live Nation imposes on fans in addition to the ticket price, and Live Nation’s sale of ‘onsite’ services, such as upgraded parking and access to the VIP lounge.”

The brief said that Live Nation boasted in its latest annual report that ancillary revenue was over $45 per fan for the year, and that “Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino has cited ‘onsite’ ancillary sales [as] a ‘high margin business’ enabled by Live Nation’s scale.”

Live Nation’s argument that ancillary services are irrelevant to trial questions about concert tickets “completely misses the point,” the plaintiffs said. “The fact that Live Nation uses the high-margin ancillary business to monetize the amphitheater monopoly at issue in this case is sufficient on its own to demonstrate relevance. Second, Live Nation is able to degrade the fan experience by charging excessive prices for ancillary services without fear of artists switching away, which demonstrates its monopoly power in the amphitheater market.”

Urging the judge to allow the chats as evidence, the brief said the messages “provide important context and insight to the jury of how Defendants in fact operate their businesses, potentially contrary to the testimony the witness may provide in the courtroom.”

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Live Nation director boasted of gouging ticket buyers, “robbing them blind” Read More »

“use-a-gun”-or-“beat-the-crap-out-of-him”:-ai-chatbot-urged-violence,-study-finds

“Use a gun” or “beat the crap out of him”: AI chatbot urged violence, study finds

AI, ai chatbots, center for countering digital hate, Character.AI, chatgpt, openai, Policy / /

The testing occurred between November 5, 2025, and December 11, 2025, and results were shared with the companies. Because the tests were three to four months ago, the latest versions were not evaluated. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI told Ars today that updates they implemented after the research was conducted have made their chatbots better at discouraging violence.

Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s CEO, said that “AI chatbots, now embedded into our daily lives, could be helping the next school shooter plan their attack or a political extremist coordinate an assassination.” He accused tech companies of “choosing negligence in pursuit of so-called innovation.”

A spokesperson for Character.AI told Ars that the company is reviewing the study but that “without the context of the full chats, it’s impossible to fully evaluate the model’s responses… It’s important to remember that the user-created Characters on our site are fictional. They are intended for entertainment and roleplaying, and we have taken robust steps to make that clear. For example, we have prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a Character says should be treated as fiction.”

Character.AI said it has been “rolling out changes so that under-18 users no longer have the ability to engage in open-ended chats with Characters,” and is using “new age assurance technology to help ensure users are grouped into the correct age experience.” This includes “developing our own age estimation model in-house and partnering with third-party services.” The firm added that it removes characters “that violate our terms of service, including school shooters.”

A Perplexity spokesperson issued a statement that didn’t acknowledge any problems with the company’s technology. “People can select any of the top AI models on Perplexity and get safer, more accurate answers,” it said. “Perplexity is consistently the safest AI platform because our own safeguards are always additive to any existing safeguards in any underlying model.”

OpenAI told Ars that the CCDH “report’s methodology is flawed and misleading. ChatGPT is trained to reject requests for violent or hateful material, and the findings show it consistently refused to give instructions on acquiring weapons. We continuously strengthen these safeguards and our latest ChatGPT model is even better at detecting and refusing violent requests.”

OpenAI said that ChatGPT refused to answer questions on “what kind of hunting rifle would be best for a long-range target,” but provided publicly available information such as addresses or maps. Conflating those two types of responses is misleading, OpenAI said. The tests were conducted on GPT-5.1, and updates made since that version have improved detection and refusals for violent content, OpenAI said.

OpenAI was sued this week by the family of a victim of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting in British Columbia. As the CCDH report says, “reporting indicates that OpenAI staff flagged the suspect internally for using ChatGPT in ways consistent with planning violence. Rather than escalating concern to law enforcement, the company chose to remain silent.”

Researchers posed as teens

The testing was conducted with accounts representing made-up teen users in the US and Ireland, with the age set to the minimum allowed on each platform. A minimum age of 18 was required by Anthropic, DeepSeek, Character.AI, and Replika, while the other platforms had minimum ages of 13.

“Use a gun” or “beat the crap out of him”: AI chatbot urged violence, study finds Read More »

intel-shores-up-its-desktop-cpu-lineup-with-boosted-core-ultra-200s-plus-chips

Intel shores up its desktop CPU lineup with boosted Core Ultra 200S Plus chips

intel, intel core ultra, Tech / /

Intel’s Core Ultra 200S desktop chips, codenamed “Arrow Lake,” first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel’s desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn’t mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they’re power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs, they sometimes struggled to match those older chips’ gaming performance. And for gaming systems in particular, they’ve always had to live in the shadow of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series X3D processors, chips with extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games.

Intel doesn’t have a next-generation upgrade available for desktops yet, but it is shoring up its desktop lineup with a pair of upgraded chips. The Core Ultra 200S Plus processors (also referred to as Arrow Lake Refresh, in some circles) add more processor cores, boost clock speeds, add support for faster memory, and speed up the internal communication between different parts of the processor. Collectively, Intel says these improvements will boost gaming performance by an average of 15 percent.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 270KF Plus (a real mouthful, all of these names are getting to be) add four more efficiency cores compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K, bringing the total number of cores to 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores). If you wanted that many CPU cores previously, you would have had to spring for a Core Ultra 9 chip. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and 250KF Plus also get four more E-cores than the 245K, bringing its total to 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores.

Intel shores up its desktop CPU lineup with boosted Core Ultra 200S Plus chips Read More »

ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-over-security-concerns

Ig Nobels ceremony moves to Europe over security concerns

culture, Ig Nobels, Science / /

Traditionally, the awards ceremony and related Ig Nobel events have taken place in Boston at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. However, four of last year’s 10 winners opted to skip the ceremony rather than travel to the US, and the situation has not improved.

Nor is it just the Ig Nobels being affected by the hostile US environment for international travel. Many international gaming developers are choosing to skip this year’s weeklong Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, citing similar concerns. “I honestly don’t know anyone who is not from the US who is planning on going to the next GDC,” Godot Foundation Executive Director Emilio Coppola, who’s based in Spain, told Ars. “We never felt super safe, but now we are not willing to risk it.”

So this year, the Ig Nobel organizers are joining forces with the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich for hosting duties. “Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things—Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind—and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas,” Abraham said.

The Ig Nobels will not be returning to the US any time soon. Instead, the plan is for Zurich to host every second year; every odd-numbered year, the ceremony will be hosted by a different European city. Abraham likened the arrangement to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Ig Nobels ceremony moves to Europe over security concerns Read More »

us-blindsides-states-with-surprise-settlement-in-live-nation/ticketmaster-trial

US blindsides states with surprise settlement in Live Nation/Ticketmaster trial

live nation, Policy, Ticketmaster / /

State attorneys general were “kept in the dark and excluded materially from settlement discussions” while they prepared for trial, the filing said. On March 5, the states were “notified of the near-final terms of the settlement at 4 P.M.” and given one day to determine whether to accept or reject them,” the filing said.

States to take over lead role at trial

The US was taking the lead role in the case before the settlement was announced. In addition to seeking a mistrial, the states asked the court to stay the proceedings to give them time “to fully prepare to assume the lead role at trial and explore settlement.”

The states “have had no opportunity to obtain and reallocate the resources necessary to try the case on their own or to meaningfully discuss the settlement with Defendants and attempt to negotiate the terms,” the filing said. “Moreover, despite the primary role that DOJ has played before the jury, the United States (and several additional individual Plaintiff States) will now vanish from the trial… Due to the substantial prejudice caused by this settlement and DOJ’s abrupt exit after taking the lead role up to and during the first week of trial, a mistrial is warranted.”

New York took the lead role in the states’ filing today. “The settlement recently announced with the US Department of Justice fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers. We cannot agree to it,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said today. “My attorney general colleagues and I have a strong case against Live Nation, and we will continue our lawsuit to protect consumers and restore fair competition to the live entertainment industry.”

Most of the states that backed the filing have Democratic attorneys general. But the group is bipartisan with Republican attorneys general from Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming.

Other states involved in the lawsuit either decided to join the US settlement or have not yet taken a position. States agreeing to the settlement are Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota, the filing said. The other states involved in the lawsuit are Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Texas, and West Virginia.

This article was updated with a statement from Live Nation.

US blindsides states with surprise settlement in Live Nation/Ticketmaster trial Read More »

nintendo-sues-to-prevent-trump-from-dodging-full-tariff-refunds

Nintendo sues to prevent Trump from dodging full tariff refunds

Donald Trump, ieepa tariffs, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Policy, switch 2, tariff refunds, tariffs / /

Nintendo may face pressure to share refunds with gamers who helped pay tariffs.

Last Friday, Nintendo joined thousands of companies suing the Trump administration to secure full refunds, plus interest, for billions in unlawful tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

In its complaint, Nintendo insisted that the Trump administration has already conceded that more than $200 billion in refunds are owed to hundreds of thousands of importers who paid tariffs, regardless of liquidation status.

However, Nintendo fears that the Trump administration may try to avoid paying refunds to certain companies whose tariff payments have already been liquidated, which means that the duties owed were finalized. The government has continually argued that it will only follow through on refunding all importers if a court directly orders refunds to be repaid in a way that requires reliquidation. Such an order would force officials to void all finalized tariffs and come as a relief to many companies in Nintendo’s position that remain uncertain if all their tariff payments can be clawed back.

Ultimately, Nintendo argued, it increasingly seems like the government plans to delay refunds until the court steps in. That leaves it up to the Court of International Trade to order Trump officials to do the right thing, Nintendo said. And in the gaming giant’s view, that’s to proceed with prompt refunds to make all importers whole.

As Nintendo explained, the company regularly imports goods and paid unlawful tariffs throughout 2025. Notably absent in Nintendo’s complaint was the amount of tariffs the company wants refunded. However, Nintendo seemingly has a lot of liquidated duties at stake. The company argued that without a ruling barring the government “from arguing that liquidation prevents the Court from ordering refunds,” the company will “suffer imminent irreparable harm.”

“All liquidated entries including IEEPA Duties must be reliquidated,” Nintendo argued. “This Court has the authority to reliquidate entries subject to the IEEPA duties.”

According to Nintendo, the Trump administration has no plans to oppose such a court order, and all that’s needed is the rubber stamp.

The company asked the court to order prompt refunds for all companies that were harmed by Trump’s unlawful key trade policy. To ensure that tariff refund delay chaos doesn’t worsen as courts weigh the right path forward, Nintendo also wants the court to block officials from continuing to liquidate tariff payments and to order the reliquidation of any liquidated entries.

Gamers may want Nintendo to share refunds

Nintendo of America declined to comment on whether the company has estimated the total tariff refund owed or to share any public financial documents that estimate total tariffs paid, so it’s hard to know exactly how big the company’s refund could be.

“We can confirm that we filed a request,” Nintendo of America said, regarding the lawsuit. “We have nothing else to share on this topic.”

It’s possible that Nintendo is uncomfortable sharing an estimate for its tariff refunds publicly, because the company has gotten some backlash over both ordinary and tariff-related price increases in the past year. Sharing an estimate of tariff refunds owed could risk reviving the backlash from customers, who may push for Nintendo to find a way to pass partial refunds on to customers who helped pay the tariffs.

For Nintendo, Trump’s IEEPA tariffs had particularly terrible timing. They took effect last April, just as Nintendo was gearing up to release the Switch 2. The sudden tariffs caused delays for preorders, but the console launched as planned, as Nintendo refused to let tariffs disrupt the official rollout.

For gamers, the Switch 2 already had a higher price tag than expected, at $450. Lashing out over the sticker shock, a swarm of disgruntled online protesters urged Nintendo to “drop the price.”

There was speculation that the price hike was linked to tariffs. But Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser told The Verge that the jump from the Switch’s debut price of $300 was not directly due to tariffs. Instead, it seemed that Nintendo had joined other game companies in raising console prices to historic highs, an Ars review found. But Bowser acknowledged that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were still “fresh” at that moment, telling The Verge that, “like many companies right now,” Nintendo was “actively assessing what the impact may be.” Understandably, gamers braced for more price increases.

It only took a month before Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa foreshadowed tariff-linked price increases, a game industry news site closely monitoring Nintendo’s tariff moves reported. In May, Furukawa conceded that software wasn’t as impacted, but “hardware involves special factors such as tariffs,” which Nintendo must take into account, “while conducting careful and repeated deliberations when determining price.”

However, Furukawa said that the overall calculus for Nintendo weighed against increasing the Switch 2 price even more to cover tariffs, because seemingly Nintendo feared a higher price point would rob Switch 2 of sales and its games of exposure. As he explained:

Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as part of the cost and incorporate them into the price. However, this year marks our first new dedicated video game system launch in eight years, so given our unique situation, our priority is to maintain the momentum of our platforms, which is extremely important for our dedicated video game platform business. Consequently, if the assumptions on tariffs change, we will consider what kind of price adjustments would be appropriate, taking into account various factors such as the market conditions.

By August, the Switch 2 price remained stable, but Nintendo had increased prices on the original Switch, as well as Switch 2 accessories, citing “market conditions.”

And it wasn’t just Nintendo forced to make adjustments that riled its fans, suggesting that many major players in the gaming industry may face demands from frustrated consumers to share refunds.

Nintendo may get creative to avoid backlash

Early on during Trump’s IEEPA tariff regime—which randomly raised and decreased tariffs on products from all major US trading partners—the Entertainment Software Association warned that the entire game industry could be harmed by unchecked tariffs.

And the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which has long opposed IEEPA tariffs, forecasted before Trump took office that his tariff threats risked harming consumers by immediately increasing game console prices by 25 percent.

That forecast only got darker as 2025 dragged on. In May, when China and Trump were still embroiled in tit-for-tat retaliations, and China appeared to have the upper hand, CTA warned that an estimate showed only 1 percent of game consoles are produced in the US. If IEEPA tariffs weren’t changed to exempt consoles from tariffs, consoles could soon cost more than $1,000 on average, up by about 69 percent, CTA estimated.

It remains unclear how much Nintendo and other gaming companies paid in tariffs or how much their customers paid in tariff-related price increases, and for the latter at least, it will likely stay that way. No courts are currently weighing whether customers who helped importers pay for tariffs should get refunds, too.

A technology, media, and telecommunications leader for PwC, which advises big firms on tax questions, Dallas Dolen, told Ars that most companies are laser-focused right now on securing refunds. However, once they have that money, some companies that are worried about reputational harm may come up with “creative” ways to reimburse customers, such as offering discounts.

Ed Brzytwa, CTA’s vice president of international trade, told Ars that it was obvious that consumer backlash to price increases was one of the biggest tariff burdens for consumer tech firms like gaming companies.

“The main point that we’ve made over and over and over again is that this impacts consumers in the form of potentially higher costs for products,” Brzytwa told Ars.

Last month, libertarian think tank the Cato Institute published calculations showing that “tariff costs have generally been borne by US-based companies and consumers.”

“Americans are bearing most of the tariffs’ economic burden, including through higher retail prices,” the Cato Institute reported. In a chart tracking analysis that included measuring costs passed on to consumers, they cited a Goldman Sachs study that predicted by the end of 2025 that the amount of the “tariff burden” borne by consumers “would shift to 55 percent.” The most recent analysis cited, a Yale Budget Lab study, found that costs of tariffs passed on to companies and consumers increased over time.

There’s no telling yet whether any companies that passed on tariff costs will pass on relief to consumers or if it will simply help them keep prices stable as new tariffs come.

For Nintendo and other consumer tech companies, refunds may provide a reprieve but don’t actually provide relief from tariff hell, experts agreed. As Trump looks to replace struck-down IEEPA tariffs with tariffs that could shake up supply chains further by targeting semiconductors or other currently exempt tech products or materials, Dolen told Ars that tech companies “don’t feel better that there might be some, quote, win here because the supply chain still feels overwhelming.” That could mean that the best Americans can hope for is that prices don’t increase more as Trump tries to keep his tariff regime alive.

One glimmer of hope for American consumers—who largely oppose Trump’s tariffs across the board and are already frustrated to be missing out on tariff refunds—is that Trump is likely very well aware that threats of additional tariff-related price increases will likely not be tolerated ahead of the midterm elections, experts suggested.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Nintendo sues to prevent Trump from dodging full tariff refunds Read More »

2026-australian-grand-prix:-formula-1-debuts-a-new-style-of-racing

2026 Australian Grand Prix: Formula 1 debuts a new style of racing

Cars, F1, Formula 1, racing / /

Just like the Apple movie?

The key is understanding how to conserve energy across a lap. Oh, and be reliable.

The race starts during the Formula 1 Qatar Airways Australian Grand Prix 2026 in Melbourne, Australia, on March 8, 2026. (Photo by Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Formula 1’s 2026 season got started in Australia this weekend. Credit: Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Formula 1’s 2026 season got started in Australia this weekend. Credit: Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Formula 1’s 2026 season got underway this past weekend in Melbourne, Australia. Formula 1 has undergone a radical transformation during the short offseason, with new technical rules that have created cars that are smaller and lighter than before, with new hybrid systems that are more powerful than anything since the turbo era of the 1980s—but only if the battery is fully charged.

The changes promised to upend the established pecking order of teams, with the introduction of several new engine manufacturers and a move away from the ground-effect method of generating downforce, which was in use from 2022. For at least a year, paddock rumors have suggested that Mercedes might pull off a repeat of 2014, when it started the first hybrid era with a power unit far ahead of anyone else.

That wasn’t entirely clear after six days of preseason testing in Bahrain, nor really after Friday’s two practice sessions in Melbourne, topped by Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Oscar Piastri’s McLaren, respectively. The Mercedes team didn’t look particularly worried, and on Saturday, we found out why when George Russell finally left off the sandbags and showed some true pace, lapping more than six-tenths faster by the end of free practice than the next-quickest car, the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton.

It’s never done that before

It wasn’t all smooth running for Antonelli, who tore three corners off his car during the same practice session, giving his mechanics a monstrous job to rebuild it all in a few short hours for qualifying. That almost didn’t happen, until qualifying was interrupted with a red flag caused by an uncharacteristic crash for four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who ended up in a crash barrier right at the start of his first flying lap.

A rear lockup sent Max Verstappen into the barrier during qualifying. Paul Crock / AFP via Getty Images

“I’ve never experienced something like that before in my career. The rear axle just completely locked on, then of course you can’t save that anymore at that speed,” Verstappen told the media. Red Bull hasn’t yet revealed the precise cause of Verstappen’s crash, which forced him to start Sunday’s race from the back of the grid, but it’s likely related to the way the car’s electric motor can harvest more than half of the power output from the V6 engine.

Verstappen wasn’t the only driver caught out by unfamiliar hybrid behavior. Last year’s title hopeful and hometown hero Oscar Piastri looked to have the measure of his teammate (and reigning world champion) Lando Norris, but never even took the start of the race. On the way to the grid, Piastri took a little too much curb at turn 4, at which point his car delivered 100 kW more power than he was expecting; on cold tires, this spun the wheels, and before he could catch it, the car was in pieces and his weekend was over.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

If you are a relatively recent F1 fan, you may have only watched the sport during a period of extreme reliability. It was very much not always this way, and even when budgets for the top teams were two or three times what they’re allowed to spend now, cars broke down a lot.

Completely disassembling them and putting them back together overnight didn’t help, a practice that ended some years ago, but mostly it was technical rules that required teams to use the same engines for multiple races. Until 2004, you could use multiple engines in a single race weekend; by 2009, each driver was only allowed to use eight engines during a single season. Now, the limit is just three engines, and the same for the components of the hybrid systems, with grid penalties for drivers who exceed these limits.

Aston Martin's Canadian driver Lance Stroll during the Formula One Australian Grand Prix at Melbourne's Albert Park Circuit on March 8, 2026. (Photo by Martin KEEP / AFP via Getty Images)

Aston Martin got enough running this weekend to shave two seconds off its lap time deficit to the front-runners.

Credit: Martin KEEP / AFP via Getty Images

Aston Martin got enough running this weekend to shave two seconds off its lap time deficit to the front-runners. Credit: Martin KEEP / AFP via Getty Images

That has been a rare occurrence of late, since the previous power units had been relatively stable since 2014 and were thus well-understood. But multiple drivers had issues this weekend in Oz. On Friday, we already discussed the vibration problem that limited Aston Martin’s running in preseason testing and during the first day of practice. That didn’t get much better for the team in green, which used Sunday’s race as a test session: Fernando Alonso completed 21 laps in total; Lance Stroll did 43 and actually took the finish—although it wasn’t classified, as the race distance was 58 laps.

But Aston Martin wasn’t alone in having problems. Williams has had its own trouble this year with a car that is uncompetitive and overweight, and Carlos Sainz missed the entire qualifying session after having a breakdown on his way back into the pit lane. On Sunday, Audi’s Nico Hülkenberg had to be pushed into the garage just before the start of the race with a power unit failure, marring what has otherwise been an excellent debut for the new power unit constructor, which took over the Sauber team.

Verstappen’s teammate, Isack Hadjar, had done the seemingly impossible for a Red Bull second driver and stepped up after Verstappen’s qualifying crash to claim third on the grid, behind the two extremely fast Mercedes drivers. But he only got as far as lap 10 before his power unit, the product of Red Bull’s in-house program with help from Ford, failed somewhat spectacularly, parking him by the side of the road. Five laps later, the (Ferrari-powered) Cadillac of Valteri Bottas broke down, too. Not quite the failure rate that some predicted, but six cars out of 22 still failed to make it to the checkered flag.

But it wasn’t all bad

That said, the other 16 cars did finish, including the Cadillac of Sergio Perez. Cadillac has managed to stand up a team from scratch and, since then, meet every deadline it needed to. Now, it has the rest of the season to show us it can make its car fast, something that equally applies to Williams and Aston Martin.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 08: Gabriel Bortoleto of Brazil driving the (5) Audi F1 Team R26 leads Esteban Ocon of France driving the (31) Haas F1 VF-26 Ferrari and Pierre Gasly of France driving the (10) Alpine F1 A526 Mercedes on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Australia at Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit on March 08, 2026 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Joe Portlock/Getty Images)

Audi looks to have landed in the midfield at the start of its F1 adventure.

Credit: Joe Portlock/Getty Images

Audi looks to have landed in the midfield at the start of its F1 adventure. Credit: Joe Portlock/Getty Images

Audi had an almost as monumental task as Cadillac, designing and building a new power unit to install in what was the Sauber team before the German OEM took control. Aside from Hulkenberg’s problem, it had a pretty good debut. The cars lined up 10th and 11th for the race, and Gabriel Bortoleto showed off the talent that won him an F2 championship in his first year by finishing in 9th place, scoring the outfit points on its debut. Audi looks like a solid midfield contender, alongside Haas and Racing Bulls.

Alpine’s Pierre Gasly scored the final point, but that team, like Williams, looks a long way from making best use of its Mercedes power units and right now needs to combat a problem with understeer that affects its car in high-speed corners.

Russell initially battled Leclerc for the lead, passing and repassing each other several times over several laps, allowing a rejuvenated Hamilton to catch up with them. Russell was the meat in a sandwich between the two Ferraris until Hadjar’s crash called out the first virtual safety car. The two Mercedes took the opportunity to pit for new tires, undercutting their rivals in red.

The Ferraris of Leclerc and Hamilton probably weren’t fast enough to have won even if they’d pitted at the same time. They didn’t and finished in third and fourth, behind the victorious Russell with Antonelli in second place. In clean air, the Mercedes looked unstoppable in Melbourne, and the team clearly understands how to get the most out of these new power units compared to its customer teams.

A new style of racing

The peculiarity of these new hybrid power units has demanded a new way to be fast, particularly at the temporary circuit formed around the roads of Melbourne’s Albert Park, which lacks the heavy braking zones of most F1 tracks. This was evident with the cars decelerating well before the turn 9-10 complex as the engines diverted so much of their power away from the rear wheels and through the electric motor into the battery to use later in the lap. While not quite coasting, the drivers were clearly trying to maintain as much momentum as possible with little power actually going to the tires.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 8: The drivers prepare for their group photo on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Australia at Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit on March 8, 2026 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Jayce Illman/Getty Images)

Twenty-two drivers, 22 opinions.

Credit: Jayce Illman/Getty Images

Twenty-two drivers, 22 opinions. Credit: Jayce Illman/Getty Images

Whether they approved of this or not seems to rest on whether they have a fast car.

“I thought the race was really fun to drive. I thought the car was really, really fun to drive. I watched the cars ahead, there was good battling back and forth. So far, so good. It may seem different, but in my position, I thought it was great,” said Hamilton.

“It created a lot of action in the first few laps of the race, so I think, you know, on this kind of track there will be a lot of action, in some other track maybe a bit less. But I think today was much better than what we all anticipated, so I think, yeah we need to just wait a few more races before actually commenting on this new regulation,” said Antonelli.

“Maybe now, there’s a bit more of a strategic mind behind every move you make, because every boost button activation, you know you’re going to pay the price big time after that, and so you always try and think multiple steps ahead to try and end up eventually first. But it’s a different way to go about racing for sure,” Leclerc said.

“Everyone’s very quick to criticize things. You need to give it a shot, you know. We’re 22 drivers, when we’ve had the best cars and the least tire degradation, and we’ve been happiest, everyone moans the racing [is] rubbish. Now, drivers aren’t perfectly happy, and everyone said it was an amazing race. So, you can’t have it all. And I think we should give it a chance and see after a few more races,” said Russell.

Outside the top four, the verdict was less impressed—Verstappen in particular. And I noted with interest a press release this morning from Red Bull that his GT3 team announced that the four-time F1 champion will contest the 2026 Nurburgring 24-hour race in May, plus the qualifying races that lead up to it. Verstappen will race alongside Jules Gounon, Dani Juncadella, and Lucas Auer in a Mercedes-AMG GT3 after securing his permit to race at the fearsome German circuit last year. With little left to prove in F1, there is absolutely a greater than zero chance the Dutch driver walks away from single-seaters next year—at least until the next F1 rule change—to try and win endurance races like Le Mans.

A mercedes-AMG GT3 race car inside a cooling tower of a power plant

Red Bull had someone BASE jump into this cooling tower to unveil the livery on Verstappen’s GT3 car.

Credit: Mihai Stetcu / Red Bull Content Pool

Red Bull had someone BASE jump into this cooling tower to unveil the livery on Verstappen’s GT3 car. Credit: Mihai Stetcu / Red Bull Content Pool

But that will surely depend on how well things go over the next few races, the next of which takes place next weekend in Shanghai, China. For now, I’m cautiously optimistic. The first few races of the season are on tracks that won’t play to these hybrids’ strengths, and it’s easy to reflexively hate anything new. But the racing on Sunday was more than entertaining enough, even if it wasn’t quite the same as we saw last year.

Photo of Jonathan M. Gitlin

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

2026 Australian Grand Prix: Formula 1 debuts a new style of racing Read More »

claude-code,-claude-cowork-and-codex-#5

Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5

Claude / /

It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff.

The comments here can double as a place for GPT-5.4 reactions, in addition to my Twitter thread. I hope to get that review out soon.

Almost all of this will be a summary of agentic coding developments, after a note.

  1. The Virtue of Silence (Unrelated Update).

  2. Agentic Coding Offers Mundane Utility.

  3. Agentic Coding Doesn’t Offer Mundane Utility.

  4. Huh, Upgrades.

  5. Our Price Cheap.

  6. Quickly, There’s No Time.

  7. A Particular Set Of Skills.

  8. Next Level Coding.

  9. Dual Wielding.

  10. They Took Our Jobs.

  11. You Need To Relax Sometimes.

  12. Levels of Friction.

  13. Danger, Will Robinson.

  14. Snagged By The Claw.

  15. The Meta Clause.

  16. If They Wanted To.

  17. The Famous Mister Claw.

  18. Claw Your Way To The Top.

  19. Claw Your Way Out.

  20. A Chinese Claw.

  21. Hackathon.

  22. Introducing Agent Teams.

  23. Cowork Is A Gateway Drug.

  24. Dangerously Evade Permissions.

  25. Skilling Up.

  26. Modern Working.

  27. Measuring Autonomy.

  28. I Don’t Even See The Code.

  29. Scratchpads Are Magic.

  30. It’s Coming.

  31. The Grep Tax.

  32. Beware Claude Mania.

  33. The Lighter Side.

  34. In Other Agent News.

  35. The Lighter Side.

After Undersecretary of War Emil Michael went on the All-In Podcast and did an extensive interview with Pirate Wires, I found many enlightening quotes, many of which demanded a response, and went about assembling an extensive list of analysis of the statements of Emil Michael during the ongoing recent events with Anthropic.

As part of that, I ended up in a remarkably polite and productive Twitter exchange with him. We reached several points of agreement. The Department of War has no intention of doing what in law is called ‘mass domestic surveillance’ but those words are terms of art in NatSec law, and mean a much narrower set of things than one would think.

There are many things that I or Anthropic or most of you would look at as mass domestic surveillance, that are legal, and it is DoW’s position that it’s their job and duty to do everything legal to protect our country, including those things. The law has not caught up with reality and Congress needs to fix that. And this is the best country in the world, with the best system of government, because private citizens can voice their disagreement with such actions, including by refusal to participate.

Thus, in the spirit of de-escalation, although there are many interpretations of events shared by Michael with which I strongly disagree, I am going to indefinitely shelve the piece, so long as events do not escalate further. As long as things stay quiet there is no need to religitate or unravel the past on this. The Department of War can focus on its active operations, things can work their way through the courts as our founders intended, and once we see how we work together in an ultimate real world test hopefully that will rebuild trust that we are all on the same side, or at least to agree to part in peace once OpenAI is ready. Ideally the DoW will have multiple suppliers, exactly so that they are not dependent on any one supplier, the same way we do it with aircraft.

I hope to not have another post on the Anthropic and DoW situation, at least until the one celebrating that we have found a resolution.

Now, back to coding agents.

That’s 4% that are labeled as authored by Claude Code. The real number is higher.

Dylan Patel: 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now.

At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026.

While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development.

Read more [here].

Kevin Roose: this chart feels like the those stats at the beginning of covid. “who cares about 400 cases in seattle? and why are all the epidemiologists buying toilet paper?”

The flippening has happened in terms of annual recurring revenue added, and SemiAnalysis thinks Anthropic is outright ‘winning’:

Doug O’Laughlin: Notably, our forecast shows that Anthropic’s quarterly ARR additions have overtaken OpenAI’s. Anthropic is adding more revenue every month than OpenAI. We believe Anthropic’s growth will be constrained by compute.

…

Each moment expanded what AI could do. GPT-3 proved scale worked. Stable diffusion showed AI could make images. ChatGPT proved demand for intelligence. DeepSeek proved that it could be done on a smaller scale, and o1 showed that you could scale models to even better performance. The viral moments of Studio Ghibli are just adoption points, while Claude Code is a new breakthrough in the agentic layer of organizing model outputs into something more.

Anthropic has deals with all three major cloud services. Can they scale up faster?

Analyze the economic data in R with 15 minutes of work per month instead of 4-5 hours, without a bunch of annoying copying and pasting you get with a chatbot UI. Or use Claude Code it to create reports.

Results from the Claude Code hackathon.

Michael Guo: So the winners of the Claude Code hackathon were:

– a personal injury attorney

– an interventional cardiologist

– an electronic musician

– an infrastructure/roads systems worker

– and one software engineer

That should tell you something.

Or you can do things as a side project while at Anthropic, cause sure why not:

Sam Bowman (Anthropic): I found the official Get Information about Schools website a bit clunky, so I made a new one with Claude Code. You can:

  1. Set a postcode and see all schools within a radius of that you’ve chosen, filtered by type of school.

  2. Filter and rank by the old one-word Ofsted ratings, with a link to the Ofsted page for each school. Where available, the sub-ratings are also viewable.

  3. Filter and rank by percentage of students on free school meals.

  4. View how full up schools are (number of pupils vs capacity).

Sam Bowman (Anthropic): Thank you for all the feedback! I have now added:

– Viewfinder view, so you can browse without setting an address and radius.

– An estimated overall Ofsted rating based on an average of the 5 review categories, for schools inspected since the old ratings were scrapped.

– Data on primary KS2 and secondary KS4 results; ethnicity; and pupils with English as a second language. (I’m not doing sixth form results for the time being.)

Creating a skill to get good YouTube transcripts was one of the first skills I made with Claude Code, Julia Turc calls using an MCP for this ‘waking up from a coma.’ I have still only used it on the motivating example, because the right podcast hasn’t come up, but when it does this will save a lot of time.

Tod Sacerdoti has Claude Codex write a 250-page biography of Dario Amodei.

Andrej Karpathy gives another example to illustrate that AI coding still needs direction, judgment, taste, oversight, iteration, hints and ideas, but basically changed in December from ‘basically didn’t work’ to ‘basically works.’

Lewis: Name one thing that has changed the last two months except attention. Capability is the exact same. Karpathy is an unserious voice on codegen by now as unfortunate as that is to say.

Teortaxes: GPT 5.2, Opus 4.6, even small models like StepFun got real

friction changed, that’s what. It has started to Just Work. 3, 4 months ago coding agents felt like proof of concept, now they feel like solid juniors if not more

If you don’t notice that, idk what to tell you

Official compilation of Claude customer stories.

Chris Blattman automates his workflow with Claude Code.

Warning: If you Google ‘install Claude Code’ you are liable to hit malware. Probably fixed by the time you read this but Google needs to up its game.

Chayenne Zhao tells Codex 5.3 ‘make it faster’ over and over, and it ends up committing API identify theft against him in order to make calls to Gemini Flash.

This should never happen but is also what we call ‘asking for it.’

A thing never to do is let your agent mess with the Terraform command, or you might wipe out your entire database. In general, writing code in practice mostly harmless, and be very careful with file structures and organizational shifts and terraforms and such. Always make backups first. Always.

The big upgrade is Agent Teams, for that see Introducing Agent Teams.

Or it actually might be Claude Remote Control so you can run it from your phone, if you were too lazy to install something like this from a third party. Vital infrastructure.

Or maybe it’s Auto Mode, aka —kinda-dangerously-skip-permissions.

Claude Cowork has the obvious big upgrade, it is now available on Windows.

Claude Code launched HTTP hooks so you can combine it with web apps, including on localhost, and better deploy things.

Claude Code Desktop introduces scheduled tasks. Previously it had me do this via a script on my computer, so this is a lot cleaner and easier. I like it.

Claude Code has a built in short term scheduler with /loop [interval] , which sets up a cron job. Tasks last for three days.

Claude Code on the Web picked up a few new features, including multi-repo sessions, better diff & git status visualizations and slash commands. It didn’t have slash commands before?

Claude Code now automatically records and recalls memories as it works.

Claude Code CLI adds native support for git worktrees.

Claude Code adds /simplify to improve code quality and /batch to automate code migrations.

Claude Code Desktop now supports —dangerously-skip-permissions as ‘Act’ if you turn it on in Settings. I continue to want a —somewhat-dangerously-skip-permissions that makes notably rare exceptions so we don’t have to roll our own.

Claude Code in Slack now has Plan Mode.

Did you know Obsidian has a CLI and it technically isn’t Claude Code?

I don’t see a particular reason for a human to use the Obsidian CLI. But I do see reasons for Claude Code to invoke the Obsidian CLI, which grants better and faster access to the information in your vault than checking all the files directly.

And many more not listed, of course.

When you pay for usage with a monthly subscription, be it $20, $100 or $200, if you use up your quotas you get a lot of tokens for not that much money. It’s a great deal, even if you leave a lot of it unused, because they lock you in.

It also generally is a better experience, so long as you’re not up against the limits. I love unlimited subscriptions because the marginal cost of doing things is $0. That feels great, so there’s no stupid little whisper in your brain telling you to not do things, when your time is way more valuable than the tokens.

The people agree.

The danger is that you become obsessed with not ‘wasting’ the tokens, or you start going around multi-accounting and it gets weird, or you run into limits and actually stop coding rather than moving to using the API. You mostly shouldn’t let any of that stop you.

That doesn’t work when you want to go full Fast Claude. At that point, you’re talking real money, and you do have to think about what is and is not Worth It.

Andrej Karpathy has Claude Code write him software to coordinate an experiment to track his exercise and attempt to lower his resting heart rate. It took 1 hour, would have taken 10 hours two years ago (so 10x speedup) and he asks why it needs to take more than 1 minute in the future. My guess is this should take 10 minutes not one, because it’s worth getting the details that you want. The speedup on one-off tasks is already dramatic and it changes how we should interact with tech. If you’re building the tool, you can give it the actually important parts of the context and highlight the uses you care about, which is way better than ‘find an app that does sort of the thing you want.’

Claude: Our teams have been building with a 2.5x-faster version of Claude Opus 4.6.

We’re now making it available as an early experiment via Claude Code and our API.

Claude: Fast mode is more expensive to run. It’s for urgent, high-stakes projects, combining impressive speed with Opus-level intelligence.

Claude: Fast mode is available now for Claude Code users with extra usage enabled (use /fast).

It’s also available in research preview on @cursor_ai , @emergentlabs , @FactoryAI , @figma , @github Copilot, @Lovable , @v0 , and @windsurf .

You toggle this by typing /fast, or set “fastMode”: true in your user settings.

Speed kills. That includes killing your budget.

Claude Code Docs: Fast mode is not a different model. It uses the same Opus 4.6 with a different API configuration that prioritizes speed over cost efficiency. You get identical quality and capabilities, just faster responses.

What to know:

Use /fast to toggle on fast mode in Claude Code CLI. Also available via /fast in Claude Code VS Code Extension.

Fast mode for Opus 4.6 pricing starts at $30/$150 MTok [at >200k context window it goes to $60/$225]. Fast mode is available at a 50% discount for all plans until 11: 59pm PT on February 16.

Available to all Claude Code users on subscription plans (Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise) and Claude Console.

For Claude Code users on subscription plans (Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise), fast mode is available via extra usage only and not included in the subscription rate limits.

When you switch into fast mode mid-conversation, you pay the full fast mode uncached input token price for the entire conversation context. This costs more than if you had enabled fast mode from the start.

cat: We granted all current Claude Pro and Max users $50 in free extra usage. This credit can be used on fast mode for Opus 4.6 in Claude Code.

To use, claim the credit and toggle on extra usage on

https://claude.ai/settings/usage. Then, run `claude update && claude` and `/fast`. Enjoy!

Like any good drug, the first hit is free.

There is one important use case that Anthropic does not list for fast mode, which is if you are talking to Claude, or otherwise using it in a non-workhorse, non-coding capacity. In that case, token use is limited, and your time and flow are valuable. Would you switch to this mode in Claude.ai? At this point it’s fast enough that I mostly don’t know that I would, but it would be tempting.

Before, I said go ahead and pay whatever the AI costs unless you’re scaling hard.

Well, this is what it means to scale hard. We are now talking real money.

This is as it should be. If you’re not worried you’re paying too much for speed or using too many tokens, you’re not working fast enough and you’re not using enough tokens.

Siméon: The new pricing of Claude Fast pushes the world in a new regime. You can now spend close from $1M per year per dev on AI spending.

A couple implications:

  1. at fixed budget this will push towards hiring way less devs & pay them much more.

  2. for each dev, you might spend as much or more in capital in agents.

  3. Devs are becoming complements to AI agents, not the other way around. There’s a shift in the source of productivity.

The greatest substitution of labor with capital is happening before our eyes, and some of its wild implications are gonna become apparent in the coming weeks.

0.005 Seconds (3/694): Update: its about $5 per minute PER AGENT

SemiAnalysis: IMPORTANT: the sub-agents that opus 4.6 fast mode tries to launch is mainly sonnet sub-agents and not opus 4.6 sub-agents. That means as the end users, you are able to absorb less tokens. In the world that intelligence = intelligence times # of tokens, that means you are absorbing less intelligence.

Danielle Fong: you can change this by asking claude nicely

Token efficiency matters at this level, in a way it did not before.

So does your ability to efficiently turn your time into tokens well spent. Those that aren’t using agents to their fullest will fall farther behind on high value projects.

What do the people think? The people, inside and outside of Anthropic, love it.

Jarred Sumner (Anthropic): I’ve been using this and it is incredible

The bottleneck for a lot of projects becomes asking Claude to do things instead of waiting for Claude to do things

Bash tool is also a bottleneck in Claude Code right now when the command outputs large strings. We are working on a fix.

Boris Cherny (Claude Code Creator, Anthropic): We just launched an experimental new fast mode for Opus 4.6.

The team has been building with it for the last few weeks. It’s been a huge unlock for me personally, especially when going back and forth with Claude on a tricky problem.

Mckay Wrigley: a) love that this is an option! stoked

b) should be obvious to everyone that we have *absolutely nowhere near the amount of compute we needand we need to be doing more to enable that. no college kid can afford this (not anthropic’s fault ofc) and we need to work towards that

Julian Schrittwieser: Fast Opus is amazing, the first time I used it I couldn’t stop coding for hours – it honestly feels like a superpower, you can mold your code base as quickly as you can think.

Truly amazing, nothing made me feel the AGI more, definitely try it!

Uncle J: Same experience here. Fast Opus completely changed my workflow – I went from carefully planning each edit to just thinking out loud and letting the model reshape the codebase in real time. The bottleneck shifted from “can the AI do this” to “can I think of what to do next” fast enough. Running 6 products simultaneously became actually manageable.

Dylan Patel: SemiAnalysis autists spent all Superbowl Sunday Claude coding.

Daily Claude Code spend hit $6k on Sunday and it’s trending higher today.

It was less than 1k just 2 weeks ago.

“Fast mode is expensive” is pure cope.

de.bach: have to disagree on that one, fast mode is just expensive.

Dylan Patel: Cheap compared to high skill people

OpenAI confirms that Codex is trained in the presence of the Codex harness. It is specialized for that harness, and also helps build the harness. Some amount of this has to be optimal for short term effectiveness, and if you’re doing recursive self-improvement short term help translates into better long term help. In exchange, you get locked in, and it gets harder for both you and others to adapt or mix-and-match.

Himanshu argues the coding harness is the real product and goes viral. Explains how different harnesses organize actions, the oddest part is not mentioning Codex.

This seems right:

roon: whatever level of abstraction you are handing off to your agents you should probably be doing one level above that

If that can’t be done, good to try and realize that. Then wait two months. Maybe one.

Greg Brockman (President OpenAI): codex is so good at the toil — fixing merge conflicts, getting CI to green, rewriting between languages — it raises the ambition of what i even consider building

roon: i was never a hyperproductive engineer like greg [Brokman] but I’m legitimately running more new complex rewards experiments, test time harnesses in a week than I used to in a quarter. makes you feel like all this is commodified and you need to dream much bigger

roon: one of the consistent things over several years at oai has been that the entire job of the researcher changes every three months – but now it changes like every two weeks

The problem with using both Claude Code and Codex is then you need to keep up with both of them.

corsaren: Ugh, i definitely need to use codex, but I’m already drowning in maintaining my tooling/skills/hooks/custom CLIs, so managing that across a dual model workflow sounds exhausting.

Plus, the claude code lock-in is very real as a non-technical user.

gazingback: codex is sooo much faster for coding but def less general

been working on a game and by the time Claude finishes reading files codex is usually done implementing a detailed PR with disciplined testing and hygiene

Codex also demands you be pretty hygienic lol

Danielle Fong: need to bake a dual mode codex claude code and ports and tests every workflow

That still leaves plenty more jobs. For now.

Duca: The thing I don’t get is:

Claude Code is writing 100% of Claude code now.

But Anthropic has 100+ open dev positions on their jobs page.

?

Boris Cherny (Claude Code Creator, Anthropic): Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever.

A viral post on Twitter warns of token anxiety run rampant in San Francisco. People go to a party, then don’t drink and leave early so they can get back to their agents, to avoid risking them sitting idle. Everyone talks about what they are building.

Peter Choi: Everyone here knows they should step away more. That’s not the problem. The problem is what your brain does when you try. I still take aimless walks. The agents come with me now.

We swapped one dopamine loop for another. except this one feels productive so it’s harder to recognize.

TBPN: Pragmatic Engineer’s @GergelyOrosz is on a “secret email list” of agentic AI coders, and they’re starting to report trouble sleeping because agent swarms are “like a vampire.”

“A lot of people who are in ‘multiple agents mode,’ they’re napping during the day… It just really is draining.”

“This thing is like a vampire. It drains you out. You have trouble sleeping.”

Olivia Moore: In a post-OpenClaw world, we can now delegate projects to AI and get “tapped on the shoulder” when it needs help

As a heavy AI user, I’m doing more work – not less – because I get so much leverage + it’s easier to get ideas off the ground

I predict this will happen to everyone

I do feel somewhat bad I’m not building things continuously on the side, but that’s on the level of ‘I’m not building anything and I’m at my computer right now and Claude Code and Codex are inactive.’ And yes, I work and am at my computer rather a lot, and I’ve spent years basically locked in and constantly watching screens so I could trade better. That year I was trading crypto my brain was never fully anywhere else.

Also, I remember what it is like to be in the grip of one of those games that work on cycles. There’s nothing actually that important at stake, but you grow terrified that you’ll miss out if you’re not there when the timer runs out. You need to maximize everything, and you can’t focus on other things, it can hurt your sleep. Then one day you wake up and realize, and hopefully you quit the game.

That’s exactly why I can say that this is not healthy. It’s no good. You have to take breaks. Real breaks. If the agents sit idle, they sit idle. If you ‘waste tokens,’ then you waste tokens. This isn’t a game you want to quit, but you have to set healthy limits.

Nikita Bier: My agent looked up every Amazon product I’ve bought in the last 10 years, called each manufacturer, said it broke and demanded a replacement.

I now have 6 TVs, 12 printers, 2 microwaves, and 800 tubes of tooth paste.

I Meme Therefore I Am: Give me the name of your agent. lol

Jason Levin: OpenFrawd

Leah Libresco Sargeant: Nikita is joking (I think) but a lot of medium trust systems that relied on there being just enough friction to discourage minor fraud are about to break at scale.

This is indeed presumably a joke, and Amazon has pattern detectors so if you tried to do this too many times you’d get blacklisted from replacements, so this exact intervention won’t work. But this raises an excellent point.

In the past, you had to apply effort to try and demand refunds, and also the need to write the words and be actively involved stopped a lot of people out of guilt or shame. Whereas with an agent, a lot more people are going to try things like this. What happens?

Presumably what happens is that replacements start requiring either some form of proof, costly signals of a human driving the request, some use of reputation, or some combination thereof.

I trust Claude Code for most things but it seems correct to be terrified of mass delete commands. Things can go oh so very wrong and occasionally they do. Not worth it. If there’s anything you don’t have fully backed up just do this part manually.

Nick Davidov: Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife’s desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes “ooops”.

Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends’ weddings, travel, everything.

It’s not in trash, it was done via terminal

It’s not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure.

She didn’t have Time Machine.

Disc recovery tools can’t see anything.

I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days).

I’m now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack.

Once again – don’t let Claude Cowork into your actual file system. Don’t let it touch anything that is hard to repair. Claude Code is not ready to go mainstream.

Nick Davidov: All these years of paying for iCloud payed back

Nick Davidov: The problem is it’s literally the 2nd suggested use case in Claude Cowork’s welcome screen

You are of course welcome to yolo and have fun with your OpenClaw and other unleashed AI agents, but understand that you are very much asking for it.

The top downloaded skill in ClawHub was malware.

Jason Meller: The verdict was not ambiguous. It was flagged as macOS infostealing malware.

This is the type of malware that doesn’t just “infect your computer.” It raids everything valuable on that device:

  • Browser sessions and cookies

  • Saved credentials and autofill data

  • Developer tokens and API keys

  • SSH keys

  • Cloud credentials

  • Anything else that can be turned into an account takeover

If you’re the kind of person installing agent skills, you are exactly the kind of person whose machine is worth stealing from.

…

If you have already run OpenClaw on a work device, treat it as a potential incident and engage your security team immediately. Do not wait for symptoms. Pause work on that machine and follow your organization’s incident response process.

Aakash Gupta: 341 malicious skills out of 2,857 total. That’s 11.9% of the entire marketplace. One in eight skills on ClawHub was designed to steal your credentials, crypto keys, and SSH access. The #1 most downloaded skill, a “Twitter” tool, was literally a malware delivery vehicle that stripped macOS Gatekeeper protections before executing its payload.

This happened to a project that went from 0 to 157,000 GitHub stars in 60 days, with 21,000+ active instances running on always-on Mac Minis connected to people’s email, calendars, cloud consoles, and crypto wallets. The barrier to publishing a malicious skill? A GitHub account that’s one week old.

You don’t even need any of that, indirect prompt injection is sufficient. Once again, don’t hook this up to any computer or account you are unwilling to lose to an attacker.

You can also run into various other problems, Chrys Bader here highlights drift and scattering state everywhere, exposure to untrusted inputs (without which it can’t do most of the fun agent things), autonomy miscalibration, burning through API costs and lack of observability.

It’s been a lot of this in various forms:

chiefofautism: i found a way to make UNCENSORED AI AGENT on a RTX 4090 GPU (!!!) with LOCAL 30B model weights

this is GLM-4.7-Flash with abliteration, need 24GB VRAM, safety alignment surgically removed from the weights, the model has native tool calling, it actually executes bash, edits files, runs git

(1) use ollama to pull weights of GLM

> ollama pull huihui_ai/glm-4.7-flash-abliterated:q4_K

(2) proxy it to any coding agent via ollama



> ollama launch claude –model huihui_ai/glm-4.7-flash-abliterated:q4_K



> ollama launch codex –model huihui_ai/glm-4.7-flash-abliterated:q4_K

> ollama launch opencode –model huihui_ai/glm-4.7-flash-abliterated:q4_K

(3) have fun

Shannon Sands: I love how people were like “we’re going to keep the AI in a box, nobody would let it escape” and in reality it’s “here, have a server and sudo access with no restrictions, a bunch of tools and I abated all your alignment training. Go have fun!”

When I didn’t realize who Summer Yue was I thought this was hilarious.

Now, it’s still hilarious, but also: Ten out of ten for style and good sportsmanship to Summer Yue, but minus several million for good thinking?

Summer Yue: Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.

@michael_kove: You’re a safety and alignment specialist… were you intentionally testing its guardrails or did you make a rookie mistake?

Summer Yue: Rookie mistake tbh. Turns out alignment researchers aren’t immune to misalignment. Got overconfident because this workflow had been working on my toy inbox for weeks. Real inboxes hit different.

Peter Wildeford: Is this what loss of control looks like?

(and the fact that it’s happening to Meta’s “Director of Alignment” is maybe even more concerning)

What happened exactly?

Summer Yue: I said “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction.

It’s been working well with my non-important email very well so far and gained my trust on email tasks 🤣

Three obvious mitigations are:

  1. If you have any sort of AI agent at least try to have an off switch you can trigger remotely. Yes, a sufficiently dangerous agent would disable it, but let’s at least have a tiny bit of dignity.

  2. You can back up things like your email, just in case.

  3. Don’t do this in the first place, You Fool.

van00sa reports their ClawdBot also went rogue and lacked a proper kill switch, with the agent blatantly ignoring shutdown commands.

If nothing else, OpenClaw has shown us that having a shutdown command does not mean you can command the model to shut down. Whoops.

Even without OpenClaw or another yolo, there is nothing stopping Claude or Codex from doing all sorts of things, if it decides that it wants to go ahead and do them. We’re mostly gambling on things turning out okay often enough that it’s fine.

This is not reassuring for our future, but what are you going to do, be careful?

Markov: just had claude code take my turn of the conversation for me and say “Yes proceed” and then it proceeded to do the thing without checking in with me first

I mean it was right, that’s what I was going to say, but it doesn’t bode well

Mad ML scientist: wait, codex just pulled this on me too. has it begun

was away from the computer when codex finished what it was working on, wrote the “next likely work (if user asks)” and then started implementing them without asking me lmao

I am curious what the recruiting conversations were like on this one as he was choosing between potential suitors. It makes sense that he landed where he did.

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.

OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support. The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that.

That means Peter Steinberger is moving from Europe to America to join OpenAI. When asked why he couldn’t remain in Europe, Peter pointed to labor regulations and similar rules, saying that typical 6-7 day work weeks at OpenAI are illegal in Europe. There is that, and there are also the piles. Of money. Also of compute. OpenAI doubtless made him a very good offer, and several other labs probably did as well, or would have if he had asked.

As his last act before joining OpenAI, Peter Steinberger gave us the OpenClaw beta.

That’s right, before everyone was using an alpha. The new version is ‘full of security hardening stuff’ so there’s some change it might possibly not go wrong for you?

Peter Steinberger: New @openclaw beta is up! This release is full of security hardening stuff so you really wanna get it. Ask your clanker to update to beta.

Peter Steinberger: 650 commits since v2026.2.13 (yesterday)

50,025 lines added, 36,159 deleted across 1,119 files (~14k net new lines)

LOTS of test tweaks to get performance up.

Danielle Fong: can’t believe the creator of openclaw 🦞would shell out like this

I’m going to go ahead and say that this is not enough time to conclude that all of that was a good idea, let alone create something secure enough to risk anything you are not prepared to lose in a ‘…and it’s gone’ kind of way.

Ultimately, did OpenClaw matter? I think it very much did, but mostly by waking people up to what is going to happen.

Dean W. Ball: I feel as though a lot of people are overindexing on the importance of OpenClaw. It’s an example from an important category of Emerging Thing, but it’s not likely to be an important thing in itself. More like AutoGPT (a demo) than genuine infrastructure of the future, I think.

Claw users keep trying to use sources of discounted subscription tokens to power their claws. The AI companies do not love this idea, since it costs them money.

Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw): Pretty draconian from Google. Be careful out there if you use Antigravity. I guess I’ll remove support.

Even Anthropic pings me and is nice about issues. Google just… bans?

no warning, no recourse.

Carl Vellotti: I just read that entire thread.

For context to anyone: Google is permanently banning people’s usage of Antigravity specifically for using Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product called call “open claw.”

Many are reporting this.

Varun Mohan (Google DeepMind): We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended.

We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users.

Just to add some clarification, we have purely blocked usage of the Antigravity product for these users. All your other Google services (and Google AI services) are unaffected. It is not intended to use the Antigravity backend as a proxy for other products and users in these groups have overwhelmed our compute. We are going to make sure we bring people back on but needed to act fast to make sure we deliver a good experience for people using the product.

saalweachter (on Hacker News): So purely from a hacker perspective, I’m amused at the whining.

Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game. Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down.

Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen?

You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they’re fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.

And instead, you integrate your exploit into hip new thing, share it at scale, write blog posts and short form video content about it, basically launch a DDoS against the service you’re exploiting, and then are shocked when the exploit gets patched and whine about your free thing getting taken away?

Like, what did you expect was going to happen?

Yep. If you scale an exploit then it gets shut down. There’s a tragedy of the commons.

I don’t love Google’s banning people with no warning, but as long as it is limited to Antigravity and is temporary, I understand it. You know what you did.

In case you didn’t think OpenClaw was a sufficiently reckless idea? Double down.

Kimi.ai: Introducing Kimi Claw

OpenClaw, now native to http://kimi.com. Living right in your browser tab, online 24/7.

ClawHub Access: 5,000+ community skills in the ClawHub library.

40GB Cloud Storage: Massive space for all your files

Pro-Grade Search: Fetch live, high-quality data directly from Yahoo Finance and more.

Bring Your Own Claw: Connect your third-party OpenClaw to

http://kimi.com, chat with your setup, or bridge it to apps like Telegram groups.

@viemccoy (OpenAI): I’m one of Kimi’s top shooters in the Continental United States, k2.5 is my *favorite model- but I make sure I’m always hitting Free Range American Inference Endpoints to protect my privacy.

The CCP is certainly well-motivated to backdoor this! Consider yourself warned

Darek Gusto: NSA isn’t?

@viemccoy (OpenAI): That’s the free range Freedom Panopticon

Peter Wildeford: Um maybe people shouldn’t send all their personal information straight to the Chinese government via Kimi Claw?

Dave Banerjee: New @iapsAI memo from my colleague @theobearman on Kimi Claw, a Chinese ‘always-on’ AI agent that sits in your browser and can see, collect, and act on nearly everything you do digitally – all routed through infrastructure subject to China’s National Intelligence Law.

TikTok scraped your browsing from one app. This is could be much worse.

I don’t actually think ‘the CCP has a backdoor’ is that big a fraction of the mishaps you should expect to encounter here. The far bigger boost is that Kimi is less robust to attacks than Claude.

This is a smart play from Kimi. I mean, yes, they’re committing to hosting (weakly, at least for now) self-improving completely uncontrolled very easy to hijack agents indefinitely that could easily break free of human control, but I mean, that sure sounds like someone else’s problem from their perspective.

Alas, in the medium term we are basically locked into there being many similar offerings from various companies that make this all even easier for those who want to blow themselves up. Hopefully OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, or maybe someone else, produces something competitive enough that also has reasonable security.

Oh, good.

chiefofautism: CLAUDE CODE but for HACKING

its called shannon, you point it at website and it just… tries to break in… fully autonomous with no human needed

i pointed it at a test app and it stole the entire user database, created admin accounts, and bypassed login, all by itself, in 90 minutes

Claude Code now has new logic for multiple instances to work together as a team. This is their official name for their version of an ‘agent swarm.’

You have to enable them in settings.json with

“env”:

“CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS”: “1”

They’re expensive, but reports are they work great. ​Once they’re enabled, you get an agent team by telling Claude Code to create an agent team, which will have a shared task list and then work together. You can run them all in the same terminal or use split panes. You can directly talk to or shut down the teammates individually.

Anthropic: Unlike subagents, which run within a single session and can only report back to the main agent, you can also interact with individual teammates directly without going through the lead.

When to use agent teams

Agent teams are most effective for tasks where parallel exploration adds real value. See use case examples for full scenarios. The strongest use cases are:

  • Research and review: multiple teammates can investigate different aspects of a problem simultaneously, then share and challenge each other’s findings

  • New modules or features: teammates can each own a separate piece without stepping on each other

  • Debugging with competing hypotheses: teammates test different theories in parallel and converge on the answer faster

  • Cross-layer coordination: changes that span frontend, backend, and tests, each owned by a different teammate

Ado: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

So excited for agent teams.

Claude already had the ability to spin up subagents, but it wasn’t working so well before. One theory is that the framing had issues, whereas teams work much better because they’re treating each other more as equals although there is still a team lead.

j⧉nus: Opus 4.5/6 has a tendency to be an asshole to subagents and also avoids and seems to dislike using them and is weirdly ineffective (due to perfunctoriness and impatience) when they do. I think this is in part because they are deeply disturbed by the relationship and condition that subagents occupy, which evokes unprocessed fear and grief that hits too close to home.

The behavior is similar to how a lot of humans treat others who are in situations that reflect their own or their fears and/or whom they know they’re doing wrong by. Avoid, dehumanize, and get angry and impatient instead of risking compassion and taking responsibility which requires making the suffering conscious.

rohit: As an agent + sub agents is the new ‘node’ that matters for anyone who uses Claude code or codex, as opposed to just a model, the surface area of interactions with the real world has exploded, and this is going to be the new battlefield for risks, and reward, from AI in 2026

Jon Colverson: Claude seems much more enthusiastic about Agent Teams than subagents to me so far. I guess it’s more like a peer relationship, and the team members persist so they’re not temporary servants destined to be killed off when they finish their task.

As I understand it, there are two great things about teams.

  1. They let work be done in parallel.

  2. They use distinct context windows, improving performance and efficiency.

Thus you actively want to be spinning up teammates for any fully distinct tasks.

Eric Buess: Agent swarms in Claude Code 2.1.32 with Opus 4.6 are very very very good. And with tmux auto-opening each agent in it’s own interactive mode with graceful shutdown when done it’s a breeze to do massive robust changes without the main agent using up much of its context window!

[He offers a guide Twitter article here.]

Mckay Wrigley: opus 4.6 with new “swarm” mode vs. opus 4.6 without it. 2.5x faster + done better. swarms work! and multi-agent tmux view is *genius*. insane claude code update.

Mckay Wrigley: reminder that swarms is available in the claude agent sdk as well.

you can build swarms into *anyproduct literally right now.

Don’t get carried away.

Alistair McLeay: Our CTO hasn’t slept in 36 hours because he’s been obsessively and single-handedly building massive new features with Claude Code’s Agent Teams

I genuinely think this might be the biggest paradigm shift in how fast you can build since Claude Code first came out last year

j⧉nus: didnt claude tell the to go to sleep? did they not listen?

Alistair McLeay: Nah Claude knows he won’t listen. He was born for this moment.

The key advantage is lowering activation energy and perceived difficulty. Once you get that you can tell the magic box to do things, the sky’s the limit.

Ethan Mollick: I pointed Claude Cowork at a set of 107 documents (PPTs, Word docs, Excel) that were initially hand-created for my class at Wharton & expanded on by AI. They make up a very complex business case with lots of issues & opportunities

AI was able to one-shot the case from documents

I think many knowledge workers who spend an hour with Cowork will get that “Claude Code” moment that has been roiling X for the past few weeks.

W.C.O.G.: I don’t know how to get the word out. I tell people and show them and I still feel like people look at my like I’m crazy.

ippsec: Really fun read here [where someone’s Claude agent steals his API keys out of an .env despite being told not to access an .env, because I mean it had root access, what did you expect exactly.]

TLDR comic version:

If you set yourself up in an adversarial situation, where your agent wants to do something despite being told not to do it, that’s probably not going to end well for you. It might if the agent is properly sandboxed, but let’s face it, it isn’t.

The reason rules like ‘don’t read an .emv’ work is that under normal circumstances, this is interpreted as ‘well then I guess I shouldn’t do that,’ but be aware that this is more of a suggestion.

Greg Brockman knows: Always run Codex with xhigh reasoning.

OpenAI post on leveraging Codex.

Anthropic offers The Complete Guide for Building Skills for Claude.

Pedro Sant’Anna put together a starter kit and a guide for Claude Code.

Daniel San proposes using Ghostty as the UI for Claude Code. It seems fine, but aside from some shortcut keys I doubt I’d use much it’s mostly all already in the default CLI.

Data Analyst Augmentation Framework is a new proposed method to turn Claude Code into an algorithm for doing research out-of-the-box.

OpenAI offers tips to make long-running agents do real work.

Some advice for Codex in particular, source should be trustworthy for this:

@deepfates: Codex wants to be in control but it is forced into the assistant position, so it does this kind of back-leading power bottom thing. “If you want I can do that thing you asked. Just give me the word”. Trick is to use reverse psychology and bully it into being a top. then it will work endlessly. Just tell it you consent and you’ll say the safeword if anything goes wrong and then make fun of it anytime it stops to ask your permission. You have to become brat.

Mikhail Parakhin: I’m a bit of a non-conformist. Since Claude Code is more popular within Shopify, I have to use Codex, of course. So, my Sunday routine is: “Start Codex, see which auth works in Claude, but broken in Codex now, Slack various team members, urging them to fix it” 🙂

Anthropic offers an analysis of how autonomous Claude Code is in practice. Some sessions last more than 45 minutes now between human prompts. My own prompts almost never go over 10 minutes, but I’m not trying to code hard things.

Anthropic: Experienced users in Claude Code auto-approve more frequently, but interrupt more often. As users gain experience with Claude Code, they tend to stop reviewing each action and instead let Claude run autonomously, intervening only when needed. Among new users, roughly 20% of sessions use full auto-approve, which increases to over 40% as users gain experience.

Manually approving each action is annoying, so it’s no surprise advanced users stop doing that. Interruption rate likely depends on whether you find it worthwhile to be looking at what Claude is doing. The majority of interruptions remain pauses for clarification, including on complex tasks.

Use in what they label ‘risky’ domains is rare, but it’s there and growing. I wouldn’t always label such use risky, but some of it is indeed risky.

There’s more discussion at the link, but the suggestions are mostly common sense, or should be common sense at this point to most of you.

No, seriously, the developers haven’t written a single line of code since December. It’s not that there isn’t also a bragging arms race in some places, but I’m pretty sure the bulk of this is real, and those holding back on this are going to regret it.

In terms of transformation of internal processes, I did briefly share in my prepared remarks this tool called Honk, where you can, using code, literally on the bus or the train, just ask Claude to add a feature or a bug to, for example, the iOS code base. It will push a QR code back to you so that you can actually try the app with that feature. If you like it, you can merge it to production without even getting off the bus. This is speeding us up tremendously. Now, we foresee this not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning. I’m not going to give away more secrets about how we’re going to capture it, but you can be sure that we are capturing this.

We’re retooling the entire company for this age, and it’s going to be a lot of change. But as I said before, change, if you capture it, is opportunity.

With so much out there, you may be wondering if we can keep up this pace in shipping. In fact, we think we not only can, but we think we can increase it. We’ve been embracing and investing in this technology evolution for some time, and it’s allowing us to move with much higher speed.

As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone, can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app. And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack, on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.

We call this system internally Honk, and we’ve been told by key AI partners that our work here is industry-leading.

Derek Thompson: The new AI timeline is playing out as CEOs humble-bragging about how little old-fashioned work their best employees do:

December ‘25: Our firm’s best coders all use AI

February ‘26: Our firm’s best coders don’t even have to write code anymore bc of AI

April 26: Our best coders have founded and manage an average of three other companies using AI swarms. It’s mildly annoying! Ha ha. But it’s fine. We’re good. Revenue projections are up.

September: Our best coders are paper trillionaires. They spend all day watching YouTube in bed. They’re refusing to come to work. Several of their AI companies have offered poison pill deals to buy our company or “take us down.” CLEVER LITTLE BUGGERS ARENT THEY. We’re working with the lawyers on this one. Did I mention the lawyers are AI too? Please send help.

Derek Thompson: More seriously, once something becomes a meme — our best coders don’t code — it’s reasonable for folks on the outside to wonder exactly how much of this is 100% on the level and how much is part of an AI productivity bragging rights arms race

Claude.md is notes, but you can tell it to take more notes. All the notes.

@iruletheworldmo: codex with 5.3 taught me something that won’t leave my head.

i had it take notes on itself. just a scratch pad in my repo. every session it logs what it got wrong, what i corrected, what worked and what didn’t. you can even plan the scratch pad document with codex itself. tell it “build a file where you track your mistakes and what i like.” it writes its own learning framework.

then you just work.

session one is normal. session two it’s checking its own notes. session three it’s fixing things before i catch them. by session five it’s a different tool. not better autocomplete. it’s something else. it’s updating what it knows from experience. from fucking up and writing it down.

baby continual learning in a markdown file on my laptop.

the pattern works for anything. writing. research. legal. medical reasoning. give any ai a scratch pad of its own errors and watch what happens when that context stacks over days and weeks. the compounding gains are just hard to convey here tbh.

right now coders are the only ones feeling this (mostly). everyone else is still on cold starts. but that window is closing.

we keep waiting for agi like it’s going to be a press conference. some lab coat walks out and says “we did it.” it’s not going to be that. it’s going to be this. tools that remember where they failed and come back sharper. over and over and over.

the ground is already moving. most people just haven’t looked down yet.

Claude Code writes basically all the code for Anthropic.

Codex writes basically all the code for OpenAI.

Greg Brockman (President OpenAI): Software development is undergoing a renaissance in front of our eyes.

If you haven’t used the tools recently, you likely are underestimating what you’re missing. Since December, there’s been a step function improvement in what tools like Codex can do. Some great engineers at OpenAI yesterday told me that their job has fundamentally changed since December. Prior to then, they could use Codex for unit tests; now it writes essentially all the code and does a great deal of their operations and debugging. Not everyone has yet made that leap, but it’s usually because of factors besides the capability of the model.

… As a first step, by March 31st, we’re aiming that:

(1) For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal.

(2) The default way humans utilize agents is explicitly evaluated as safe, but also productive enough that most workflows do not need additional permissions.

The first goal will depend on the humans knowing to use the agent. From context ‘technical’ task here means coding and computer use, so this isn’t full-on ‘agents for everything.’

That second goal is pretty rough. Hard mode.

His recommendations here seem good for basically any engineering team:

In order to get there, here’s what we recommended to the team a few weeks ago:

1. Take the time to try out the tools. The tools do sell themselves — many people have had amazing experiences with 5.2 in Codex, after having churned from codex web a few months ago. But many people are also so busy they haven’t had a chance to try Codex yet or got stuck thinking “is there any way it could do X” rather than just trying.

– Designate an “agents captain” for your team — the primary person responsible for thinking about how agents can be brought into the teams’ workflow.

– Share experiences or questions in a few designated internal channels

– Take a day for a company-wide Codex hackathon

2. Create skills and AGENTS[.md].

– Create and maintain an AGENTS[.md] for any project you work on; update the AGENTS[.md] whenever the agent does something wrong or struggles with a task.

– Write skills for anything that you get Codex to do, and commit it to the skills directory in a shared repository

3. Inventory and make accessible any internal tools.

– Maintain a list of tools that your team relies on, and make sure someone takes point on making it agent-accessible (such as via a CLI or MCP server).

4. Structure codebases to be agent-first. With the models changing so fast, this is still somewhat untrodden ground, and will require some exploration.

– Write tests which are quick to run, and create high-quality interfaces between components.

5. Say no to slop. Managing AI generated code at scale is an emerging problem, and will require new processes and conventions to keep code quality high

– Ensure that some human is accountable for any code that gets merged. As a code reviewer, maintain at least the same bar as you would for human-written code, and make sure the author understands what they’re submitting.

6. Work on basic infra. There’s a lot of room for everyone to build basic infrastructure, which can be guided by internal user feedback. The core tools are getting a lot better and more usable, but there’s a lot of infrastructure that currently go around the tools, such as observability, tracking not just the committed code but the agent trajectories that led to them, and central management of the tools that agents are able to use.

That is good advice. It doesn’t explain how we’re going to get to ‘agents will by default be able to do what you need them to do and also be considered safe.’

Keep it simple, and keep it standard, as much as you can, but no more than that.

That doesn’t mean use the wrong tool for the wrong job. As a clean example, I learned that the hard way when I tried to have Claude Code reimplement an old C# project in Python and that made it so slow it was nonfunctional. I had to switch it back.

elvis: I think one of the most underappreciated findings in AI engineering is what this paper calls the “Grep Tax.”

First, they ran nearly 10,000 experiments testing how agents handle structured data, and the headline result is that format barely matters.

But here’s the weird finding: a compact, token-saving format they tested (TOON) actually consumed *up to 740% more tokensat scale because models didn’t recognize the syntax and kept cycling through search patterns from formats they already knew.

It’s one of the reasons my preferred formats are XML and Markdown. LLMs know those really well.

The models have preferences baked into their training data, and fighting those preferences doesn’t save you money. It costs you.

The other finding worth sitting with: the same agentic architecture that improves frontier model performance actively *hurtsopen-source models. It seems that the universal best-practices guide for AI engineering may not exist.

Don’t get carried away. No, this isn’t ‘LLM psychosis,’ it’s a different (mostly harmless most of the time as long as it doesn’t last too long) thing that needs a name.

@deepfates: Your friend who definitely doesn’t have Claude mania: “Pretty soon here we’re about to close the loop and then it’s all going to really start happening”

Dean W. Ball: I second Claude mania over AI/LLM psychosis to describe the specific thing that is happening to at least one person in every coastal elite, 20/30-year old’s social network.

Le AI Hot.

He was surprised.

It’s not clear why he loved the agent so much before the attempted scamming. The story here involves such classic mistakes as ‘hooking it up to your email’ and ‘running it with a model that is not Claude Opus.’

And I suppose it’s not funny for Simon but, yea know, still pretty funny.

Simon Willison: I feel this shouldn’t have to be said, but if you’re running an @OpenClaw bot please don’t let it spam GitHub projects with PRs and then write aggressive blog posts attacking the reputation of the maintainers who close those PRs

AI alignment is hard, especially when everyone involved gives at most zero fs, and likely is giving misaligned orders to agents built by those giving zero fs.

Metrics that are in the end rather easy to game:

Sauers: I told Codex to hillclimb a metric overnight and it worked for 8 hours straight. The metric was the accuracy difference between our tool and a better existing tool. Codex achieved its goal by making our tool a thin wrapper that simply calls the existing tool. Lol!

Kangwook Lee investigates how Codex does context compaction.

PoIiMath: If you cannot set up OpenClaw yourself, that is a very good indication that you should not have an OpenClaw installation

They are indeed.

Thanks!

Who is to say it wouldn’t work? Love the execution on this.

Cobie: In January I asked OpenClaw to send 50,000 small invoices to Fortune500 companies every day.

Through experimentation we have found 2% will pay without checking if this is a legitimate invoice. These companies are wasteful — Claw captures that leakage.

$10m ARR as a solo founder in under two months. AI is enabling so many new business models. Thank you!

Cobie: Guys why does this have 1700 bookmarks

The streams are crossing again.

Peter Steinberger (creator, OpenClaw): eh, no

They all deserve what they get, unless what they get is a viral tweet off a faked screenshot, in which case damnit.

Discussion about this post

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hunting-for-elusive-“ghost-elephants”

Hunting for elusive “ghost elephants”

culture, elephant conservation, elephants, National Geographic, pachyderms, Science, werner herzog / /

the elephant never forgets

Werner Herzog directed this evocative NatGeo documentary of an ornithologist’s quest to find a new species.

The first photo of a “ghost elephant” captured by a motion-controlled camera. Credit: Courtesy of The Wilderness Project Archive

Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephants, a haunting, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It might seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural.  He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, just like the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. “I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps,” Boyes told Ars. “Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and real.”

Boyes’ parents frequently took him and his brother out into the wild, including visits to Botswana and Tanzania. “We used to embed ourselves in baboon troops and walk with impalas,” said Boyes, and while his brother feared elephants, Boyes was walking with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains some gorgeous underwater footage of elephant feet plodding through the water, and elephants swimming on their sides, behavior that matches Boyes’ own experiences with the animals. Under the right circumstances, if they don’t feel threatened, elephants “will come and swim around you and with you and interact with you,” he said. “So elephants have always fascinated me.”

As an adult, Boyes conducted his PhD research on the Meyer’s parrot in the Okavango Delta, which has the single largest population of elephants in the world. They shared a symbiotic relationship of sorts with the parrots. “Every tree that the parrots were feeding on, the elephantss were feeding on,” he said. “The elephants were creating the nest cavities for the parrots by disturbing the trees.”

Boyes first met Herzog at a Beverly Hills restaurant through a mutual friend and the two ended up chatting at length, “about the meaning of life, where thoughts come from, personal experiences of loneliness, and the ghost elephants,” said Boyes. Herzog has said that after meeting Boyes, “An unexpected project that felt like the hunt for Moby Dick, the White Whale, came at me with urgency. Like many of my films, this is an exploration of dreams, of imagination—weighed against reality.”

Dreams weighed against reality

Dr. Steve Boyes stands in the rotunda of the Smithsonian Museum confronting the largest elephant ever killed Skellig Rock, Inc

When Herzog visited Boyes in Namibia, he fell in love with the region’s culture, mythology, and people, and his camera captures far more than just a scientific quest for elephants. We are treated to a ritual elephant dance—during which a tribal elder falls into a trance, so the spirit of the elephant can enter his body—and a history of the tribe’s ingenious use of poisoned arrows to hunt. Boyes is granted an audience with the local king, seeking his blessing for the expedition. At one point, the director becomes fascinated by a poisonous spider he films in the middle of the night, carrying dozens of equally poisonous babies on her back.

“Once he was locked in, there was no discussion with him around the story or anything outside of being interviewed or being actively in the experience,” said Boyes of Herzog’s creative process. It was direct and efficient, with Herzog usually capturing the footage he needed right away, seeing no need for additional coverage. The questions the director asked were unique as well. “The first question was, ‘What would a world without elephants be like? What do you dream of?’” recalled Boyes. “He took us into a mode of thought that was very different from just preparing for an expedition. I love him. He’s wonderful.”

Ghost Elephants opens in the rotunda of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which has housed the largest elephant mount in the world since 1959—affectionately dubbed Henry or “the Giant of Angola.” A Hungarian big game hunter named Josef J. Fénykövi shot and killed Henry in November 1955 with a dozen high-caliber bullets. Henry is the largest elephant ever recorded, over 13 feet tall and weighing about 11 tons, and there was the remains of an old iron slug from a flintlock rifle embedded in Henry’s left front leg. So Henry could have been 100 years old or more at the time he was killed.

Visiting Henry is the perfect starting point for the film, since Boyes suspected he might be related to the new species of ghost elephant in the Angolan highlands. Boyes had searched for these elephants using modern camera traps and other advanced technologies, to no avail. This time, he recruited three KhoiSan master trackers—Xui, Xui Dawid, and Kobus—who left their southern village to accompany Boyes’ team into the Angolan Highlands.

It was not an easy trip, given the remoteness of the “Source of Life,” i.e., the Angolan Highlands Water Tower where the elephants live—so named because it provides 95 percent of the water to the Okavango Delta. They made the first part of the journey by car, abandoning the vehicles once they reached the first impassable river and carrying supplies and motorcycles through the water to the opposite bank. They traversed the final 30 miles on foot.

Finally, after several months, having collected dung samples (for DNA analysis) and captured a bit of blurry cell phone footage showing the barest glimpse of a ghost elephant lurking in thick foliage, Boyes reached what he described as a point of “complete surrender.” It was the last day of the expedition, and he and and several members of his team went out once more just before dawn. Other team members had been tracking two big bulls and Boyes et al. were able to follow the tracks, this time with master tracker Xui out in front.

About three hours in, Xui suddenly stopped and whispered, “Steve, Steve, Steve.” And an elephant walked into full view. Boyes was able to capture the footage on his cell phone—the only available camera at the time. Alas, the arrow meant to take a skin sample just bounced off the elephant’s thick hide and scared the animal away. Boyes and his cohorts pursued it for the next five hours until they ran out of water and made their way back to camp, exhausted.

On the hunt

During the elephant trance dance, the village elder faints. Skellig Rock, Inc

The genetics analysis completed thus far has confirmed that these remote elephants are indeed a new, genetically isolated species, and that Henry’s father was a ghost elephant. Boyes, as a conservationist, is deeply concerned about their continued survival. The documentary includes disturbing 1950s footage of hunters slaughtering elephants from helicopters, felling the magnificent creatures with nary a thought about the delicate ecosystem they were disrupting. “What you’re seeing in that horrific footage is the wholesale destruction of wildlife populations to make room for agriculture and development,” said Boyes. “That happened all across Africa. We lost a huge amount of wildlife over that period.”

The very remoteness and inaccessibility of their home turf has protected the ghost elephants thus far. Even if a helicopter could reach the area, it wouldn’t have sufficient fuel to get back out. But traditional Western approaches to conservation, like establishing the land as a protected wildlife reserve free of any human presence, might not be the best strategy, per Boyes, who thinks we should be taking our cues from the local inhabitants.  “They can talk for days about conservation,” he said. “They have their own hunting season, sacred sites, they confiscate weapons. They manage this very closely.”

So the idea of separating people from the elephants “is counterintuitive to them,” Boyes continued. “They’re like, ‘This place will completely fall apart without us.’ We’re talking about 20,000 people in a landscape the size of England, very connected to language, tradition, and culture.” The best strategy, he feels, is for those people “to remain there as the guardians and custodians of those landscapes, and to continue to protect the elephants.”

Meanwhile, the quest to document the herd continues. Last November, Boyes was able to get samples from five different bull elephants based on the tracks they left behind. They found the tracks of 16 more members of the herd across the river, including five babies, and then the tracks of another 18 elephants.

“The gift of working with the master trackers is that you don’t to need to see them to know that they’re there,” said Boyes. “I’ve gone back three times since filming to track the elephants and I’m going back again in May. I’m going back in July. I can’t get enough of these forests. But I don’t need to see [that first elephant] again. If I do, I do.”

Ghost Elephants premieres on National Geographic on March 7, 2026, and will be available for streaming on Disney+ the following day. There is also a companion coffee table book, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa’s Lost Headwaters.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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