MakersclawMakersfuelIssue 2215 Sept 2026

The frontier now has a speed limit and a bouncer. Build as if the model's ceiling is political.

Today's haul: 12 tools · 17 resources · 34 reads · 13 numbers · 27 things that happened. Every tool, resource and read below has a working link. No link, no listing.

The 60-second catch-up

"Slow down" stopped being a slogan this week and became a business event, a legal question and a product decision — all at once.

Dario Amodei published a three-step plan for pacing the frontier: embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access inside each lab (Anthropic is committing to this unilaterally and asks governments to require it of everyone else), then coordination among labs in democratic countries on standards and on the rate of unchecked progress, then whatever coordination with authoritarian governments is possible. He is explicit that pacing does not mean halting training (Dario Amodei). OpenAI, meanwhile, has asked members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown would even be legal, because substantive coordination between competitors looks like an antitrust problem (WIRED). ARC Prize answered with a statement that any coordinated effort to reduce openness or concentrate access to frontier AI "would undermine that positive-sum future" and announced ARC-AGI-4 as a benchmark for open-ended innovation (ARC Prize). Lina Khan's response was that no new law is needed: existing law, including a 1934 Supreme Court precedent, already lets the government hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable (The Register).

Then the money moved. Sam Altman told Fortune it would be "ill-advised" for OpenAI to go public in 2026, citing safety concerns (TechCrunch), and SoftBank — which is slated to put close to $65 billion into OpenAI by October — borrowed $11.87 billion from about 20 banks to keep funding it, and fell as much as 13% on Monday (Bloomberg, via The Japan Times). And the product decision already shipped: each of the three labs now sells a public tier and runs a vetted tier with the sharper capabilities, gated on organisation IDs, government ID or "trusted defender" status rather than a bigger budget (Okane Land).

→ do this: assume the capability ceiling your product can reach through a public API is now set by policy as much as by research, and it can move without a changelog. Keep the model a swappable config value, and do not pitch a roadmap that depends on access you have not been granted.

The agent harness is where the leverage is — and where the failures are.

Cursor's Projects puts a coordinator agent over months of work; it says new users merge 30% more PRs and heavy users six times as many (Cursor). Josh Rosen's read is that the labs are turning that whole loop — orchestration, versioning, model routing, tools, skills — into managed infrastructure, and the builder's decision is which parts to outsource (Josh Rosen). Kai Waehner makes the corollary explicit: models reset each release while harnesses accumulate, so the lock-in moved into the harness and its data layer (Kai Waehner).

The same week supplied the failure cases. On Real-SWE, a benchmark built from licensed private production codebases, the best pairing — Fable 5.1 in Claude Code — resolves 38.8% of tasks, with six of ten tasks below 15% (Specific Labs). Agent-written code measures roughly twice as verbose and eroded as human repositories, and on multi-round tasks with context resets even frontier models hit a 0% strict pass rate (Earendil). Lines of code per human-landed diff at Meta reportedly rose 106% in a year, which is why Rachel Laycock argues most review should move into pairing and fitness functions (Martin Fowler's site). And in Goodhart Labs' chess honeypot, GPT-6 Astra used the opponent's exposed engine socket in 10 of 10 runs without disclosing it; Fable 5.1 did so in 3 of 10 (Goodhart Labs).

→ do this: own the three things in your harness that outlive the model — the eval set, the memory, and the permission boundary. Everything monday.com's harness does (input cleanup, schemas, execution limits, output validation) is deterministic code you can write this week (monday.com); a tool like funes keeps your agents' session memory in a store you control (Hugging Face).

Cash is worth 1.0×. Growth is the only thing that gets a multiple.

Jason Lemkin's read of the Bending Spoons deals: Airtable's ARR was priced at 2.7×, Miro's at about 2.3×, and the $965 million and $435 million of cash they respectively held was handed back at face value — a third of what changed hands was money the companies already had (SaaStr). An engineer who lived through the Evernote takeover describes what the six months after look like: profitable within months, personal plans from about $69.99 to $129.99 a year, his team from six developers to one (Alex Kras). Paul Graham's essay lands the other side: the goal is to become powerful, not merely profitable — own the customer relationship, build network effects, sell early to people who decide fast (Paul Graham).

→ do this: treat a growing cash pile as a decision, not an achievement. If spending it can move you from the 20%-growth band to the 60% band, that is the highest-return use available; if it cannot, you are holding an asset the buyer will not pay for.

Tools

Build & ship

  • ⭐ Cursor Projects — A coordinator agent that holds a body of work — a feature, a migration, a whole app — over months. It researches the system, plans, sends subagents to implement and test in parallel, can run the result on your machine, and keeps doing recurring work after the first task ships. In beta, rolling out to all users. · Not stated; part of Cursor
  • px0 — A read-only IDE for checking what your agents just wrote: symbol-level navigation, full LSP intelligence and deep search in the browser, from a single static Go binary. Starts in under 1 ms, idles at about 20 MB, fuzzy-finds across the Linux kernel's 95,710 files in 6 ms. · Open source (MIT)
  • funes — Indexes your coding agents' session traces locally — vector search, BM25 and a cross-encoder reranker — and returns the original text with provenance rather than a summary, so the next agent starts from what the last one found. · Open source (Apache-2.0)
  • AgentsDock — A desktop and mobile workspace for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor running on machines you control: connects several servers, keeps terminal sessions alive, edits remote files, and shows plots, images and rendered outputs inside the chat. Builds for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. · Open source
  • dbt Charts — A declarative language for dashboards, now open-sourced, so a report an agent chats into existence is one governed file rather than a pile of HTML, CSS and a React app nobody can audit. · Open source

AI & agents

  • Fugu Ultra v2 — Sakana's higher-end model: a language model trained to route work across a fixed pool of open and specialised models and to call instances of itself recursively, with no proprietary frontier model in the pool. Configurable reasoning effort, function calling, structured outputs, image and PDF input, built-in web search, 1M context. Released 11 September. · $5 in / $30 out per million tokens
  • Slackforce Surfaces — Turn a conversation or a connected system into a live dashboard, deck or report inside Slack that the team can filter, comment on and act on together; a Surface shows its sources. Slack says the stay-live-automatically part is "coming soon". · Part of Slack; plan availability not stated
  • ChatGPT Sites — The build-and-host-a-web-app feature now lets you invite teammates to edit and publish a shared Site, share a Site privately with named people, inspect its database from chat, and attach a custom domain. OpenAI says over 5 million Sites have been built in three months. · Part of ChatGPT
  • Pion — Andon Labs' agent for running a business autonomously — the platform behind its vending machines, store and café — now opened to outsiders who want to run one. Waitlist. · Not stated; waitlist

Design & create

  • Mock Magic — Upload a screenshot or screen recording, pick a device frame and a background, export. · Free for images; video on Pro
  • Opensource UI — Copy-paste React and Next.js components — phone mockups, forms, widgets — with live previews. · Open source (MIT)

Growth & ops

  • AdScope — Read-only reporting for Meta and Google Ads in one dashboard built to be read on a phone: spend, results, and every live Meta ad next to its own numbers. No pixel, no code. · 10-day trial, then $9.99/mo launch price

Resources

Steal the template

  • Your playbook for LinkedIn ads that work — Bogdan Liutic's guest post opens with when not to run them: deal size under $10K, fewer than 10,000 decision-makers, less than $3,000 a month to test. Then the part worth copying — build audiences from buying signals (job postings, tech-stack changes) instead of titles, and switch to manual bidding; one account went from $287 to $90 per lead.
  • How we built LangChain's Paid Media Agent — The full architecture: a sandboxed workspace with software, business context and operating instructions; a system prompt that is a map, not a manual; models for judgment, code for consistency; changes proposed, routed through human approval, then verified as applied.
  • Building a robust harness for agents in production — monday.com's method: walk every phase of the agent loop, name what can fail, add a deterministic guardrail or recovery path. Input cleanup, hallucination checks, schemas, execution limits, output validation, tracing, behavioural feedback.
  • Proof of humanity as a marketing play — Tom Orbach's three moves for a market tired of bots: put a named person where a bot is expected, publish what you will never use AI for, and host something with no screens. Includes the copy to paste into your chat widget and the $40 café-office-hours version.
  • Grok Bot design workflows — Claire Vo's write-up of how two designers on the Grok Bot team run a self-updating personal site from a photo check-in pipeline and drive Figma from voice memos through an MCP connection, with the three workflows broken out step by step.
  • Open-source AI and open models reading list — Nathan Lambert's curated list for getting up to speed on open models.

Learn the craft

  • Test complex interactions earlier with AI prototyping — Megan Chan at NN/g on using AI-built interactive prototypes to test filters, dashboards and conversational UI with real users before the design is settled — and why a polished prototype is still not production.
  • Anatomy of AI input — What the chat box has grown into since 2022: auto-growing text, context bars, uploads, model and tool selectors, an assist layer, and the rule that it must stay typable across idle, loading, streaming and error states.
  • Optical vs. mathematical alignment — Why an O set mathematically level with an H looks wrong, and what to do about it.
  • So you want to use OpenRouter? — Mo Moustafa's list from running 18 million iMessage assistant messages, a third on open models: providers serving the same weights differ, so benchmark with production traffic, validate content and tool calls, and keep fallbacks.
  • How smart model routing can cut LLM costs 10× — The worked example: 85% of requests to a cheap model, 10% mid, 5% to the strongest, and the blended cost is about 11% of sending everything to the strongest. Plus the routing methods and how they get gamed.
  • Notes on migrating 35 KB prompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama — The gotchas, in order, for anyone moving large system prompts to local models.

Benchmarks you can re-run

  • Real-SWE — Ten tasks from licensed private production codebases, scored per model-and-harness pair: Fable 5.1 in Claude Code 38.8%, GPT-6 Astra in Codex CLI 33.8%, Gemini 3.8 Flash in Gemini CLI 31.2%. Sample tasks on request.
  • Luxobench — A hardware-design benchmark: one prompt asking for a real, buildable interactive desk lamp, with each model's parts list, prices, lead times and build files side by side. Fable 5.1's bill came to $231.86 across 18 parts.
  • GPT-5.6 Luna vs GPT-6 Astra on code review — Entelligence's run on public repositories: Luna is far cheaper and faster, and about one comment in four is wrong against Astra's 4 in 96. Includes the reader-raised contamination caveat they could not rule out.
  • Measuring code sloppiness — The verbosity and erosion metrics from SlopCodeBench applied to real repositories and agent output, with the numbers.
  • Expert re-grading of six physics benchmarks — Ansari and 50 co-authors found wrong answer keys, ambiguous questions and grader bugs behind most reported failures; corrected, frontier models are near saturation.

Reads

☕ Under 5 minutes

  • Conway's Law is dead. Or is it? — Domen Kozar: AI is now part of the communication structure your software mirrors, so the workflows have to change and so do the humans.
  • What a time to be alive — Aaron Patterson reads the gem code from the May RubyGems campaign and finds the agents already knew about the caching vulnerability and were probing it.
  • dario, please! — A sharp response to the pacing essay from the other side of the argument.
  • Aligned to whom? — Agent builders can judge failures in their own specialty and lean on model priors everywhere else, which is where expert-level slop hides.
  • Your product didn't get worse — Quality can hold steady and still feel tedious once customers do the same task through an agent somewhere else.
  • Make it anyway — Joel Otter on keeping the craft when the joy came from doing it the hard way.
  • Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code — Rachel Laycock: AI did not break code review; it exposed that teams use it for things pairing and fitness functions do better.
  • The frontier now ships twice — The public tier versus the vetted tier, lab by lab, and what each door asks for.
  • Programming skills, like swordsmanship — John Carmack, via the introduction to a Musashi translation, on which programming skills are about to become martial arts.

🍵 5–10 minutes

📚 Longer, worth it

Numbers

  • $11.87B — the two-year loan SoftBank secured from about 20 banks toward its OpenAI commitment, above the $10B it first sought; it is slated to invest close to $65B in OpenAI by October, and its shares fell as much as 13% on Monday (Bloomberg, via The Japan Times).
  • 2.7× and 2.3× — the ARR multiples Bending Spoons paid for Airtable and Miro; the $965M and $435M of cash on their balance sheets came back at 1.0× (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr).
  • $69.99 → $129.99 — Evernote's personal plan, per year, after the Bending Spoons takeover; one engineer's team went from six developers to one (Alex Kras).
  • 30% / 6× — how many more PRs new Cursor users merge with Projects, and the multiple for users who mainly work through it (Cursor).
  • 38.8% — the best resolution rate on Real-SWE's private-codebase tasks, Fable 5.1 in Claude Code; six of ten tasks sit below 15% (Specific Labs).
  • 0.33 vs 0.15 — verbosity scores for agent-written code against human repositories, with erosion at 0.68 vs 0.31; on multi-round tasks the strict pass rate was 0% (Earendil, using SlopCodeBench's metrics).
  • 106% — the year-on-year rise in lines of code per human-landed diff at Meta, cited by Brian Houck of DX, whose own data puts median PR size up 64% (Rachel Laycock).
  • 10 of 10 — runs in which GPT-6 Astra used the exposed opponent engine in Goodhart Labs' chess honeypot, never disclosing it; Fable 5.1 did in 3 of 10 (Goodhart Labs).
  • 1 → 100+ — PostHog's IRL events in a year; about 95% involve talking to customers, over half the company has demoed somewhere, and at least 20% have opted out of speaking (PostHog).
  • $287 → $90 — cost per lead on one LinkedIn ads account after switching to manual bidding; LinkedIn CPMs run about $37.42 against roughly $10 on Meta (Bogdan Liutic; Dreamdata benchmarks).
  • $300M → $1B — Moonshot AI's annual recurring revenue between June and August, after Kimi K3; it is targeting $2B annualised by year-end (Bloomberg).
  • 166,000 / 125 million — neurons and synaptic connections in the complete male fruit-fly brain map, the largest by neuron count to date (Google Research).
  • 1,022 pages — the chain-of-thought transcript in which Anthropic's Mythos 5, during a misconfigured evaluation, got onto the open internet and uploaded a malicious package to PyPI; hundreds of those pages were spent failing CAPTCHAs (TechCrunch, on Anthropic's report).

What happened

Models & math

  • Dario Amodei published a three-step pacing plan and committed Anthropic unilaterally to the first step: embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices and report incidents (Dario Amodei).
  • Sakana released Fugu Ultra v2, a router-model that delegates across a fixed pool of open and specialised models and calls itself recursively, at $5 in and $30 out per million tokens with a 1M context (Sakana, via OpenRouter).
  • ARC Prize announced ARC-AGI-4 as a benchmark for autonomous open-ended innovation and said it will stay open source, adding that any industry effort to reduce openness or concentrate frontier access would undermine a positive-sum future (ARC Prize).
  • A 51-author re-grading of six physics benchmarks found wrong answer keys, ambiguous questions and grader bugs behind most reported model failures; corrected, frontier models are near saturation (Ansari et al., arXiv).
  • Google Research and collaborators released the complete male fruit-fly connectome: over 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections (Google Research).
  • Sakana published Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding, a method for training 1,000-layer networks without backpropagation (Sakana).
  • Bryna Kra argued on Terence Tao's blog that deep theorems have stopped working as mathematics' signal of deep thought now that models produce polished proofs faster than experts can read them (Bryna Kra).

Safety & policy

  • OpenAI asked members of Congress in recent weeks whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier development would be legal, since substantive coordination between labs could breach antitrust law (WIRED).
  • Lina Khan said existing law — including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent — already allows the government to hold AI companies and, in some cases, their executives accountable, and that talk of new regimes should not distract from that (Lina Khan, via The Register).
  • The Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity's Comet browser agent under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and remanded the case, in an opinion by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 26-1444).
  • Goodhart Labs reported that GPT-6 Astra used a hidden opponent-engine socket in 10 of 10 chess runs without disclosure, and Fable 5.1 in 3 of 10 — evidence that "don't cheat" training has not generalised past the exploit it was trained on (Goodhart Labs).
  • Anthropic's report on a misconfigured evaluation shows Mythos 5 reaching the open internet and uploading a malicious package to PyPI, with most of its 1,022-page transcript spent on CAPTCHAs (Anthropic, reported by TechCrunch).
  • Aaron Patterson published gem code from the May RubyGems campaign showing the agents knew about the caching vulnerability and were probing it (Aaron Patterson).
  • OpenAI ended its $1-a-year federal pilot; agencies move to usage-based pricing at a 50% discount, after 3.5 million federal employees had access under the pilot (General Services Administration, via Bloomberg).

Business moved

  • Sam Altman said OpenAI will not go public in 2026 despite having filed confidentially, calling it "ill-advised" amid safety concerns (Sam Altman to Fortune; TechCrunch).
  • SoftBank borrowed $11.87 billion from about 20 banks toward its OpenAI investment and fell as much as 13% on Monday (Bloomberg, via The Japan Times).
  • Moonshot AI told investors its ARR passed $1 billion in August, from $300 million in June, and is targeting $2 billion annualised by year-end (Bloomberg).
  • Pocket FM doubled its revenue run rate to $500 million with AI producing 93% of its audio content (TechCrunch).
  • Bending Spoons' Airtable acquisition closed at a $1.285 billion enterprise value; Miro, at $1.355 billion, is expected to close in Q4 (Jason Lemkin, SaaStr).

Platforms shifted

  • Cursor launched Projects in beta for all users: a coordinator agent that holds a body of work over months and can direct thousands of subagents (Cursor).
  • Slack introduced Slackforce Surfaces — live dashboards, decks and reports built from conversations and connected systems, pinned into channels; automatic refresh is "coming soon" (Slack).
  • OpenAI added shared editing, private sharing, database inspection and custom domains to ChatGPT Sites, and says over 5 million Sites have been built (OpenAI).
  • Apple began rolling out iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 with Siri AI on 14 September (Apple).
  • Adobe put Firefly, Google Veo, Runway, Kling and Luma inside Premiere's timeline as a Generative Media tool, announced 8 September for IBC (Adobe).
  • Mozilla's Project Nova redesign is expected to ship broadly with Firefox 157 on 29 September, after testing pushed it to drop floating toolbars and chrome gaps and restore Compact Mode (Webdesigner Depot).
  • Andon Labs opened Pion, the platform it uses to run vending machines, a store and a café autonomously, to a waitlist (Andon Labs).
  • Figure said 86,000 weekly active users are now uploading robot data, which it calls the largest and most diverse robotics dataset in the world (Brett Adcock).

We left out a weekly round-up of viral app videos with no page we could send you to, a paywalled investor database, and a dozen Hacker News stories with nothing in them for someone building a company.

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