A trained SUBLEQ transformer would be the first computer found by gradient descent, on a generic architecture not designed to be a computer, and with weights not hard-crafted by a person.

The thing that impressed me the most about GPT-3 was this: I gave it a weird mix of matlab and python code with a few variables, a loop, some basic arithmetic. Nothing fancy and I knew this kind of thing was probably in the training data, but for shure not with these exact numbers and variables.

Wilson Lin at Cursor coordinated hundreds of GPT-5.2 agents to build a web browser from scratch, running uninterrupted for one week. Over a million lines of Rust.

We plan to release new evaluations every 1–2 months.

GUI bottleneck (Gemini spent weeks unable to list a product due to misclicking)

Most passing SWE-Bench solutions are not accepted by maintainers.

Whatever is precise enough to benchmark is also precise enough to optimize for.

By the end of the year, we expect AI to be able to do tasks roughly one day long with a 50% success rate. In comparison, I'd guess that this task would take several days for a person familiar with the paper and is able to play around with the web interface.

The benchmark tasks were meticulously constructed to be realistic, involving the hard work of hundreds of experts and likely millions of dollars — placing it among the most expensive economics papers of all time.

our central estimate is around 660,000 H100-equivalents

AI agents submit pull requests every few minutes

About 6% of conversations with Claude involve seeking personal guidance

52.5% reduction in hallucinations

non-expert humans comfortably exceed 60%

Metacognitive Activities and Ethical Reflection

questioning the output, understanding limitations, and recognizing broader socioethical implications are essential for individuals to engage with such technologies in a constructive and responsible way

Gebreegziabher et al. [24] argued that counterfactual generation that follows the principles of VT allowed the introduction of discriminatory variance for the model to learn on.

Building on methods proposed in PaTAT [24], Mocha first generates human-readable neuro-symbolic pattern rules from partially labeled text data for classification.

These theories have proven insightful for understanding how humans grasp and compare concepts, shaping the development of human-AI collaboration systems for sensemaking [29], hypothesis testing [2], as well as model training [24].

Both systems enabled users to quickly identify variations and patterns within the data and support exploration and hypothesis testing.

The last two prior works also combine Variation Theory (VT) and SAT together, as we did (i.e., a corollary of SAT referred to as Analogical Transfer/Learning Theory).

In line with previous work, Mocha aims to support a user's efforts in the disambiguation of concepts through structural comparisons of counterfactual data in the context of machine teaching.

Metacognitive awareness

reducing the cognitive load of sentence crafting

Results show that participants successfully customized interfaces using natural language. Users found the system intuitive and achieved good performance regardless of technical background, we report analysis of optimal prompt length, challenges in separating functional and visual instructions in structured templates, correlation between LLM experience and success, and learning effects.

By allowing users to express desired changes using their own words and harnessing the generative capabilities of LLMs, MorphGUI mitigates the limitations of predefined options and reduces the need for technical expertise. The framework translates functional and stylistic requests into either modifications of existing application components or generation of new ones.

Graphical user interface (GUI) customization relies on predefined configuration options and settings, constraining diverse individual needs and preferences within predetermined boundaries and often requiring technical expertise. To address these limitations, this work introduces MorphGUI, a framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable interface customization through natural language.

MorphGUI: Real-time GUIs Customization with Large Language Models

implications for society focus on a technology's societal impact. The purpose of these implications is to raise awareness, stimulate reflection, and prompt action in relation to the impact of emerging technologies on our lives.

Policy implications seek to inform or persuade regulators, politicians, and others in governing positions.

While the term practitioner in HCI research often refers to those in design-related roles (e.g., a UX designer), the design and evaluation of sociotechnical systems also lead to implications for other domains. The target audience for implications for practice can be specific professionals, such as teachers or healthcare staff, or those in leadership positions.

The prototypical implications of HCI work are implications for design. These implications seek to inform the design of technology, bridging the gap between research findings and real-world design challenges.

Implications for the HCI community may follow from studies or reflections on how we operate as an academic community, for example, through bibliographical analysis or a critique of ethical shortcomings.

The purpose of creating implications for theory is to improve our ability to understand and predict phenomena in interactive computing.

Theoretical implications concern the basic constructs of HCI and our understanding of how they affect each other.

Methodology implications aim to inform the way we design and analyze studies within HCI. These implications focus on aspects such as the selection and recruitment of participants or the analysis of data or reporting thereof.

The tool also provided reflective value. Participants reported that it helped articulate what matters to them and why. Beyond research settings, individuals can use the framework to audit which dimensions drive their own sense of ownership, select AI tools that respect those priorities (e.g., suggestion-only assistance for high-Control creators), and mediate collaboration by visualizing divergent ownership profiles when teammates disagree about contribution and credit.

Many participants thought that it was important to consider how closely the final product aligned with their initial conceptions (P7, novelist; P8, web developer; P11, filmmaker), "almost like a success-type question" (P3, dancer). This idea can be thought of as an aspect of intentionality — as P11 (filmmaker) stated, "Did your intentions translate into the final work?"

Intentionality can be supported through periodic intent check-ins and visual diffs that surface drift from initial goals.

Levene and Friedman [20] examined the effects of creation and intent on ownership judged and found that the effects of creation hold even when controlling for other factors. They also showed that successful and intentional creations are ascribed more ownership than unsuccessful or unintentional creations, and that creation is ascribed more ownership than the equivalent labor.

Even though the majority of participants stated that intentionality doesn't play a role in their conceptions of ownership as it is "a given" (P5, architect) and that "everything is intentional" (P17, illustrator, graphic designer), these cases showcase that intentionality can indeed play a role in ownership sentiments, especially when the ability to be intentional is taken away.

there seem to be times when material constraints can indeed shift ownership feelings, especially when control, intentionality, and creative vision all lie at an intersection: "I lose ownership points there, because I'm limited by this specific tool even if I have a specific vision" (P4, nonfiction writer)

The one participant who did directly reference intentionality did so more in terms of the medium they work with: "We're still digging up shards of pottery from hundreds and thousands of years ago; once you fire something, it doesn't go away. It's hard as rock. So you really want to be sure and confident and intentional when you make something out of clay and fire it, because it can't be undone" (P20, ceramicist).

While continuity is distinct from control or intentionality, it can still shape one's capacity to make intentional creative decisions, particularly when involvement is limited to a part rather than the whole project.

Only one participant directly mentioned the term intentionality, but a few participants reported that whether or not they were able to work on the project from start to finish (a sense of continuity perhaps) was important to their sense of ownership.

Intentionality – How intentional were you about the creative decisions that you made?

Intentionality can be supported through periodic intent check-ins and visual diffs that surface drift from initial goals.

Levene and Friedman [20] examined the effects of creation and intent on ownership judged and found that the effects of creation hold even when controlling for other factors. They also showed that successful and intentional creations are ascribed more ownership than unsuccessful or unintentional creations, and that creation is ascribed more ownership than the equivalent labor.

Even though the majority of participants stated that intentionality doesn't play a role in their conceptions of ownership as it is "a given" (P5, architect) and that "everything is intentional" (P17, illustrator, graphic designer), these cases showcase that intentionality can indeed play a role in ownership sentiments, especially when the ability to be intentional is taken away.

However, there seem to be times when material constraints can indeed shift ownership feelings, especially when control, intentionality, and creative vision all lie at an intersection: "I lose ownership points there, because I'm limited by this specific tool even if I have a specific vision" (P4, nonfiction writer); "I wrote everything that I wanted to, I planned everything the way that I wanted it to be. But when I went to shoot, and I started facing challenges, I realized I don't have enough time, enough budget, and the crew is not experienced enough. So then, your idea of making the film itself changes" (P11, filmmaker).

The one participant who did directly reference intentionality did so more in terms of the medium they work with: "We're still digging up shards of pottery from hundreds and thousands of years ago; once you fire something, it doesn't go away. It's hard as rock. So you really want to be sure and confident and intentional when you make something out of clay and fire it, because it can't be undone" (P20, ceramicist).

Only one participant directly mentioned the term intentionality, but a few participants reported that whether or not they were able to work on the project from start to finish (a sense of continuity perhaps) was important to their sense of ownership.

The study protocol was approved by our institutional ethics review board (IRB). All participants provided informed consent prior to participation. Each received $25 in compensation, either as cash or a gift card.

Our methodological design was guided by the goal of comparing how participants described ownership before and after being introduced to the framework, with a focus on understanding the coverage and utility of the framework's dimensions. To capture this contrast, we asked them to reflect on both a high-ownership and a low-ownership creative project, enabling comparison across contexts as well as within individual experience. We refer to these phases as the pre-webtool and post-webtool sections of the study.

We analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis. Each transcript was segmented into meaningful units (quotes or lines), which were then coded based on the core theme or idea expressed. Codes were iteratively refined and collapsed, with similar codes grouped together into broader categories that reflected shared orientations toward ownership. Through repeated reduction, these categories were distilled into a set of central themes that captured the most salient patterns across the dataset.

In the post-webtool phase, participants were introduced to the Creative Ownership Webtool, which asked them to evaluate each product across the nine subdimensions of the Person, Process, and System framework, resulting in a numerical value for each project. Finally, participants reflected on the framework outputs, discussing whether the results aligned with their intuitions, which dimensions resonated or felt less relevant, and what aspects of ownership they felt might be missing.

Interviews were structured into two phases. In the pre-webtool phase, participants first provided background information on their creative trajectory, education, and domain of practice. They then reflected on two creative products selected in advance—one associated with high ownership and one with low ownership—explaining the reasoning behind their classifications and the factors that influenced them.

We conducted semi-structured interviews lasting 45–60 minutes, guided by a shared set of questions and thematic prompts while allowing flexibility for participants to reflect on their individual experiences. This approach encouraged rich, situated accounts of ownership while maintaining comparability across interviews.

Potential participants were identified through a combination of referrals from the researchers' professional networks, publicly available sources, and local art communities in the Greater Boston area. To be eligible, participants were required to: (1) work or participate significantly in a creative field, (2) have at least two finished creative products—one associated with high feelings of ownership and one with low feelings of ownership, (3) be fluent in English, and (4) be over 18 years of age. We recruited 20 participants via word of mouth, email, and snowball sampling.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 creative professionals across a diverse range of fields. We used a two-phase, within-participant protocol. Participants first described one high-ownership and one low-ownership project without the framework, then used our instrument to rate both works and reflect on the output.

Building on these efforts, our aim is to develop a framework for ownership that is specifically tailored to creative practice and designed for use in HCI research.

Efforts have been made in HCI to establish more unified frameworks, though these remain limited in scope.

Building upon literature across psychology, philosophy, the humanities and social sciences more broadly, and within human-computer interaction, we introduce a nine-subdimension framework of creative ownership organized across Person, Process, and System.

We introduce a framework of creative ownership comprising three dimensions - Person, Process, and System - each with three subdimensions, offering a shared language for both system design and HCI research.

A Paradigm for Creative Ownership

Pre-framework interviews concentrated on Embodiment, Control, and Abstraction. With the framework in view, attention distributed across all nine dimensions.

Pre-framework talk concentrated on a limited subset of subdimensions (embodiment, control, abstraction).

Hegel's ideas of ownership stem from the notion that the "will" can be embodied in external entities, and that this embodiment is necessary for one's actualization as a person cannot come to exist without both relation to and differentiation from the external environment.

There almost appears to be a divide between "process-focused" (P18, painter, sculptor) and "person-focused" (P3, dancer) creatives.

The sentiments highlighting the importance of embodiment largely paralleled those expressed prior to the participants viewing the framework. Participants stated that it was important to them that their work reflected their "value system" (P5, architect), "emotional experience in [their] lived feelings" (P2, ukulelist, singer), and that it was a "labor of love" (P16, cartoonist).

Participants felt that when the work reflected their "signature style" (P4, nonfiction writer) or "distinctive mark" (P8, web developer), they had a stronger sense of creative ownership.

Participants used a variety of words to get this message across: self-indulgence, passion, obsession, vulnerability. Being able to engage in their own explorations, share their backgrounds and experiences, and, in the words of one participant, "imbue more of [themselves]" (P9, dancer), was key across the study.

P19 (painter, glass artist) chose a piece that was an exploration of body and memory: "It was a lot of looking through and reflecting what I was thinking."

P4 (nonfiction writer) cited that they chose the work because it was both crafted in their signature style, and was an emotional piece written about their mother.

Embodiment of values, personality, and identity was repeatedly cited by participants as a strong reason why they feel creative ownership over their work.

Embodiment – How much do you feel that the finished product embodies your values, personality, and identity?

Qualitatively, pre-framework talk concentrated on a limited subset of subdimensions (embodiment, control, abstraction). Once introduced, participants articulated and prioritized all nine subdimensions, enabling finer distinctions (e.g., conceptual authorship vs. physical production) and revealing medium-dependent nuances.

Participants also found the categories legible, and a recurrent split emerged between person-focused and process-focused practices. Employment context further moderated ownership: low-ownership projects were often job-driven, whereas high-ownership projects skewed toward self-initiated work. These findings support modeling ownership as a multi-dimensional profile with moderators rather than a single latent factor.

Pre-framework interviews concentrated on Embodiment, Control, and Abstraction. With the framework in view, attention distributed across all nine dimensions. Quantitatively, high-ownership cases exhibited higher overall scores, whereas low-ownership cases showed greater dispersion. Taken together, these patterns indicate that the framework broadens the analytic space of ownership and supports the capture of heterogeneous routes to ownership, particularly in low-ownership contexts.

Overall, these results demonstrate both the coverage and diagnostic power of the framework: all nine sub-dimensions shifted between conditions, and the variance patterns in the low ownership condition surfaced the diverse ways participants experience reduced ownership.

For HCI, the immediate use is practical: report ownership as a profile rather than a single score, state construct boundaries, and use the dimensions as design levers (e.g., decision rights for Control, intent alignment for Intentionality, attribution for Recognition, modality-aware workflows for Production/Abstraction, and role clarity for Interdependence).

Responses for low-ownership projects showed substantially greater variance, with wider inter-quartile ranges and more outliers than in the high-ownership condition. Whereas ratings for high-ownership projects clustered tightly at the upper end of the scale, low-ownership responses spanned nearly the full range, from near zero to moderately high values. This indicates that while participants converge on what constitutes high ownership, experiences of low ownership are more heterogeneous, reflecting different ways ownership may be diminished (e.g., limited control, lack of recognition, or minimal effort).

Methodologically, we recommend reporting an ownership profile rather than a single score and explicitly stating construct boundaries. A brief "ownership design card" in Methods—specifying manipulated versus measured dimensions, expected moderators (e.g., medium tangibility, employment context), and anticipated trade-offs—would improve interpretability and comparability.

Across all nine sub-dimensions of the framework—Embodiment, Occupancy, Recognition, Control, Intentionality, Effort, Production, Abstraction, and Interdependence—participants gave consistently higher ratings for projects they associated with high ownership compared to low ownership (Figure 2). This pattern held across the board, suggesting that the framework reliably distinguishes between ownership conditions rather than capturing isolated dimensions.

A potential risk is profile drift under sustained high-automation use (e.g., declines in perceived Effort or Control). Because the framework is lightweight, it can function as a periodic check-in to track such changes and recommend countermeasures (e.g., adding decision checkpoints or narrowing automation scope).

The framework yields actionable implications for system design. Treating ownership as a first-class experience goal positions each dimension as a design lever. Control can be protected by making decision rights explicit, keeping suggestions reversible, and attaching rationales to consequential edits. Intentionality can be supported through periodic intent check-ins and visual diffs that surface drift from initial goals. Recognition benefits from attribution by default. Production and Abstraction suggest modality-aware workflows (concept-first versus material-first), and Interdependence calls for role visibility and decision traceability in collaborative tools. The aim is not to prescribe features but to make ownership designable: systems can be tuned to the ownership profile a context demands.

In study of AI-driven scriptwriting by Weber et al. [42], participants associated ownership with ease, expression, collaboration, uniqueness, and enjoyment.

Weber et al. [43], for example, use the term "artistic ownership" in studying support for creative goals, yet operationalize it through adjacent concepts such as creative vision, intentions, collaboration, pride, control, and emotional response [43]. Even when researchers begin with a focused definition, as in Wasi et al.'s work [41] on content ownership, related ideas often surface—embodiment, identity, originality, and effort among them.

Some studies conflate ownership with adjacent ideas (e.g., control, vision, identity); others elicit participants' views without a common scaffold, making results hard to compare across settings and media.

As one participant put simply, "Did I love it?" (P3, dancer).

P4 (nonfiction writer) reported a similar sentiment but used the term pride instead — "That sense of proudness doesn't really have anything to do with how much I feel ownership about it, at least not directly."

P2 (ukulelist, singer) reported feeling a "creative attachment" to a piece, even though they didn't feel any ownership over it — "A little bit of my heart and the soul is in this thing, even though it doesn't have anything to do with me otherwise."

In their 2003 paper, Pierce et al. [32] define psychological ownership as "that state where an individual feels as though the target of ownership or a piece of that target is 'theirs'."

In the field of psychology, there have been numerous theoretical propositions and empirical studies attempting to explain the formation of psychological ownership. Several scholars have created frameworks based on decades of psychological research that capture key themes that have emerged time and again such as effectance and control of possessions [10, 25, 44], positive affect [10], and symbolic meaning and personhood [35].

Hegel's ideas of ownership stem from the notion that the "will" can be embodied in external entities, and that this embodiment is necessary for one's actualization as a person cannot come to exist without both relation to and differentiation from the external environment [34].

One of the most fundamental materialist theories is Locke's labor theory, which posits that "every man has a property in his own person," and thereby goes on to argue that when one mixes their labor with natural resources, the resulting good becomes their property - evoking the embodiment theory of personhood [22, 34].

Materialist theories stem from notions of property as control over material entities, going as far as to stipulate that physical, material states are the ultimate determinants of reality, taking precedence over thought, consciousness, and abstract entities [27, 38]. On the contrary, idealism posits that something mental is the ultimate foundation of reality, and idealist theories of property and personhood are concerned with symbolic and mental conceptions of ownership [12].

Building upon literature across psychology, philosophy, the humanities and social sciences more broadly, and within human-computer interaction, we introduce a nine-subdimension framework of creative ownership organized across Person, Process, and System. Person captures how the artifact relates to the self; Process characterizes the decisions, intentionality, and effort by which it is created; System situates creation within its material, collaborative, and contextual conditions.

Research on the self-creation effect illustrates how creating something oneself can lead to stronger object valuation and a more profound sense of ownership - aspects that are often overlooked by traditional frameworks of ownership. Therefore, we draw upon existing frameworks and approaches to produce a framework that is more streamlined for creative contexts.

In their 2003 paper, Pierce et al. define psychological ownership as "that state where an individual feels as though the target of ownership or a piece of that target is 'theirs'." In this paper, we will focus on a narrower definition revolving around creative ownership in which the target of ownership is a creative product or artifact that the individual in question had a role in creating — no matter how small or large.

In the field of psychology, there have been numerous theoretical propositions and empirical studies attempting to explain the formation of psychological ownership. Several scholars have created frameworks based on decades of psychological research that capture key themes that have emerged time and again such as effectance and control of possessions, positive affect, and symbolic meaning and personhood. These frameworks span a range of formulations ranging from Targets-Antecedents-Consequences-Interventions to corrective dual-process models, among others. Some of the major themes found across frameworks include responsibility, accountability, identity, self-efficacy, belongingness, control, self-congruity, psychological closeness, object-knowledge, self-investment, and rights over the object.

Hegel's ideas of ownership stem from the notion that the "will" can be embodied in external entities, and that this embodiment is necessary for one's actualization as a person cannot come to exist without both relation to and differentiation from the external environment. While the specifics of theories vary, the investment of one's self, values, and identity as a means of developing feelings of ownership is a common theme that arises.

One of the most fundamental materialist theories is Locke's labor theory, which posits that "every man has a property in his own person," and thereby goes on to argue that when one mixes their labor with natural resources, the resulting good becomes their property - evoking the embodiment theory of personhood. "Bundle of Rights" views hold ownership as a set of contractual obligations between people in relation to property.

While there are many schools of philosophical thought that could be used to frame a discussion of ownership, two juxtaposing ones that encompass the duality of ownership related values are materialism and idealism. Materialist theories stem from notions of property as control over material entities, going as far as to stipulate that physical, material states are the ultimate determinants of reality, taking precedence over thought, consciousness, and abstract entities. On the contrary, idealism posits that something mental is the ultimate foundation of reality, and idealist theories of property and personhood are concerned with symbolic and mental conceptions of ownership. This dualistic framing captures both the tangible and intangible elements of ownership.

Engineering refers to the use of technical principles, such as mathematics, science, and technical know-how, to realize a design that best meets a given set of expectations, which are typically captured in a requirements specification.

Designing is the process of arriving at a plan, specification, prototype, system, or service—a design. In HCI, this often means designing a user interface and relevant parts of the underlying interactive system.

HCI focuses on people who use an interactive system or are affected by its use. This focus is often called being user-centered or human-centered to contrast it with a focus on the technology itself [423, 604].

Finally, interaction often involves co-adaptation between people and computers [646], meaning that both the user and the system learn and adapt to each other during interactions.

Interaction is, in other words, not a property of the system design or the user but something that emerges when they influence each other.

The development of technology for interactive computing systems has been an important driver behind the widespread adoption of computing we have witnessed in the last 50 years.

In HCI, evaluation refers to the application of some systematic methodology to attribute human-related values to an artifact, prototype, system, or process. Examples of such attributes include performance, experience, safety, and ethical aspects, such as the avoidance of bias or harm.

Programmability lends computers their power as tools. Computer programs can decompose complex activities into sequences of much simpler operations.

A special part of a computing system is the user interface. It is the part that the user can see and utilize to control the computer. Through the user interface, users can provide input and instructions to a computer and receive feedback from it. In short, the user interface enables interaction with a computer.

In multitasking, tasks compete for limited sensory, motor, and central (cognitive) capacities

Visual objects that are unique in their visual primitives attract user's attention.

Interaction is a concept that is fundamental in HCI and specific to this field [357]. Intuitively, it refers to the reciprocal influence between people and an interactive system that takes place through the user interface.

Users continuously adapt their social behavior to compensate for the lack of social cues in computer-mediated communication

Users' performance in providing input to a computer is limited by a speed–accuracy trade-off

A mental model captures how people understand something. For instance, people have vastly different beliefs about how calculators work [598]. These beliefs can explain the errors and the issues they face when using calculators.

Interactive systems are tools that help users achieve their goals.

The remarkable efficiency, flexibility, and scalability of computers as tools boil down to the concept of a programmable machine capable of interpreting computer programs.

Programmability lends computers their power as tools.

A key technical construct in HCI is the user interface. It refers to the parts of an interactive system that the user comes into contact with or that in other ways shape the user's perception of the system.

In HCI, evaluation refers to the application of some systematic methodology to attribute human-related values to an artifact, prototype, system, or process.

A special part of a computing system is the user interface. It is the part that the user can see and utilize to control the computer.

Programmability lends computers their power as tools.

It is an egocentric fallacy to assume that others are like us—to attempt to explain other people by reference to one's own experience.

Agentic Coding is a Trap

The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis

What 4 engineers with 10+ years of experience say about staying relevant in the AI era

Ask HN: What skills are future proof in an AI driven job market?

If most efficiency improvements came from a small handful of scale-dependent innovations, then existing models of the software intelligence explosion may be flawed.

On RE-Bench's five open-ended extension tasks, preserved failure traces in ARA accelerate progress, but can also constrain a capable agent from stepping outside the prior-run box depending on the agent's capabilities.

Tolerable for human readers, these costs become critical when AI agents must understand, reproduce, and extend published work.

We also learned that treating agents as rigid nodes in a state machine doesn't work well. Models get smarter and can solve bigger problems than the box we try to fit them in.

Our early versions of agentic work was only asking Codex to implement the task. That approach proved too limiting. Codex is perfectly capable of creating multiple PRs as well as reading review feedback and addressing it.

When our engineers no longer spend time supervising Codex sessions, the economics of code changes completely. The perceived cost of each change drops because we're no longer investing human effort in driving the implementation itself.

Among some teams at OpenAI, we saw the number of landed PRs increase by 500% in the first three weeks.

Six months ago, while working on an internal productivity tool, our team made a controversial (at the time) decision: we'd build our repo with no human-written code. Every line in our project repository had to be generated by Codex.

Instead of using domain knowledge to prescribe team organization, roles, or workflows, Fugu learns to dynamically assemble agents from a pool and coordinate them through non-obvious but highly efficient collaboration patterns.

He argues that specific algorithmic “cleverness” matters far less than the massive scaling of a few fundamental inputs

we are nearing the “end of the exponential” for AI development

The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession.

In one case [first reported by the Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d?syn-25a6b1a6=1), an Amazon Web Service agent called Kiro purportedly decided the best way to upgrade a particular software service was to delete the whole thing and start over — and was able to do so without asking for human permission

Instead of just answering a user’s questions, the way a chatbot does, agents can take a human user’s instructions and act on them

We’ve seen remarkable adoption since its launch, with over 103,000 agents built and a total of more than 1.1 million agent sessions recorded

Military personnel and Defense Department civilians have used a version of Google Gemini’s [Agent Designer](https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini/enterprise/docs/agent-designer) to create over 100,000 semi-autonomous AI agents in less than five weeks since the tool became available

We built AI into our editor's foundation instead of bolting it on top.

But there’s a critical difference between using agents to accomplish defined objectives and spinning up 20 agents because the dashboard makes you feel like a general commanding an army.

The average employee AI usage was 1.5 hours per week. The average CEO AI usage was less than one hour per week.

The enthusiasm has spawned an entire ecosystem of tools designed to make you feel like you’re running a company with AI agents.

37,000 lines per day. And this was the output.

Two prominent tech leaders, both publicly using the word psychosis. Both framing sleeplessness and obsessive agent usage as a feature of the moment rather than a bug.

It’s feeling like a new form of [AI psychosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis).

Anthropic says it has no way to control or shut down its AI models once they're deployed by the Pentagon

Bun operates its own fork of Zig, and recently achieved a 4x performance improvement on Bun compile after adding 'parallel semantic analysis and multiple codegen units to the llvm backend'.

Putting a leaderboard in place was always going to incentivize much more AI usage.

The rankings, set up by a Meta employee on its intranet using company data, measure how many tokens — the units of data processed by AI models — employees are burning through.

The rankings, set up by a Meta employee on its intranet using company data, measure how many tokens — the units of data processed by AI models — employees are burning through.

Employees at Meta Platforms who want to show off their AI superuser chops are competing on an internal leaderboard for status as a “Session Immortal”— or, even better, “Token Legend.”

Today’s LS guest, Mikhail Parakhin, CTO of Shopify, had another take on the “tasteful tokenmaxxing” - you want to go for depth (e.g. do more serial autoresearch loops) than go for breadth (e.g. solve a problem by kicking off 5, 10, 50, 500 parallel runs of the LLM slot machine). Worth thinking through.

the top conversations we have been hearing from AI leadership (CTOs, VPs, Founders) have all centered around the concept of “Tokenmaxxing” and how leaders want to get their teams using more AI, WITHOUT the downside of incentivizing the kinds of horrendous waste

AI News for 4/21/2026-4/22/2026. We checked 12 subreddits, [544 Twitters](https://twitter.com/i/lists/1585430245762441216) and no further Discords.

Endorsement reversal occurred in fewer than 3 in 1,000 observations.

AI systems currently provide more consistent fraud warnings than lay humans in an identical advisory role.

The AI-generated image of Neukgu had prompted Daejeon city government to issue an emergency text to residents, warning them of a wolf near the intersection.

The most urgent finding this week comes from researchers who demonstrated that the very mechanism enabling agents to use tools - function calling - can be hijacked with alarming reliability.

Nothing in between. A model that arrives at the correct answer through careful reasoning receives the same reward as one that guesses correctly by chance.

They deliver every answer with the same unshakable certainty, whether they're right or guessing.

And it’s not just the US putting chatbots at commanders’ fingertips; China is commissioning similar tools, according to recent [analysis] by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Today’s military personnel might give chatbots a list of potential targets to help decide which to strike first.

The transition from isolated AI models to the aggregated, metered token economy will unlock the twenty-first.

Consider the deep anatomy of an individual AI session to understand how this telemetry actually works in practice.

The smartest companies are no longer just hiring talent; they are purchasing synthetic intelligence by the gigawatt.

The smartest companies are no longer just hiring talent; they are purchasing synthetic intelligence by the gigawatt.

We do not publish AI-generated images, audio, or video as authentic documentation of real events.

Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work.

These standards have governed our editorial work since AI tooling became available.

We don’t publish claims based solely on AI-generated summaries, and reporters may not represent any material as “reviewed” unless they have examined it directly.

Ars Technica is written by humans. Our reporting, analysis, and commentary are human-authored.

We do not publish AI-generated images, audio, or video as authentic documentation of real events

Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research

Our reporting, analysis, and commentary are human-authored

AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity

The company has also had to make major investments in its AI efforts in order to keep up with competitors in the space — earlier this month, it debuted a completely overhauled AI product called Muse Spark.

In truth, nate relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation

Authoritarianism in all its forms depends on people acting against their own interests, in this case seeing the abdication of agency and giving up of rights as something positive, as almost a relief. Let the leader decide for you! Let the leader, who is an agent of divine providence, decide your destiny! Getting people to believe this is one of the main functions of personality cults that depict the leader as infallible.

The LLM took an entirely different route, using a formula that was well known in related parts of math, but which no one had thought to apply to this type of question.

Resolution increases make them more expensive, then efficiency gains reduce costs - a sawtooth pattern.

Will smarter models be increasingly expensive because of greater accuracy or less expensive because they're smarter?

Smaller pieces force the model to pay closer attention to each word, like reading a contract word by word instead of skimming paragraphs.

Then Opus 4.7 shipped & the smarter model became much more expensive. The cause : a new tokenizer

Opus 4.5 costs 67% more than Sonnet. But Opus 4.5 used 76% fewer tokens to reach the same outcome.

When Anthropic launched Opus 4.5 in November 2025, the bigger, more expensive model was actually cheaper to use.

The agent interprets new information and adapts the logic. The engine applies that logic continuously and emits precise updates.

Agents and CDC streams are powerful together because they split the work well.

The fix is not smarter prompts. It is software built to meet agents halfway.