TLDR 2026-11-06

Cognition Studied How Global 1000 Engineering Teams Use Cloud Agents (Sponsor)

Cognition analyzed five months of production data from Global 1000 engineering teams running Devin cloud agents and found that writing code accounted for 23% of the productive engineering hours. The other 77% came from planning, testing, security, and deployment. Learn why cost per session fell as usage grew, where enterprises point agent spend, and which use cases return the most engineering hours per session.

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Big Tech & Startups

Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5 Trillion Valuation (7 minute read)

Major investors planning to participate in Anthropic's IPO, expected to launch the week before Thanksgiving, say the expected $1.5 trillion valuation will likely need to come down. The AI lab was expected to raise up to $100 billion, but is now predicted to raise around $80 billion, leaving it with a valuation closer to $1 trillion. Investors have revolted against AI bets this week as the midterm elections have put several AI skeptics in power, potentially slowing data center development in the US. Anthropic has avoided committing to specific plans for its IPO to maintain optionality.

The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America's AI Boom (11 minute read)

Recent election results show that voters are overwhelmingly against the massive build-out of compute capacity that Silicon Valley is pushing. This could rein in AI's rapid growth and become a big problem for the tech companies developing the technology, and could have effects on the wider US economy. Stalling construction could result in dire consequences for tech companies that were already struggling to secure enough compute.

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Science & Futuristic Technology

Blue Origin says it is building a higher-performing rocket engine at 1/4 the cost (2 minute read)

Blue Origin has announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket that reduce the cost of manufacturing the vehicle and expand its capacity for payload delivery. The company aims to eventually launch the vehicle more than 1,000 times a year. It has started test firing a new engine that will eventually replace the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of New Glenn. The company is also developing a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the rocket to give it an extra kick.

They Created a Cell That's Almost Alive. What to Do With It Now? (8 minute read)

A SpudCell is an artificial cell created from lifeless ingredients that can grow, copy its DNA, divide in two, and start its cell cycle all over again. It is still far from a self-sustaining cell that any scientist could manufacture from prepared ingredients, but the technology could eventually make it easier to produce medicines, foods, and other items that could not otherwise be produced with ordinary biology. The researchers working on SpudCell hope that it will eventually be a platform for biotechnology that will allow a simple cell to be engineered in scores of useful ways. SpudCell could potentially be misused, so its researchers are taking security seriously from the start - its DNA and proteins are engineered so that it can only survive on an exotic diet of chemicals not found in nature.

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Programming, Design & Data Science

A Pile of MCP Connectors Is Not A Context Engine (Sponsor)

Your agents have MCP access to Slack, Jira and GitHub. Your engineers still babysit them. Read why connectors alone fall short, and how using a real context engine can make the same coding task 83% faster and 60% cheaper.

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Inside GitHub's new Git storage architecture (21 minute read)

GitHub's new Git storage architecture is capable of handling thousands of writes per second with reads that scale on demand. It can support 5,000 concurrent agents working on a repository while serving read traffic with consistently low latency. The new architecture is designed to support agentic development for hundreds of millions of developers. This post walks through the requirements behind the design of the new architecture and explores two of its components.

Meet *sshole, the vulnerability that lets hackers SSH into Linux devices (3 minute read)

*sshole is a vulnerability in Linux that allows attackers to log in via SSH without knowing the password. The vulnerability exists in systems using OpenSSH with musl without pluggable authentication modules. Despite the prerequisites, the vulnerabilities likely threaten a large number of systems. It is still unclear where the vulnerability resides and what other packages may be vulnerable.

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Miscellaneous

The Making of Dario Amodei (20 minute read)

At the heart of Dario Amodei's worldview are two interwoven philosophies: rationalism, which aims to apply dispassionate thinking to the world, and effective altruism, which seeks to maximize social good with mathematical precision. These schools of thought form the foundation for Anthropic. As the company has grown, Amodei's views have become increasingly prominent. This article takes a look at how Anthropic's chief executive's thinking on AI was shaped.

The Hackintosh Reborn... with AI (3 minute read)

A 'Hackintosh' is a non-Apple computer running macOS. The Hackintosh community started fading away after Apple released its first ARM-based Mac and discontinued support for x86 versions of macOS. However, the rise of AI has revived activity in the space, and there has been an explosion in development, activity, and success in the past few weeks. This post lists a few recent developments, including macOS 27 running on a Snapdragon laptop, iOS 17 running on the Nintendo Switch OLED, and macOS 27.2 Beta on an ARM SBC RK3588 with Mali drivers.

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Quick Links

Is your documentation ready for AI agents? (Sponsor)

When an agent can't use your docs, developers don't get an error. They reach for a competitor. Find out where you stand across Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT. Score your docs.

Getting Data to Grow in a Dish (30 minute read)

This essay looks at what it takes to build a physical platform capable of performing biological experiments, measuring their outcomes reliably, and generating evidence at the scale AI requires.

A database is a store for global variables (7 minute read)

Two pieces of common software engineering dogma - avoid global variables and use a database for state - are partially inconsistent.

How Musk Plans to Shake Up the US Wireless Industry (9 minute read)

Elon Musk wants to combine SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network with mobile antennas, fiber connections, and other ground infrastructure, so that regular smartphones can seamlessly tap into signals from both Earth and space.

Tool overload got your head spinning? (Sponsor)

Tech stack complexity is out of control, and the last thing you need is a bigger ‘stack'. Microsoft Azure gives you a unified view of applications, cloud resources, and AI—so you can ship more software with less open tabs. Simplify with Azure

The Exploit Was the Bottleneck (24 minute read)

The average time from disclosure to attack has been falling for some time, but AI has changed who can operate inside that window, and how fast known bugs get weaponized.

I wish tech companies knew more about me (4 minute read)

Tech companies track, store, and sell a lot of information - they should use it to make the user experience better.

100x more programmers (17 minute read)

There will be 100 times more programmers in the next few years, but most of them won't call themselves programmers.

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Dan Ni & Di Wu

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Anthropic IPO doubts 📉, datacenter bans 🛑, GitHub's new storage 👨‍💻