TLDR 2026-05-18

Agents are smarter when they can search the web. But Google doesn't offer an API for web search results... so how are AI companies doing it?

Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API:

👉 Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews, Maps, Local, Shopping, and Knowledge Graph)

👉 Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make.

👉 Used by Perplexity, NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.

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Andy Jassy took the role of Amazon's CEO five years ago. He recently placed a series of expensive bets on AI that are audacious even by Silicon Valley standards. In his time, he has killed projects and cut staff, pleasing Wall Street, and now he has to steer the tech giant through its greatest challenge yet. This article tells the story of Jassy's tenure at Amazon.

SpaceX plans to launch the newest version of its Starship rocket on Tuesday during a launch window that opens at 6:30 PM ET. The flight plan will be similar to previous Starship test launches. The most recent test flight was seven months ago. Starship has undergone major redesigns and is now bigger, more powerful, and a step closer to being fully reusable.

CAR T cell therapy was originally designed to target and wipe out cancer by reprogramming patients' immune cells. It is now being offered to patients in clinical trials for autoimmune conditions. There's still uncertainty about how well the treatment works for autoimmunity and how any benefits might last, as well as what long-term side effects might arise. Another major challenge is that the therapy can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars after accounting for hospital stays, cell engineering, and other expenses.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is designed to study the universe in greater detail than ever before. It is expected to discover a million asteroids, thousands of comets, and billions of stars and galaxies in its first year alone. The facility has begun collecting preliminary images and astronomers are poring over the initial data. Scientists have already been able to make new discoveries with its first images despite the images still not being as sharp as expected and the observatory still requiring a final tuning.

P50 response time tells you almost nothing about performance. The metric that actually matters has to account for recall, grounding rate, re-query rate, and integration overhead. Fast-and-wrong is slower than you think. Read the full breakdown from You.com

Zero is a systems programming language for agents that provides small native tools, explicit effects, predictable memory, and structured compiler output. The language is still experimental and not stable yet, but it is in a stage where users can try it out and provide feedback. Practical examples are available for users to learn the language with.

Agents have gotten really good in the last fifteen months. They can now be used for real work with light supervision. AI can now be used for writing code changes, investigating and fixing bugs, research in large code bases, manual testing, and more. It still isn't suitable for writing public communications, unreviewed code, or testing UIs, but its capabilities are improving quickly.

Many people try to gain employment through the front door: they find a job advertisement, send their resume, and hope that someone on the other side notices them. Most people don't realize there are other entrances into the building. Conversations at parties, warm introductions, cold emails, and visible proof of work are viable alternatives. Sometimes, it's about creating a signal that attracts the exact person who needs it.

The idea that all exponentials eventually become sigmoids might not be necessarily true for AI. There are several examples of exponentials that don't end up becoming sigmoids (or haven't yet), for example, the decline in birth rates or solar power deployment. Things that are currently happening are more likely to continue happening than not. AI is unlikely to stop progressing on all fronts anytime soon.

The more your product succeeds, the more the invoice hurts? Not anymore. Reveal is the embedded analytics SDK with flat pricing, predictable costs, and AI that drives better engagement. See how

SwiftUI & Apple's native SDKs are constraints when it comes to building rich text rendering for long-form chats.

Git has been behind the state of the art for a while now, prompting companies like Meta to develop better in-house systems.

Changes are happening so fast that nobody is noticing the underlying architecture decaying, and people are denying that this is an issue because they are focusing on the wrong metrics.

TLDR is hiring a VP of Marketing to scale growth, pipeline, and brand across 8M+ subscribers, 13 newsletters, and advertisers like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Apply here.

Hooks make agent workflows more dependable by implementing tests, policies, logs, and completion gates as deterministic parts of the workflow.

Waymo's rapid scaling to 400,000 rides per week proved that AV operators might not need Uber at all, so Uber is pivoting to asset ownership to avoid being cut out entirely.

It is becoming apparent that understanding the domain and how it connects to the program is valuable, which is why spec-driven development is now in the spotlight.