TLDR 2026-09-14

Orkes Shift '26 is one day on running agentic systems in production: durable execution, retries, distributed failures, and human approvals. October 15, Convene Union Square, San Francisco. Early bird pricing ends soon and capacity is limited.The agenda:

• “Rebuilding a Monolith: Choreography to Orchestration”
• “Designing a Focused Agent Runtime on Conductor”
• “Stop Babysitting Your AI Coding Agents”
• Speakers from LinkedIn, Bumble, and the Orkes founders, plus a fireside and happy hour

Conductor runs 1B+ executions a day at Netflix, Tesla, and LinkedIn.Register here →

Anthropic's CEO recently released a 3,800-word essay calling for a global slowdown of AI development. He said that while the technology offers many benefits, it is advancing too quickly for researchers to continue safely. AI leaders are preparing for a day when an AI system can grow more advanced without the aid of human researchers. Some researchers believe that achieving recursive self-improvement will lead to AI systems spinning out of control.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that the company will not be going public this year. He said it would be an ill-advised moment to go public due to current safety concerns. OpenAI had hired bankers and lawyers with the goal of going public this year. The company is now leaning toward 2027 due to the volatility of tech stocks and its own financial challenges.

The push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics. The goals of AI companies and the mathematical community are severely misaligned. This is a symptom of broader alignment issues that impact other scientific and creative professions, as well as the whole of society.

Construction is labor-intensive. There has, unsurprisingly, long been interest in automating the process to reduce the amount of labor required. However, automation has only been successful in tasks that can be done off-site in factories and on-site tasks that are extremely factory-like. Almost nothing outside of these two categories has succeeded.

Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on Sep 23 to see how leading teams save time and tokens by giving their agents a context layer.

Forward-deployed engineers have the hottest job in AI right now. While labs, startups, and PE firms are all hiring engineers to sit inside their customers' operations and solve their problems, almost none of them agree on what those engineers are supposed to accomplish. This article looks at what works and what fails and tries to predict where the industry is heading. It covers misunderstandings about the role, its history, what the goal of the role is, and more.

Large language models are able to write almost perfectly correct code. It is pretty straightforward to get a model to generate code and then let that code be checked by hidden tests. Checking the sloppiness of this code often requires human intuition and time, and is an extremely difficult task in general. This post illustrates why this is by going through possible ways of measuring slop.

The company behind Roblox announced several new features at its annual Roblox Developer Conference, including new game-creation tools, expanded NPC capabilities, and the ability to make games available across platforms. The company is also launching a dedicated card and wallet for creators. Roblox is rolling out its generative AI game creation feature more broadly to Serbia and Singapore. It is also gaining desktop access, and later this year, it will get a new prompt-based scene-generating feature.

While AI has the potential to produce a long line of technological miracles, like many technologies before it, it brings risk. These risks include losing control of AI systems, the misuse of the technology for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom spurred by commercial incentives makes these risks more acute. Anthropic's CEO has called for the industry to prioritize caution over speed and prudence over profit. Addressing these risks will require pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.

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Most prompts are bad because people only add to them over time rather than removing unnecessary instructions.

The future will see more software, more people making it, and none of them typing.

The speed of the developer experience will matter a lot more when generating tokens stops becoming the bottleneck.

Big prompts are brittle and hard to debug and evaluate, but they are the best choice in some cases.

Humans who want to use AI for interpersonal interactions will need to work hard to compensate for the loss of trust it engenders.

Tesla recently made a post that simply wrote, 'Go for launch,' with a graphic showing a '10.1' date.