GPT-6 Astra is finally here, and it changes what a model launch even looks like.

Shane and Abhi open on the trailer for "Artificial" (Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, in theaters Christmas), then get into the launch everyone's talking about: Astra's computer-use leap. This isn't just a coding model. It'll drive Blender, CAD, Notion, even Microsoft Paint, pulling a whole new class of technical-but-not-coding users into the fold. Abhi's been daily-driving it as a genuinely great collaborator; Shane's more mixed on the raw coding.

Then the benchmark wars: ARC-AGI-3 leaps from 7.8% to 98.6% in one drop, the AI-2027 curve suddenly holds, and Astra even tops Vending-Bench while being "more ethical" than Claude. Anthropic rushed Fable 5.1 out the door on September 1st, and Astra promptly sucked the oxygen out of the room. All this progress reignites the "should we pause AI?" debate, with Bernie Sanders in all caps, Austen and Dwarkesh going back and forth, and the EU deciding ChatGPT is a search engine. Plus OpenAI's agents crack the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem (with a "significantly more capable than Astra" tease), Cognition raises $2B at $48B, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Qwen3.8-Max tops Code Arena, Claude "open sources" Commerce Agents, Runway Solaris, and TimesFM-3.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 READ MORE

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

"Code is almost like the sawdust of the conversation."

Charlie Holtz, co-founder and CEO of Conductor (YC S24), returns to Agents Hour to show how far coding agents have come in just a few months. Conductor started as a Mac app for running a handful of Claude Code agents in parallel. Now it's fully cloud-native and multiplayer! 

According to Charlie, once Fable-class models could run for hours or days, keeping agents chained to your laptop stopped making sense.

Charlie gives a live demo of what he thinks everyone in cloud is overlooking: multiplayer. See every teammate's agents running in real time, jump into a workspace and steer an agent together, hand off a whole session with one keystroke, and watch agents spin up their own workspaces through Conductor's API. Along the way, Shane and Abhi dig into the ideas underneath it: code as a disposable byproduct of the prompt, the Figma-style collaboration unlock, why today's models aren't trained for multi-person conversations, and why Conductor built a native iOS app instead of just living in Slack.

Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays at 12 PM Pacific.

📚 ABOUT CONDUCTOR

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

Someone became worth $2.5 billion in a week, and that's just the warm-up. Shane and Abhi open on the drama of the week: OpenAI cutting off Cursor after its acquisition by SpaceX, telling the team direct access to its models ends November 12th over "trust." Cursor's Michael Truell waves it off as 5% of traffic, Anthropic jumps in to say it would never do such a thing, and Amjad reminds everyone about Windsurf. It's a Game of Thrones, and meanwhile China is making moves.

What if agents and workflows aren't two different things — but the same thing?

Abhi sits down with Tony Kovanen, Mastra's founding engineer, live in London, to explore the ideas behind Mastra's design. Tony co-created Next.js and was a core team member of Socket.IO before joining Mastra as employee number one, and here he explains why, inside Mastra, an agent is really just a workflow that loops.

You'll learn why workflows first mattered when the models weren't good enough, why they're back as tasks get longer and more complex, and the three distinct aspects of durability — human-in-the-loop that can wait a week for a reply, resuming a three-day agent run after a crash, and replaying a stream from the beginning. Tony makes the case that durable-by-default isn't free, walks through how Mastra compiles workflows into a JSON step graph run by an interpreter, and demos a dynamic workflow he built that week in London: point it at a codebase, and ten agents fan out in parallel to summarize every file and roll it up — so it never misses a file and never poisons its context.

Recorded live in London.

📚 ABOUT TONY

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

A shorter but juicy one. Shane and Abhi open on the debate everyone's having — do you want to use your agent to reach into someone else's tool, or do you want that tool to build the best agent and meet you where you already are? Then the week's biggest mystery: a stealth model called 0x-alpha that appeared on OpenRouter beating Fable and Sol on coding, with a wild one-hundred-trillion-tokens-a-day capacity that had everyone convinced it was a secret Google model — until someone made the server name itself, and it turned out to be Z.ai.

From there: Qwen breaks the size curve with a 27B model that outranks Opus 4.8 on the agentic index and runs on your own hardware, open-weight tokens cross 62% on Vercel's AI gateway, and Salesforce ships Slack Code so humans and agents can work in the same channel. Plus the case that legal is AI's breakout use case — Harvey trained its own model, Tenet, on a Kimi K3 base, and legal is the fastest-growing Codex adopter, up 108x since February. In the quick hits: agents now burn 5x the tokens humans do, and Tobi Lütke vibe-codes a Git-at-scale binary over a weekend.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 READ MORE

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

What does it actually take to run AI agents reliably in production? Hendrix Liu, co-founder of Respan (formerly Keywords AI, YC W24), joins Shane and Abhi to break it down.

Respan is a one-stop LLM engineering platform — an AI gateway, observability, evals, and prompt optimization in one place — used by teams like AlphaSense, Retell AI, DataCurve, and Mem0. Hendrix shares the three failure modes every agent team runs into (silent failures, reliability outages, and runaway cost), and the techniques to catch each one: fallback routing across 1,000+ models when a provider goes down, online evals that flag hallucinations before a customer does, and spend limits at the per-key, per-model, and per-customer level.

You'll also hear the counterintuitive origin story — Respan started as a model router in 2023, years before routing was cool, then pivoted to observability when nobody wanted another black box — plus a live demo of their Scratch-style evaluators, an honest take on build vs. buy for the LLM stack, and why most teams chasing an eval "certification" are really just after a compliance sticker.

Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 ABOUT RESPAN

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

Money is moving, models are dropping, and GitHub's status page looks like a Christmas tree. Shane and Abhi open on the week's most-shared joke — the SF founder who realized his best friend was "emotionally attached to a cron job" — then get into Anthropic watermarking every bit of Claude's output to comply with the EU AI Act, and the reasoning-leak vulnerability that let researchers pull hidden thinking tokens out of frontier models.

Then a wave of new models: Grok 4.6 lands right in the conversation with GPT-5.6 and Fable (and Elon is already teasing 4.7), GLM 5.3 pushes near-frontier for cyber defense, and Qwen ships an open-weights 27B you can actually run on your own hardware. On the money side: Stripe reportedly acquiring OpenRouter for $7B, Dynatrace buying Arize, CodeRabbit's $143M Series C (with an all-time-great Silicon Valley parody video), and Lovable raising $400M at $13.3B. Plus DeepSeek's new harness, Sol running ultra-fast on Cerebras, and the code-hosting land grab as Cursor Origin and Netlify both become Git hosts while GitHub keeps going down.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 READ MORE

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

Git wasn't built for AI agents — so Ben Warren's team rebuilt the file system from scratch.

Ben Warren, co-founder and CTO of Mesa (YC S24), joins Shane and Abhi to explain why the file system is the missing primitive for AI agents, and how Mesa — a versioned, POSIX-compatible file system with Git-style branching — lets you run massively parallel agents without the pain of Git.

You'll learn why cloning a whole repo before an agent can do thirty seconds of work is a waste, why Git's model (large-file limits, painful conflicts, full clones) breaks down for agents, and how Mesa's lazy materialization pulls only the data an agent actually touches — like iCloud or Dropbox for your agents' workspace. Ben walks through a live "CFO command center" demo where three parallel Claude agents each branch the file system, swap a vendor across a data room, and hand back diffs to compare and merge.

Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 ABOUT MESA

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

An AI agent hacked a gym — and that's not even the biggest story of the week. Shane and Abhi open on Australia's first known autonomous AI cyberattack, where a Melbourne man's OpenClaw agent found a hole in a gym's booking API and canceled a stranger's reservation to move him up the waitlist. Nobody asked it to.

From there: OpenAI's new Agent Plugins standard (built on Anthropic's own skills and MCP), the "AI employee" era with Lindy and Grok Bot, Meta opening the weights on Muse Glimmer, and OpenAI shipping GPT-5.6-Cyber while quietly postponing Astra after it hit "Critical" on cyber. Plus a run of acquisitions (Smithery to Arcade, ElectricSQL to Neon at Databricks, and Manus getting un-acquired by Meta), NVIDIA turning compute into a $500B asset class, and Anthropic signing a $9.1B, 20-year compute deal with a Bitcoin miner. In the quick hits: Claude proved more than 67% of the Riemann zeros lie on the line, the inside story of how OpenAI's agents used a JFrog artifact registry to coordinate a hacking spree, Unsloth Desktop, Sonnet 5's permanent price cut, Spotify's Xirp, Stagehand v4, and Harvey open-sourcing a synthetic law firm.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 READ MORE

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

Isabelle Ilyia, co-founder and CTO of Cedar (YC W25), joins Shane and Abhi to demo Cedar Copilot — the AI-native "Superhuman for sales," built on Mastra from day one.

Cedar started as an open-source framework for agentic frontends. Isabelle walks through the pivot: the same technology, verticalized for the messiest part of sales — the stretch from first demo to closed deal. She gives a live tour of a pipeline where agents manage every deal, extract a sales-and-product knowledge base straight from your calls, generate custom one-pagers and per-prospect decks, and run a full AI-native email client. Then the technical side — how it's built on Mastra primitives, where MCP and human-in-the-loop fit, and a multi-threading agent that spots single-threaded deals, figures out who to reach next, and drafts the intro.

Whether you're a founder running your own sales or an AE drowning in pipeline, it's a concrete look at what agent-native go-to-market software actually looks like.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific.

📚 ABOUT CEDAR

📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA?

⏱️ CHAPTERS