Agents Hour

Fable came and went in a week. Shane and Abhi break down the strangest model launch yet — Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model Anthropic said was too capable to release widely, until a US export-control directive made it vanish for everyone.

We cover the whole arc: the launch hype, the pricing that had people spending $1,000 a day, the silent fallbacks to Opus, the system-prompt leak, and the snitch that triggered a 90-minute shutdown. Then a stacked back half — China's open-weight surge, OpenRouter Fusion, loop engineering vs loopcraft, the agent-learning gold rush, OpenAI filing to go public, and Dario's new essay.

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

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Shane and Abhi are in person this week — live from the CodeRabbit office — for a packed AI news rundown.

The big theme: loop engineering. Boris Cherny (head of Claude Code) and Peter Steinberger both landed the same take within days — stop prompting your agents, start designing the loops that prompt them. We walk the whole evolution: the traditional loop, the Ralph loop, /goal, and Claude Code's new dynamic workflows — and debate whether "stop prompting" is real insight or just clickbait.

Plus: Anthropic engineers shipping 8x more code (and the "depressed employees" reply), agentic traffic passing human traffic on the web for the first time, OpenAI's Codex Sites taking aim at Lovable, Cognition's $10M AI Productivity Guarantee and Devin Desktop, Cloudflare acquiring VoidZero, the accelerating shift to Chinese models (Lindy going 100% DeepSeek), Notion disabling Anthropic models over reliability, a big open-model dump (Gemma 4, Magenta RealTime 2, Miso One, Nemotron, Liquid, GLM 5.1, MiniMax M3), funding rounds (Suno, Supabase), Brian Chesky's new AI lab, and whether AI is actually profitable yet.

Recorded live at the CodeRabbit office — thanks to the CodeRabbit team.

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

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WorkOS quietly powers the auth and enterprise layer under OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and a long list of companies building the AI era. So when its founder decides his entire company should learn to code, it's worth asking why.

Michael Grinich joins Shane and Abhi to talk about what "AI-native" actually looks like from the inside — the in-house coding agent his team built instead of buying, the all-day internal hackathons, and the operating principle he now hires for: everybody codes.

He shares how AI is reshaping go-to-market and not just engineering, why he braced for pushback and got the opposite, and the one trait that separates the people who thrive from the people who stall. We close on the thinking behind his Death of UI talk, and where human-computer interaction goes from here.

🔗 MICHAEL

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Anthropic filed to go public. The S-1 lands the same week as a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, a claimed first profitable quarter, and a home listing that takes Anthropic stock as payment.

Opus 4.8 shipped mid-week, and Shane and Abhi give the vibe check: a polish pass over 4.7 more than a step change, still trailing GPT-5.5 on DeepSWE, with GPT-5.6 spotted in Codex logs. The quieter, more interesting release: mid-conversation system messages, steering a model mid-task without breaking the prompt cache.

MiniMax M3 is out, agent-tuned and long-context at a fraction of frontier pricing. NVIDIA used Computex to push AI onto the desktop with Vera, RTX Spark, and a Windows DGX Station that runs trillion-parameter models locally, plus a startup unit that bolts onto your house and pays you for compute.

OpenAI brings Codex to Windows and ships private MCP servers. Claude Code's dynamic workflows get cloned by pi within a day, Devin raises $1B, and the model-vs-harness debate heats up.

Plus continual learning as the next wave, a $500M accidental Claude bill, Corgi's seven-days-a-week firestorm, and a GitHub Star Party pick.

🔗 LINKS

Pope on AI: https://x.com/pontifex/status/2060322763718725798

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Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production.

0:00 Cold open

Shane and Abhi are back with AI news! 

Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. The OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI head said he wants to "get back to R&D" at the LLM frontier. Same week, Greg Brockman posted "the model alone is no longer the product."

Elon Musk announced SpaceX is offering AI compute as a service at significant scale, with Anthropic as the flagship customer. Tom Brown confirmed Anthropic is scaling on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 through June. Anthropic is reportedly paying SpaceX $1.25B a month — a $15B run rate to one vendor.

OpenAI offered $2M in tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity. WorkOS launched auth.md, an open protocol for agents to register for services on the web, with Cloudflare and Firecrawl as launch partners.

The Chinese labs kept pushing. DeepSeek made their 75% discount permanent on V4-Pro. The architecture behind the price: V4's KV cache is 100x smaller, ~3GB VRAM for 1M tokens. Qwen shipped 3.7-Max. MiniMax teased a similar move.

Anthropic shipped self-hosted sandboxes and MCP tunnels for Managed Agents, /workflows in Claude Code that replaces the LLM orchestrator with code, /usage for per-component token attribution, and a first-party security plugin.

Google had a week. Gemini 3.5 Flash launched at 3x input and 6x output the price of 3 Flash — Theo's math shows it costs 2x more to run than 3.1 Pro on similar tasks. Gemini Omni lost a side-by-side to Seedance 2.0. Jack Wotherspoon shipped Antigravity CLI, Philipp Schmid debuted Managed Agents in the Gemini API, and Google open-sourced Agent Executor.

Cursor shipped Composer 2.5 and published CursorBench. Datacurve released DeepSWE as a harder agentic coding benchmark.

Supply-chain attacks kept rolling: Mini Shai-Hulud hit antv, TrapDoor crypto stealers spread across npm/PyPI/Crates.io, Megalodon injected 5,718 commits into 5,561 GitHub repos in six hours, and GitHub itself disclosed unauthorized access to its internal repositories. Cloudflare published their experience running Anthropic's Mythos against 50 of their own repos.

The MCP 2026-07-28 RC is stateless. ElevenLabs launched Music v2 and Speech Engine. Runway shipped Aleph 2.0. Accenture laid off 11,000 in an $865M AI restructuring. Exa raised $250M at $2.2B. OpenRouter raised $113M.

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WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production.

00:00 — Intro

Anthropic acquired Stainless, the SDK and MCP platform behind every Anthropic SDK since their earliest API days. The Information pegged the deal at $300M+.

Starting June 15, paid Claude plans get a monthly credit for programmatic usage covering the Claude Agent SDK, claude -p, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party apps built on the Agent SDK. Theo from t3.gg called the change a personal burn after wrapping the Agent SDK in T3 Code. Anthropic followed with a 50% increase to Claude Code weekly limits through July 13 and Fast mode for Claude Opus 4.7 in research preview.

Claude for Small Business launched as a productized SMB offering with templates for payroll planning, end-of-month accounting, HubSpot, and marketing campaigns. ChatGPT countered the same week with a personal finance preview for U.S. Pro users that connects directly to financial accounts.

Notion shipped its Developer Platform: the ntn CLI, Workers that run code on Notion's infrastructure, Database sync, Agent tools, and an SDK for using Notion agents in external systems. Notion is now directly addressable by coding agents.

CodeRabbit launched Project Atlas as the first AI-native code review interface. Colin Hacks shipped Pullfrog the same week as an open-source GitHub Actions alternative at 7¢ a run. The cloud-coding-agent category kept moving: Cursor's cloud agents now run in fully configured dev environments, Cursor landed in Microsoft Teams, OpenAI brought Codex to the ChatGPT mobile app, and Linear shipped Code Intelligence.

Cognition's Devin reached a $445M run rate with usage doubling every eight weeks. The TanStack supply-chain attack, now being called a mini Shai-Hulud, expanded across the npm ecosystem and forced affected teams into full secret rotation. Aaron Levie called forward-deployed engineering one of the most in-demand jobs in tech, the same week Google reportedly hired hundreds of FDEs.

Also covered: the Musk vs OpenAI verdict, Mercury's agent-birthing UI, Peter Steinberger's $1.3M-a-month token spend, OpenClaw on the Codex harness, Vapi's $50M Series B, Thinking Machines' first technical reveal, MCP spec deprecating Sampling/Logging/Roots, David Cramer on vendor-specific chatbots, and quick hits on Replit, Cua, OpenAI Daybreak, Files SDK, Lovable, Grok Build, Dia, CopilotKit, VS Code, Lighthouse Attention, and Bun's Rust rewrite.

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📚 MASTRA RESOURCES

WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production.

00:00 — Intro

Evan Marshall, CTO of Ito, joins Agents Hour to argue that the bottleneck of code development has moved to QA — and the tools to automate it don't exist yet.

Ito is a code review tool that runs your code. It intercepts every PR, spins up the impacted user flows in an isolated sandbox, and posts videos, screenshots, and run logs back to the GitHub timeline as proof. The team is fourteen people, mostly engineers. Evan has been a professional programmer for fifteen years and previously worked at Demox Labs and Rev.

With model gains flattening after Opus 4.5, the harness around the model is where value gets created.

Evan shares details of Ito's "carriage" — a workflow of swarmed agents inside deterministic boundaries, designed so the system benefits from agents getting smarter without compounding probabilistic errors. He explains why bigger organizations aren't hitting the 10x code velocity the X timeline promises, and what the validation layer needs to look like before they can.

🔗 EVAN MARSHALL

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0:00 Cold open: It's the harness

Shane and Abhi bring you a new batch of AI news.

Anthropic strikes a compute deal with SpaceX. The same day, they double Claude Code's rate limits and raise API rate limits for Opus.

Corgi launches AI Coverage — insurance for when your AI messes up — plus a $160M Series B.

Jarred Sumner says Robobun is the top contributor to Bun, then quietly tries rewriting Bun in Rust. It passes 99.8% of the test suite.

OpenAI and Anthropic both announce vertically integrated AI services companies. OpenAI launches the Deployment Company, a consortium of 19 investment firms and SIs. Anthropic teams up with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs on a parallel firm for the mid-market.

Anthropic ships financial services agent templates, brings Claude Platform to AWS as GA, and launches Dreaming in Managed Agents — offline memory consolidation Anthropic calls REM sleep for your agent.

Terminal-Bench 2.1 ships with a public audit. WorkOS releases Horizon, a self-driving codebase. Shopify releases River, an agent that lives in Slack and is available only in public channels.

Coinbase cuts 14%. Brian Armstrong attributes it to market plus AI. Elad Gil's framing of the AI productivity throughline gets co-signed by Andreessen. Braintrust confirms a breach.

Thariq says HTML is the new Markdown. Karpathy co-signs.

Ramp Labs publishes how they used Prime-RL post-training to build a spreadsheets agent faster than Opus and almost as fast as Haiku 4.5.

OpenAI's big week: GPT-Realtime 2, Codex in Chrome, ChatGPT in Excel and Google Sheets. Google's quiet week: Gemini 3.1 flash-lite, Gemma 4 up to 3x faster, File Search multi-modal. ERNIE 5.1 approaches SOTA at ~6% of the cost.

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

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Shane and Abhi are in person at the CodeRabbit studio, and AISI just quietly torched one of Anthropic's loudest narratives. AISI confirmed GPT-5.5 is the second model to complete a multi-step cyber attack simulation end-to-end. The first was Mythos.

Vasuman posts an essay on why building real agents is harder than the hype suggests.

In this episode, Shane and Abhi sit down with Sherwood Callaway, founder of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform designed for engineering teams that move fast.

Sherwood shares his journey from building infrastructure and observability teams at Brex to realizing that modern development tools are moving at light speed, while observability tooling hasn't kept pace. While AI agents can ship thousands of lines of code per day, teams are still debugging production with the same tools they've been using for years: Datadog, Sentry, manual dashboards, and manual incident triage.

Sazabi takes a radically different approach to observability centered on three core principles:

1. Less is More — Debugging an incident is as simple as asking a question. "Why is production down?" The best UI for observability is chat.

In this conversation, we dive into the gap between modern development and modern observability, and why the idea that “logs are all you need” is both controversial and, in Sherwood's view, correct. We also explore how Sazabi uses AI agents for root cause analysis (RCA), the philosophy behind simplifying observability for all engineers, and the company’s current status.

AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream hosted by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Airing Mondays at 12PM Pacific on YouTube and X, the show covers breaking AI news, agent development techniques, and features interviews with industry experts building AI applications today.

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