Braid

Mostly-work, malicious npm, and one engineer replacing a law firm


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A six-month overview from Simon Willison anchors the day: coding agents crossed from often-work to mostly-work in November, and laptop-class models started outrunning expectations. Then a fresh npm supply-chain attack — 637 malicious versions in 22 minutes — that for the first time specifically hijacks Claude Code and Codex agent hooks for persistence. Plus a Number 10 talk on replacing a one-and-a-half-million-pound law-firm contract with one embedded engineer, an editor-layer company renting xAI's Colossus 2, Ethan Mollick on insourcing, the full GenMedia pipeline running for a dollar a book, Daniel Griesser's pi-config skill repo, and two obituaries that hit the Unix world in the same week.

  • Simon Willison's last-six-months-in-LLMs PyCon lightning talk
  • Mini Shai-Hulud strikes again — 317 npm packages and your agent hooks
  • Prime Intellect's General-Agent — synthetic RL environments
  • Eoin Mulgrew on Number 10's insurgent technical unit
  • Cursor's Compose 2.5 reportedly trained on xAI's Colossus 2
  • Ethan Mollick on insourcing via hiring
  • Guillaume Vernade's full GenMedia pipeline at a dollar a book
  • Daniel Griesser's pi-config — Plan, handoff, and subagent skills
  • Peter Neumann (1932–2026)
  • Peter Salus (1938–2026)
  • Magnifica humanitas confirmed for May 25
  • ...more
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    BraidBy Lenar Kess · Damra Vol