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We've been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B, but we're excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C.The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that.The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when something broke. While this was painful for developers, it worked since they could fill in missing context in their heads.However, agents don't have that luxury. Now in this new era of agents, everything has to be tighter.They need a place to write code, run it, inspect the output, change the environment, debug failures, and try again. Fast iteration and feedback loops with all the necessary context are crucial for agents to operate properly. Furthermore, sandboxes are a clear representation of this shift as agents can easily spin up isolated environments. This programmatic infra even extends to research:Two years ago, we were one of the first to cover Modal with CEO Erik Bernhardsson and Alessio designed our favorite LS thumbnail of all time:At the time, Modal was just a teeny little company with a $17M Series A.Today, fresh off their $355M Series C, Modal is one of the clearest examples of the agent cloud future being built in real time: a cloud platform moving past traditional web app assumptions toward the workloads AI actually creates such as elastic inference, sandboxes, GPU burst, post-training, background agents, and infrastructure that agents themselves can operate.In this episode, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna joins swyx and Vibhu to unpack why AI applications don't fit traditional cloud assumptions, why Kubernetes was never designed for bursty compute-heavy workloads, and why Modal is now shifting from developer experience to agent experience.We go deep on Modal's AI infra stack: serverless functions, decorator-based infrastructure, elastic inference for custom models, GPU snapshotting, DeFlash, speculative decoding, Auto Endpoints, sandboxes, persistent storage, networked containers, private IPv6, RDMA, multi-node training, and Modal's capacity pool across 17 cloud providers. Akshat also explains why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes, why production agents need hard guardrails, why observability may matter more than reading code, and why AI has made infrastructure exciting again.We discuss:* Why Kubernetes wasn't built for bursty AI workloads* How Modal started as a better runtime before becoming an AI cloud* Why Modal added GPUs before ChatGPT* The shift from developer experience to agent experience* Why observability matters when agents are writing the code* Elastic inference for custom models across audio, video, robotics, and comp bio* GPU snapshotting, cold starts, and why inference workloads are so bursty* Why RL rollouts can require 100,000 sandboxes* DeFlash, speculative decoding, and frontier-level inference performance* Auto Endpoints and making optimized inference easier to deploy* What Modal adds beyond vLLM, SGLang, and raw GPU rental* Modal's 17-cloud capacity pool and supercloud strategy* Networked sandboxes, sidecars, private IPv6, and RDMA* Serverless multi-node training for post-training and research workloads* Auto-research, model-guided sweeps, and agents launching GPU experiments* Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers* Why production agents need specialized sandboxes and hard guardrails* Modal's take on managed agents, CI, Gitpod/Ona, Python, TypeScript, and Modal BenchAkshat Bubna* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshat-bubna-188885103* X: https://x.com/akshat_bModal* Website: https://modal.comTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:39 Modal's origin and why Kubernetes wasn't enough00:04:32 Developer Experience → Agent Experience00:06:21 Modal's AI cloud primitives00:09:14 Sandboxes, agent loops, and proto-Cognition00:12:12 Elastic inference, GPU snapshotting, and 100,000 sandboxes00:15:24 DeFlash, speculative decoding, and Auto Endpoints00:19:59 Production-grade inference beyond raw GPUs00:22:00 Background agents, Ramp Inspect, and the agent lifecycle00:24:08 Modal's 17-cloud supercloud strategy00:26:40 Networked sandboxes, private IPv6, and RDMA00:32:48 Multi-node training, post-training, and auto research00:37:36 Compute strategy, capacity planning, and batch tiers00:40:55 Open models, real-time AI, and production agent infra00:43:06 Hard guardrails, managed agents, and specialized sandboxes00:46:06 Why AI made infrastructure exciting again00:48:30 Model APIs, differentiated products, and agentic video00:51:50 CI, coding-agent infra, SDKs, and Modal Bench00:57:28 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptIntroduction: Modal, Series C, and the Art PartySwyx [00:00:00]: We're here with Akshat, CTO of Modal, together with Vibhu. Congrats on your Series C.Akshat [00:00:10]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:11]: Your party yesterday was amazing.Akshat [00:00:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:00:15]: From all the photos and all the swag.Akshat [00:00:17]: We had a bunch of art installations, which was fun, seeing, like, our products on pedestals next to, like, Rodin.Swyx [00:00:25]: Very nice. Very nice. When you started, it was not the GPU inference company. Maybe it was in your mind. Take us back to the origin story.Modal's Origin: A New Runtime Beyond KubernetesAkshat [00:00:39]: I first met Eric, who's the CEO, through an investor. Back then Eric was already thinking about building, a new runtime, and he got there thinking through why are workflow orchestration products so hard to use. It's because you have to run them on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and, custom images,Swyx [00:01:03]: YeahAkshat [00:01:03]: It has a terrible developer experience.Swyx [00:01:05]: And I'll, I'll interjectAkshat [00:01:06]: YeahSwyx [00:01:07]: For listeners, who are new, we interviewed Eric two years ago, and there's a bit more of the story there from Spotify and all those things.Swyx [00:01:14]: And I came across Eric through Data Council because he did that talk on the serverless container stack that you guys did, which was like, that was my first like, “Okay, I need to take Modal very seriously” moment.Akshat [00:01:26]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:26]: But it was still very unclear, like, do I need all this for just my data pipelines?Akshat [00:01:33]: Yeah. initially what we were thinking about was if we build a better runtime, it's a very useful primitive in itself. It's There's a lot of things that, get solved by serverless functions, like you can do, ETL stuff, you can do job queues, you can do all this, like, bursty processing, which it turns out every company had needs for. but then we also were thinking about this as like, this is a primitive that we can build a whole collection of products on, which are very verticalized. So perhaps data engineering would've been the first one, but we were thinking about inference. Back then it was more classical inference, like computer vision stuff and running XGBoosts and whatnot. But we added GPUs to the product a year before ChatGPT came out.From Serverless Containers to GPU WorkloadsSwyx [00:02:19]: Nice.Akshat [00:02:19]: We just didn't think it would be that big of a deal.Swyx [00:02:22]: Yeah, just like add A100.Vibhu [00:02:23]: Was there any, like, early key problem that really sparked off why you built it?Akshat [00:02:28]: Yeah. Primarily it's just, none of the tooling that was out there was built for, one, a really great developer experience, and also there's a general trend of, a lot of the workloads that we were seeing were very. I wish there was a better word for it, but compute-heavy. Like, they need, one, like, need a lot more resources, so you need to burst up and down a lot, versus like Kubernetes designed for, like, slow scaling and, more for, like, web server use cases. And also there's just a lot more specialization in, like, what kinds of environments these workloads run in. Like, we had sometimes they need accelerators, sometimes they need different kinds of images, and this is just like a consistent thing that we saw across a lot of companies. That would be the next step.Software-Defined Infrastructure and Decorator-Based DXSwyx [00:03:13]: Yeah. Yeah. Be nice. I don't know how much this factored into the early story, but I wrote a post when I was at Temporal about infrastructure, software-defined infrastructure or something like that.Akshat [00:03:22]: Yeah, the self-provisioningSwyx [00:03:23]: Self-provisioning.Akshat [00:03:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:24]: Yeah. I can't even remember my own post.Swyx [00:03:26]: And then you put me on the landing page.Akshat [00:03:28]: Yeah. We really like, the term and so we stole it.Swyx [00:03:32]: Because you had the insight that everything can just be in decorators co-located with the code, right?Akshat [00:03:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:03:37]: Was that a big part of the originalAkshat [00:03:39]: YesSwyx [00:03:39]: Story or it was just like a DX layer?Akshat [00:03:41]: That was, really important because we really didn't want people to spend, so much time, writing YAML, and it seemed like you could really condense the surface area of what you're doing, put it in code so you can operate on it just like you operate on other code, and like build stuff that's more expressive and dynamic. and so yeah, that was always a very important part.Swyx [00:04:04]: Then the pushback is this is a DSL.Akshat [00:04:07]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:07]: It's you're closed source. I am locked into Modal.Akshat [00:04:11]: Yeah. We never really got pushback for that because the nice thing about Modal is you can bring whatever code you have, and sure, the DSL is at the configuration layer for, what hardware you're using, how you're scaling things up, but you still own the code.Akshat [00:04:27]: And that's, that's been an important, part of our story, even as we do inference now.Swyx [00:04:32]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:04:32]: How much of do you think still stays the same today? Like if you were to build something today, DevX very important, but I feel like, a lot of this has been changed with just hook it up to an agent, have Claude Code, have Codex implement a tool. there's very agent native primitives that are different than if I'm doing this myself, right?Developer Experience → Agent ExperienceAkshat [00:04:54]: We've changed our SDK team to think about agent experience instead of, developer experience and we think that the same benefits that apply for DX also apply for AX, which is why would you have an agent read through hundreds of Kubernetes files and like write YAML that's not even typed when it can make a couple of changes in a decorator and it gets this self-provisioning runtime of, being able to see its changes live in action? yeah, it just seems from the customers we talk to, they find Modal is much faster for agents to use versus operating on a different substrate.Swyx [00:05:34]: Yeah, because like you, again, you co-locate the infrastructure requirements to the code that runs it.Akshat [00:05:38]: Yeah.Swyx [00:05:38]: Well, the negative thesis now is that nobody's looking at their code anymore, so there's no point.Akshat [00:05:44]: Yeah, people aren't looking at code. one thing we still see is really important is observability.Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah.Akshat [00:05:51]: Like how good is your dashboard? And of course, like we have, we push a lot of it to the CLI so the agents can do their own investigation, but you still need humans to go interpret what's going on and, make judgment calls and whatnot. and that's I feel like, Maybe more important now than looking at the code itself.Swyx [00:06:11]: Yes, because like, you can try to treat the code as a black box and then use, see the observable action that comes out of it, and then just prompt a change.What Modal Is For: AI Cloud PrimitivesAkshat [00:06:21]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:22]: So I think it takes a bit of restraint to not specialize, to say, “I want to ship a new primitive,” and then just be general purpose.Swyx [00:06:31]: People ask you, “What are you for?” You're like, “ I don't know. We can do this, we can do that.”Vibhu [00:06:36]: Well, I'd be curious to see, like, okay, if we were to ask you, like, what is Modal for even at a high level? There's a lot you guys do, sandboxes, GPUs, everything. How do you answer?Akshat [00:06:46]: Modal is a cloud platform that's built for, where we've built the primitives from scratch for AI applications. and right now it covers, inference, training, batch processing, and sandbox workloads.Akshat [00:07:00]: But we're building a lot moreSwyx [00:07:02]: I noticed you didn't say web server, so there is still a role for, like, the always-on large-scale Kubernetes type things.Akshat [00:07:09]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're not trying to compete with the renders of the world, because yeah, we think the differentiator for us is the, are the workloads that need specialized compute, need to scale up and down a lot. yeah, they're, they're, they're just shaped differently.Working Alongside Frontier StartupsVibhu [00:07:26]: I think you're building a lot of it alongside the startups, right? They're innovating quite a bit, even in your, like, latest blog post. Like, even in the series C, the customers that you mention here, the cognitions, technical ones, ramps and whatnot, they're, they're innovating with you, right? And that's not something AWS is doing directly with.Akshat [00:07:45]: Yeah, absolutely. I think, this is again classic. We're a small team. We can move really fast. our engineers are working with our customers and figuring it out. Yeah.Swyx [00:07:54]: So my first week at Cognition, I walked in, there was someone wearing a Modal shirt. I was like, “What are you doing here?” They're like, “Yeah, I just. I am embedded inside of Cog.”Akshat [00:08:05]: Yeah, I think that was Peyton. We sent him overSwyx [00:08:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:08:07]: Because, the latency of communication was too high otherwise.Swyx [00:08:12]: Yeah, distributed node, you have to - you have to place one and collocate.Vibhu [00:08:16]: Yeah.Swyx [00:08:16]: So I had a, I had direct personal experience, right? So I worked on smol developer three years ago. it was inspired by Claude 1. I think you onboarded me at some point, like, just before, and I was like, “Oh, like, I need some bursty compute. Like, I was just gonna try using Modal.” And it was a, it was a pretty pleasant experience. apparently, I showed up in the board meeting, like the analytics.smol developer, Sandboxes, and Proto-CognitionAkshat [00:08:39]: Yeah, you blew up on Hacker News and,Swyx [00:08:41]: YeahAkshat [00:08:41]: We got a big traffic spike. I. I think the way you used smol developer was Modal functions for running stuff, which was. Like, the, that was a good use case. but then, yeah.Swyx [00:08:53]: Yeah. That - So to me, that was proto-cognition.Akshat [00:08:55]: Right.Swyx [00:08:56]: If only I had, like, stuck to it.Swyx [00:08:58]: Like, that was like, if - did you say draw the tech treeAkshat [00:09:00]: AbsolutelySwyx [00:09:00]: You're just like, “Yeah, like, probably this will happen.”Akshat [00:09:02]: Yeah. Like, he was so close. You were just rebuilding upon usSwyx [00:09:04]: I just didn't realize.Akshat [00:09:05]: But the funny story there is at the same time, we were talking to a bunch of customers who needed something like sandboxing.Swyx [00:09:14]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:14]: This is like twenty-three.Swyx [00:09:15]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:16]: So we builtSwyx [00:09:17]: You introduced a new API right after that.Akshat [00:09:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:19]: Yes.Akshat [00:09:19]: Like, we built sandboxes in May of twenty-three before anyone was even knew this was gonna be a thing. And the first example we published was, we took smol developerSwyx [00:09:28]: Smol developerAkshat [00:09:28]: And put it in a loop, so the agent can iterate on itself.Swyx [00:09:33]: Loops are hot these days.Vibhu [00:09:34]: It's the looper.Akshat [00:09:34]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:35]: Loops in. When was this, twenty-three?Akshat [00:09:38]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:39]: A small check.Akshat [00:09:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:09:39]: It's like twenty-three. so the. the, those for listeners, like, the problem was the models are not built for any of this, right?Swyx [00:09:46]: Like, you're just trying to like. They're not post-training to understand, like, looping and, like, self-correction and tool calling was there, but, like, also not that great.Akshat [00:09:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:09:55]: I don't remember if you used tool calling in this one, but yeah, the models would just diverge after like ten iterations and not produce anything meaningful.Swyx [00:10:03]: Yeah. But like, then. So okay, like now talking to myself three years ago, the answerVibhu [00:10:08]: Of course they will get betterSwyx [00:10:09]: Collect all the failures, build benchmark, and then collect all the, examples, build the RL environmentAkshat [00:10:15]: RightSwyx [00:10:15]: Sell it for like ten billion dollars to Meta.Swyx [00:10:17]: And then also train a model and then sell that for sixty billion dollars to Elon. And this isAkshat [00:10:23]: Yeah, of courseSwyx [00:10:23]: The funny machine. Like, it's like, it's about the hardware.Akshat [00:10:28]: It's hard to have that inherent conviction that the stuff will get that much better.Swyx [00:10:33]: In retrospect, it's so f*****g obvious.Akshat [00:10:36]: Fair enough.Swyx [00:10:37]: Like, what else were we doing back then? I don't know. anyway. Yeah. So this. That was the start of your sandboxing journey, right? I feel like it didn't blow up until, like, last year.Akshat [00:10:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:10:50]: So there was like a couple years of quietness.Akshat [00:10:52]: Exactly, yeah. We wereVibhu [00:10:53]: I think very underrated product value. Like, my experience with Modal, Charles, before he had joined Modal, met this guy at a hackathon, and he really insisted we wanted to run some small model, not hosted anywhere, and he's like, “ there's this cool company, Modal. They'll like spin up a GPU sandbox, we can throw it on there. They'll take a Hugging Face link.” And like there's so much value just right there, right? Like instant hosting, spin it up, spin it down. It'll stay cold, but we run the demo a few days later, it'll come back up and like all this stuff in retrospect, like it's still what we needed like today.Akshat [00:11:27]: Yeah, it's still needed today. workload shapes have changed a lot as, we run stuff for people with really massive production scale and, there it's it's not about scaling from zero to one, but it's how do we scale really elastically, from like thousand to fifteen hundred GPUs very quickly in a given region. It's the same shape problem.Elastic Inference, GPU Autoscaling, and Custom ModelsVibhu [00:11:50]: Okay. So you look at, say, Cursor Composer, right?Akshat [00:11:53]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:11:53]: They had a. “We'll do RL on a model every couple hours.” you guys have a whole version of RL inference gym and whatnot.Vibhu [00:12:01]: When you look at workloads like that, you're doing train runs where you need to scale up, scale down every hour thousands of GPUs, right? That's the example for we do need it, right?Akshat [00:12:12]: Yeah. Well, so I'll, I'll take a step back and, maybe talk about like how people use Modal today. because our biggest use case is, elastic inference. And the thing we first found product market fit, with was inference for custom models. So we stayed away from the LLM space, and we were serving companies like Suno for audio, Runway for video, robotics, comp bio companies that train their own model elsewhere. But Modal is the best black box that for deployment, scaling to however many GPUs you need as your traffic pattern changes. And we saw all of them like have a very unpredict- predict- predictable, traffic pattern. it's like diurnal. It's Some days, like the company will do a launch and, they'll need like, way more. And it's not just one model that they deploy. They-- all these companies deploy, lots of different models in different regions, and so the autoscaling problem becomes even harder because then you have to scale within a certain region, and those cycles are offset. So different times you scale up in different regions.Akshat [00:13:20]: So that's like our sortVibhu [00:13:22]: And thatAkshat [00:13:22]: YeahVibhu [00:13:22]: That in and of itself is a huge category. There's a bunch of inference providers which, provide this fireworks, does this as a service together, whatnot, Base10. that's carved into its own niche for language models, at least right now.Akshat [00:13:36]: Yeah. the thing that we have specialized in is the autoscaling aspect.Vibhu [00:13:41]: Yeah.Akshat [00:13:41]: Because we found that it's not universally true that everyone else can autoscale, and we've gone deeper into it on the tech side by, we've incorporated GPU snapshotting into the product so we can take the GPU state, like your torch.compile model, snapshot it, and the next cold start is way faster. And so going back to your question, it's That's why you need a lot of burstiness for inference. But then people also do a lot of demand training, like for RL stuff, your rollouts are bursty, as you said. People also do a lot of batch jobs. So we'll see, a lot of companies, before they have a training run, they'll need thousands of GPUs to run encoding or something like that. And I think those things are much more bursty than. I agree that agents are not that bursty. sandboxes are, except when you're doing RL. RL is justRL, Batch Jobs, and 100,000 SandboxesVibhu [00:14:28]: Or commerceAkshat [00:14:28]: Insanely bursty.Vibhu [00:14:29]: Yeah.Akshat [00:14:30]: Yeah. Like when you're doing, rollouts, you sometimes need a hundred thousand sandboxes in your sandboxes.Vibhu [00:14:37]: Yeah. I'm curious if you've seen early sparks of continual learning. There are some people, like our friends, ngram, recently announced thisAkshat [00:14:45]: YeahVibhu [00:14:45]: They're, they're trying to do training. That also seems like a different workload, right? If you're doing training twenty-four/seven per se, there's a very weird dynamic of how you're using GPUs between people and whatnot, but seems like something you guys would work for.Akshat [00:15:00]: As you said, we're, we're fortunate to work with a number of, customers at the frontier and grab some of our customers. and they are taking the primitives we have, and trying to use them in very interesting ways, like continual learning. It's possible as the stuff gets better, some of that will be part of, our offering as well if, more people need it. but we're, we're just waiting to seeVibhu [00:15:23]: YeahAkshat [00:15:23]: How it shakes out.Vibhu [00:15:24]: Is there a primitive that you added after sandboxing that was the next step in the story?LLM Inference, DeFlash, and Speculative DecodingAkshat [00:15:32]: I guess we've been going much deeper into LLM inferenceVibhu [00:15:35]: YeahAkshat [00:15:35]: Because we realized that some of the advantages we have with like autoscaling, again, especially in different regions and whatnot, are, not present elsewhere. and the place where we had a gap was we weren't, working on the model layer itself. Like we were a black box. And, we realized that, we can get to frontier-level model performance, with, by having great people who work on this. And, we've been open sourcing a lot of our work, in terms of, Recently, we, shared our work on DeFlash, which is a block-based, speculator, and we've open sourced, all of it. So, you can - By using open source DeFlash, you can get the same performance as you would with one of the proprietary providers. And the next thing we're thinking about hereVibhu [00:16:23]: I thought this wasAkshat [00:16:24]: YeahVibhu [00:16:24]: An interesting blog post as well, right? Like, I think in here you make a claim that. Not a claim, just that how effective speculative deco-decoding really just get to.Akshat [00:16:33]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:33]: Anything you wanna point out from this around, what people should know?Akshat [00:16:39]: Yeah, absolutely. the high-level summary is, it would help to describe what speculative decoding is.Vibhu [00:16:44]: Yes.Akshat [00:16:44]: I will, yes.Vibhu [00:16:45]: I think, likeAkshat [00:16:46]: YeahVibhu [00:16:46]: So we've covered like Eagle and all thisAkshat [00:16:47]: YeahVibhu [00:16:47]: Like Hydra and all those things, but it was like two years ago.Akshat [00:16:51]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:16:51]: I think it doesn't hurt, right?Akshat [00:16:52]: Yeah. Speculative decoding is you have a smaller model, called a draft model, predict tokens ahead of the bigger model, and then you have the bigger model, verify all of this, all the tokens are predicted. And the reason it's faster is if you're predicting, one token at once, you're bound by memory bandwidth. But if you can batch the verification of, the draft model, then you're much more efficient using compute, and it's faster, and as long as your draft model is producing a lot of tokens that can get accepted, which is called the accept length, you can get a speed up that's, multiple times of, the original model speed. and well, that's what we highlight here. It's Like people talk a lot about we made these kernels faster and whatnot, but improving kernel will only give you like few percentage points of improvement, and, increasing accept length, literally is a multiplicative decreaseVibhu [00:17:47]: Like two to four X.Akshat [00:17:48]: Yeah, exactly.Vibhu [00:17:48]: Without much head-on performance.Akshat [00:17:50]: Yeah. I think it may - you are running a second model, right? So it may be something more expensive in the compute,Vibhu [00:17:57]: I meant quality performanceAkshat [00:17:58]: Probably not by muchVibhu [00:17:58]: But yeah. I thinkAkshat [00:17:59]: So there's no drop in quality performanceVibhu [00:18:01]: YeahAkshat [00:18:01]: Because you're always. You're never accepting a token that the big modelVibhu [00:18:04]: It's strictly betterAkshat [00:18:05]: YeahVibhu [00:18:05]: Or it's same.Akshat [00:18:06]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:18:07]: Right. Yeah.Akshat [00:18:08]: And so we've been working a bunch on DeFlash, which is a block-based speculator. so it's instead of predicting, one token at a time, it's predicting a block. And we've been open sourcing our work with it. The next thing for us here is for helping people train speculators and custom models. it's it's something that traditionally is very forward-deployed engineering driven, support deployed, engineer driven, like you work with customers and help them do that. And our vision for. This is why we launched Auto Endpoints, is we want to make frontier-level performance available to everyone. And so, we mentioned this in the announcement, we teased it. The next thing we're, we're launching is, as you run an auto endpoint, we shadow trafficAuto Endpoints and Frontier-Level PerformanceVibhu [00:18:54]: Do you want to explain what auto endpoints are?Akshat [00:18:57]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:18:57]: I lovely, yeah.Akshat [00:18:58]: Yeah. So, this is, I guess, going back to your Modal is you touch the code, but, sometimes people don't wanna touch the code, and they wanna get started with an endpoint that works and has all the great performance and, scalability that Modal has. So we've made that easier with, a way to create an endpoint from our UI, from the CLI, that has all of our optimizations that we talked about, like the DeFlash stuff already baked in, and there's full transparency. So we give you the code, you can go run it yourself, and if you want, you can eject out into the full Modal experience, which we see as people get sophisticated, they do wanna tweak the models, they wanna, fine-tune stuff. You can still do all of that. It's it's not a black box. And yeah, the next thing, as we teased later in the post, is how do we give you value even beyond this in terms of having your draft models evolve as your data distribution evolves, again, without having to talk to a person and, yeah.Vibhu [00:19:59]: I guess just to understand it directly, you have the GPUs, you have an endpoint that's compatible, you serve open model. If someone was to do this themselves, what's the delta that you guys provide? So you do a lot of open source great work on effective inference. how does it compare to, say, I take the same model, 5.2 FP8, take shelf inference engine, vLLM, SGLang, get compute of similar capacity, similar cost. What's the delta that plugging into something this, like this offers outside of the benefit of, scaling?Production Inference Beyond Raw GPUsAkshat [00:20:34]: It's interesting because we've taken the approach of open sourcing our contributions and upstreaming them. we work closely with the SGLang team. We want the improvements that our team, comes up with to be, there in open source for others to use, even outside of Modal. The benefit to us is we have a team that has significant expertise in terms of if you do have something that is not there, our team can help you get that performance, first. the other thing is with these endpoints, we are way more elastic, as you said, than, anyone else, and you have true scaling to zero. you have true, burstiness, and in practice, that matters a lot more to people than just finding, the GPU and, running Modal code on something.Vibhu [00:21:20]: Yeah. And I will say it's not that straightforward to just. like what I said is easier said than done, right?Akshat [00:21:26]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:27]: It's I think still for the average person, still hard to just gut check using different. There's, there's quite a bit of combinations you can make there. the trade-offs aren't really known at face value.Akshat [00:21:40]: Yeah. it's it's not just that. I think it's it's that running production-grade inference is a hard infer problem.Vibhu [00:21:49]: YeahAkshat [00:21:49]: Even if you subtract out the autoscalingVibhu [00:21:50]: YeahAkshat [00:21:51]: Is controlling things like tail latency and, making sure every, request is delivered at least once and whatnot.The Model and Agent LifecycleVibhu [00:22:00]: There's a lot of innovation that you can do here. I think, it's very interesting that you're starting to encroach on, like as you become a full cloud, you're starting to encroach on other people's turf.Vibhu [00:22:09]: What will you not do?Akshat [00:22:13]: Well, we wanna follow our users and, make sure they get like a platform that has everything that works well together. so right now we're focused on the model lifecycle and the agent, lifecycle. so both like going from data prep to training to inference, and then also if I want to deploy a background agent, let's say, sandbox, do persistent storage, a whole bunch of other stuff.Vibhu [00:22:38]: We talked to Cole, who did, OpenInspect. Yeah.Akshat [00:22:42]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:22:42]: And RealInspect also is on Modal.Akshat [00:22:44]: Yeah. So Ramp Inspect was a great example of a background agent that was really successful because they, were able to use some of the primitives like snapshotting and fast scaling to just have something that feels really reactive and works well.Ramp Inspect and Background AgentsVibhu [00:23:02]: Yeah. That's the new CTO of, Ramp right there.Akshat [00:23:05]: Yeah, Rahul.Vibhu [00:23:08]: It was really fun. yeah, okay, I think, all very bullish. Like, one of my reflections was also I did not originally. So when I met you guysThe Inference Inflection: CPU, GPU, and Co-LocationVibhu [00:23:19]: You weren't that much in the GPU game, and now you're all about, inference. And one of the points that I hinged on for Jensen's keynote at GTC this year was, what we're calling like the inference inflection, right? That let's say in AI workloads or machine learning workloads, it used to be like, let's call it eight to one GPU to CPU, and now it's more like one to one, which is like a interesting. Like, - because of how much agents are blocked or call out to this, to CPU heavy stuff the actual, like, limiting factor, like, swings back and forth from GPU to CPU a lot more than it used to be all GPU and then occasional CPU.Akshat [00:24:01]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:24:02]: GPU, CPU. And now it's like just constantly, and you just have to locate everything.Seventeen Clouds and the Supercloud StrategyAkshat [00:24:08]: Yeah. And that's one of the things that, again, we see as, something appealing about Modal, which is we've built this capacity pool that spans, 17 cloud providers, so we're, we're very good at Running on various kinds of cloud capacity across the worldSwyx [00:24:24]: You don't have your own data centers?Akshat [00:24:25]: We don't have our own data centers. We just run across a lot of neo cloudsSwyx [00:24:29]: Yeah. AreAkshat [00:24:30]: Metal providers.Swyx [00:24:30]: Yeah. Question mark.Swyx [00:24:31]: Yeah. You're, you're running the math, and you're like, “What's the cutover point where you're like.”Akshat [00:24:36]: Yeah, it's a good question. part of it is we see our differentiator in the software layer, and, being capital light and focusing on the software helps us move really fast. so far it's worked out well because there are so many other people building data centers that we're able to work effectively with them, and again, focus on what makes us, special.Swyx [00:24:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:24:56]: 17 gets you into, like, the local providers sometimes. LikeAkshat [00:25:00]: The,Swyx [00:25:01]: Which was the most interesting one?Akshat [00:25:02]: There are a lot more neo clouds than you expect, and they all have various degrees of, various levels of reliability. And, that's why it's something we've invested a lot of time in, is building our own reliability layer on top. so if the GPU falls off the bus or something happens, we user workloads are not affected, and that lets us use a lot more capacity than,Swyx [00:25:30]: YeahAkshat [00:25:30]: You as a user would be able to.Swyx [00:25:32]: It's a useful thing to have because like now everyone knows, like, what layer you are and, like, you optimize for being the super cloud of all clouds.Akshat [00:25:41]: Yeah. That's, that's, that's the idea. and so I guess when you mentioned colocation, that's, that's another interesting thing where, one thing we've seen is people come to us when they want, very specifically located, CPUs or GPUs, like they wantSwyx [00:25:57]: Oh, they pin it in likeAkshat [00:25:58]: YeahSwyx [00:25:58]: EU?Akshat [00:25:59]: Exactly. Or EU, US.Swyx [00:26:01]: Right. Data resiliencyAkshat [00:26:02]: AustraliaSwyx [00:26:02]: Locality thing or performance or what?Akshat [00:26:04]: It's either data locality or latency, yeah.Swyx [00:26:07]: Yeah.Akshat [00:26:07]: Like, you want your. They're running sandboxes and model. They want them to be right next to aSwyx [00:26:10]: Yeah, it's easy thenAkshat [00:26:11]: YeahSwyx [00:26:12]: To. That is important in all those things. and so, like, you've accidentally, I don't know if it's accident, but, like, you've built the perfect primitive for agents to express themselves. And then, like, it's almost very funny how every extra development just involves more file system, just involves more CPU.Akshat [00:26:30]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:31]: Just like the things that you already have. I don't know much about, if there's any, like, networking usages that are interesting, but you've also done some good work on networking.Networking, Sidecars, Private IPv6, and SandboxesAkshat [00:26:40]: Yeah, that's exactly right. Like, we're just taking compute storage and networking and building stuff on that layer, for, again, the stuff people need.Swyx [00:26:49]: YeahAkshat [00:26:50]: We see a few interesting networking things coming up. one is people want networked sandboxes. so we haveSwyx [00:26:57]: For like a Docker cluster type thing.Akshat [00:26:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:26:59]: Sorry, Docker Swarm. Oh, f**k. What is it called?Akshat [00:27:02]: Compose.Swyx [00:27:03]: Compose type thing.Akshat [00:27:04]: Yeah. So if you want Docker Compose, our sandboxes now support, this thing called sidecars. So you can. A sandbox is a pod of containers, and you can run multiple containers in, a sandbox. also useful because, going back to networking, people want a lot of control over, outbound networking from a sandbox.Swyx [00:27:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:23]: Like, they might wanna run a middle proxy for, like, maybe logging stuff for RL or, controlling how egress can happen to a domain, injecting credentials. and yeah. So we've, we've had to build a lot of that stuff ourselves.Swyx [00:27:38]: Yeah.Akshat [00:27:39]: But then also sometimes people want, sandboxes spanning multiple nodes to talk to each other, which is an emerging thing we're seeing. We have support for that for a different reason, and yeah, we'll see if that becomes stable.Swyx [00:27:52]: Like, just an open socket. It's a. This is directly like mTLS.Akshat [00:27:56]: We do support that, which is you can, expose a tunnel inside a sandbox.Swyx [00:28:01]: Yeah.Akshat [00:28:01]: And then you can either expose it to public internet or it can be, you can add like a HTTP, auth layer above it. But we have this thing called I6PN, which we haven't talked about, which is this, like, overlay network using IPv6 addresses. so if Modal containers, within the same workspace, when this is enabled, can address each other using this private IPv6 address, and no one else can.Akshat [00:28:28]: So it's like private networking, for containers. We built it because we needed it as a primitive for our distributed training product. so we have this other feature, which is you can add a decorator to a function, and you get a cluster of GPUs. and they have RDMA networking. so you can run a distributed training job, that's truly serverless. and we did the overlay network for that. But then we've seen that people are using it for other reasons, and, I'm intrigued to yeah, what would people do with it.Swyx [00:28:59]: Build primitives and let people figure it out, right?Akshat [00:29:01]: Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:29:02]: You put out a pretty interestingAkshat [00:29:03]: They're like, they read the docs webpage. Let me use thatSwyx [00:29:06]: YeahAkshat [00:29:06]: Something they never intended to work. This is literally not even in our docs page. People somehow found it, and they're using it.RDMA, Memory Movement, and Distributed TrainingSwyx [00:29:12]: Huh.Swyx [00:29:14]: The way you portrayed it with, like, RDMA versus TCP, like, very well laid out, but just the transfer speed change at scale for RL, like yeah, you have it, you have it built in. I'm sure someone found it. It's found it to be a lot more efficient before you made a thing out of it, right?Akshat [00:29:32]: Yeah. And not to split hairs, I guess the overlay network is the TCP overlay network.Akshat [00:29:39]: The reason we have that is you need that to do the key exchange for RDMA before you set up the RDMA network on top of that. but then people found the TCP part.Swyx [00:29:48]: Can I tell you, this is like a big aha moment for me becauseAkshat [00:29:51]: YeahSwyx [00:29:51]: So I review 2,200 submissions for the World's Fair.Akshat [00:29:56]: Yeah.Swyx [00:29:57]: And then I got this from John OsterhoutAkshat [00:29:58]: HuhSwyx [00:29:59]: Who I don't know if. Do John Osterhout by name?Akshat [00:30:01]: The name sounds familiar.Swyx [00:30:02]: He published a. He's a well-known professor, published a lot of interesting software design books, and this is the talk he chose to submit, is on RDMA at Inference. And I'm like, you wouldn't think that this guy, who is like operating systems guy, would care about RDMA.Akshat [00:30:20]: I, it makes sense to me because I,Swyx [00:30:24]: This is the cloud, right? YeahAkshat [00:30:25]: Like, the way you move around your KV cache and how efficiently you can do it, how efficiently you move, your weights from your training GPUs to your inference GPUs in RL is there's a lot of degrees of freedom, and it is a systems problemSwyx [00:30:41]: YeahAkshat [00:30:41]: Moving memory aroundSwyx [00:30:42]: YeahAkshat [00:30:43]: Scheduling.Swyx [00:30:44]: This shows you how primitive my understanding of networking stuff is.Swyx [00:30:46]: Is this like the domain of WireGuard as well?Akshat [00:30:50]: Not quite.Swyx [00:30:51]: It's adjacent?Swyx [00:30:53]: Explain everything.Akshat [00:30:54]: Sure.Swyx [00:30:56]: How do we move memory around GPUs?Akshat [00:30:58]: Well, so sorry. Yeah, that is memory. Sorry, I was talking more, and maybe I was talking like five minutes back, about the private IPv6, addressing that you've set up.Swyx [00:31:09]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:09]: Is it like it's a VPN?Swyx [00:31:10]: Yeah, it is like a VPN, and yeah, WireGuard is, yeah, you're right. It is,Akshat [00:31:16]: Right. Yeah, you already moved on to new topicsSwyx [00:31:17]: A similarAkshat [00:31:18]: OkaySwyx [00:31:19]: In the same space, WireGuard is, encrypted and this is,Akshat [00:31:23]: And you don't need encryption.Swyx [00:31:23]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:24]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:24]: This is not encrypted. that's the main difference. This is TCP and we have eBPF programs that will reject or allow the TCP connection based on whether you're allowed to do it.Akshat [00:31:35]: Used to involve a full sidecar, but now you have eBPF in the Linux kernel.Swyx [00:31:39]: Yeah.Akshat [00:31:40]: Yeah. I don't know if this is a natural follow-on to the topic of like my skepticism on distributed training is that while, like, people spend a lot of money on, like, cables to hook up GPUs, and even that is not, like, fast enough, and that's the bottleneck, is your networking fast enough?Swyx [00:31:59]: Yeah. So I guess you're talking about fully distributed training like, Dialog or something which is like cross data centerAkshat [00:32:06]: That would be, yes.Swyx [00:32:07]: That's the extreme.Akshat [00:32:08]: Yeah.Swyx [00:32:08]: You're in the middle, and then other people would have like the Mellanox cables up in, like, their actual data center.Akshat [00:32:14]: When you run multi-node training on Modal, RDMA, I think Mellanox, is, or InfiniBand is like a, is all seen as RDMA. but it's a way to bypass the TCP networking stack and, transfer, stuff much faster, between one node, to the other. And we have I think like 3 terabit per second, internal networkingSwyx [00:32:40]: OkayAkshat [00:32:40]: Which is the standard that's needed.Swyx [00:32:42]: Okay. So I misunderstood whatAkshat [00:32:43]: 50Swyx [00:32:43]: What part of the stack you wereAkshat [00:32:44]: 50 gigs overSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:45]: If you wentSwyx [00:32:45]: YeahAkshat [00:32:46]: RDMA.Swyx [00:32:46]: Okay.Swyx [00:32:48]: Yeah. I, very impressive work.Multi-Node Training, Post-Training, and Auto ResearchSwyx [00:32:52]: So effectively you're extending like the model philosophy to the training cluster, like, yeah.Akshat [00:32:59]: Yeah. And we're, we're not going for like large scale training runs. the thing that we've built multi-node training for is, we see a lot of, smaller scale post-training. like, people are post-training like medium sized fund models, so they can, get higher quality on inference. this is a perfect fit, for something like that.Swyx [00:33:21]: Yeah. That is my impression of how a lot of these labs explore branches in post-training and then eventually merge whatever they find in.Akshat [00:33:31]: Yeah. The other use case we've seen for multi-node training is even if you have a big cluster, your researchers are still doing small runsSwyx [00:33:38]: YesAkshat [00:33:39]: Having elasticity thereSwyx [00:33:40]: Right, sureAkshat [00:33:40]: Matters a lot more.Swyx [00:33:41]: Yeah. the, like, this is like the current limiting factor for auto research, which is like you need to give your model some GPUs in order for it to completely run.Akshat [00:33:51]: We have a blog post on auto resource and model is,Swyx [00:33:55]: YeahAkshat [00:33:56]: Yeah, like, turns out to be pretty good substrate for that.Swyx [00:33:59]: So my impression is auto research means many things, likeAkshat [00:34:01]: YeahSwyx [00:34:01]: Anything that Andrej coins. Right now it's still science fair, right? Like not like, I don't know how many people are doing this.Akshat [00:34:08]: We're having a golf.Swyx [00:34:08]: Yeah.Akshat [00:34:09]: I thought the same thing.Swyx [00:34:11]: Yeah, you would know.Akshat [00:34:12]: We, like, our internal both training and inference teams use this the general shape of this quite a bit. like we have this one internal repo called auto inference, which essentially we've automated our own forward-deployed engineering efforts using, this harness, which is, the agent will just spin up a sweep of different things. It'll even run like, NVIDIA inside profiler and it'll like tweak configs and it'll arrive the right thing. it'll change your GPUs both from H200 to B200, and works really well.Swyx [00:34:47]: Nice.Akshat [00:34:47]: So yeah.Swyx [00:34:48]: By the way, I enjoy that your forward-deployed engineering is so technical that you have to do these things.Swyx [00:34:52]: It's very different from forward-deployed engineering from other people.Akshat [00:34:54]: Yeah. For our forward-deployed engineering team is, essentially they're like applied inference researchers or applied training researchers.Swyx [00:35:02]: Someone told me like they have to be able to build, but they also have to be able to sell. do they have to sell or are they like they're good, they're just like post-sale type of thing?Akshat [00:35:09]: It does, being able to talk to a customer and engage effectively with themSwyx [00:35:13]: YeahAkshat [00:35:13]: Matters a lot.Swyx [00:35:14]: They want the same thing.Akshat [00:35:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:35:15]: ?Akshat [00:35:15]: But it's it's not really a sales, thing. We pair them with-- We have solution architects as well that are more on the sales side.Swyx [00:35:23]: Okay. Let's spend a bit more time on auto research. This is a big focus for for this year. Where does this go? like, have people explored enough? Like, there's all these beautiful charts of like improve and then level off a bit and then you find the next thing. Is this one abstraction up from normal training? Is that how we think about it, or do you think about it differently? Like model level training versus high, like driven hyperparameter search.Auto Inference and Modal BenchAkshat [00:35:51]: Yeah, like,Swyx [00:35:51]: Someone, some people call it like neural architecture search or whatever, right? Like.Akshat [00:35:54]: Yeah, - So the stuff I've seen people do with it is nowhere on the architecture level. It's pretty much tweaking parameters, but it's it's a hyperparameter sweep that's guided by some model intuition, so it's like much more efficient than, whatever other, sweep you would have.Swyx [00:36:12]: Yeah, it's just, it's just a question of where you want to spend your compute?Akshat [00:36:16]: Right.Swyx [00:36:16]: ‘Cause yeah, you can just throw infinite amounts of money on this and somehow you'll bang out Shakespeare?Akshat [00:36:22]: Yeah, infinite monkey.Swyx [00:36:24]: Yeah, so like the very good for model. and I think it's also very important that agents can spin up other agents, can spin up their infrastructure. Like very good for you. how good is our LLMs at generating model code? Like the benefit of existing LLMs is that you are in the data.Akshat [00:36:42]: Yeah. They're, they're surprisingly good. I think like pre Cloud 4 they were not, and then now they're able to shot, stuff out of the box. But we're playing around with releasing like a Modal Bench for like the harderSwyx [00:36:55]: YeahAkshat [00:36:55]: Things, that the LLMs cannot do yet and maybeSwyx [00:36:59]: What's an example of that?Akshat [00:37:01]: I think the things that- Sometimes agents struggle with, without right guidance and a skill is, how to, use the rest of our observability. Like how to. Something is failing, like how do you look at the logs and then update the right thing? It's reasoning about that. But they're able to shot, likeSwyx [00:37:23]: Yeah. You can just add a skill to it?Compute Strategy and Capacity PlanningAkshat [00:37:26]: Yeah. So we have a Modal skill now that. Which is why we built this Modal Bench. It's to find things like that, so we can address them in our tool.Swyx [00:37:35]: Tune a skill. Yeah.Akshat [00:37:36]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:36]: No. it's it's good. are you facing any shortages? like we talk a lot about GPU shortages, but also CPU, also memory.Swyx [00:37:44]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:45]: We have had a lot of growth, which means that, there's - we've had to be much better aboutSwyx [00:37:53]: PlanningAkshat [00:37:54]: Proactive capacity planning.Swyx [00:37:55]: Yeah.Akshat [00:37:55]: So we have,Swyx [00:37:57]: Which by the way, like it's like a MBA's like dreamAkshat [00:38:00]: YesSwyx [00:38:00]: Is like just planning this stuff. I think last time you and I talked about something maybe about this.Akshat [00:38:03]: Yeah. we have a really competent team of people that we call, The role is called compute strategy. so yeah, if anyone listening here or wants to work on thatSwyx [00:38:13]: Compute strategy?Akshat [00:38:13]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:14]: I think,Akshat [00:38:14]: I feel like,Swyx [00:38:15]: I think the normies call it FP&A or something.Akshat [00:38:18]: Well, it's more It's it's not FP&A. It's it's There's a lot of interesting financial questions of like what is the blend between one year and three-year reservations? how do we forecast our own capacity? how do we. especially since our capacity is very fungible across different GPU types and different regions, like you have to model a lot of it. and you also have to have an opinion on how the supply chain is gonna evolve, and then you have to like, take bets,Swyx [00:38:49]: YeahAkshat [00:38:49]: Based on that.Swyx [00:38:50]: Tokenomics.Akshat [00:38:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:51]: This is like probably a not a real point, but, I was trying to think about like what other industries. I was trying to think about like, we cannot be first to like these kinds of problems.Akshat [00:38:59]: Yeah.Swyx [00:39:00]: And what other industries have had this? And I was like, airlines with fuel and like they have to hedge their fuel and like, I think for a long time Southwest because they made like a hero fuel bet, they like were like super low cost becauseAkshat [00:39:12]: OhSwyx [00:39:12]: Compared to everyone else.Akshat [00:39:14]: Yeah. I hadn't thought about that.Vibhu [00:39:16]: We're at a fun time too?Akshat [00:39:18]: Yeah. It's. A lot of the compute business in general, for us is also about being very good about capacity management. That is how you have great unit, economics. but also over time it's how you can unlock more value for customers. Like, one of the things we're building now is like a way for customers to get, If they don't care about latency, like get much cheaper pricing and they'll get results back in like next 24 hours or something, like a batch tier essentially.Batch Tiers and Latency-Insensitive WorkloadsSwyx [00:39:47]: Yeah.Akshat [00:39:47]: And those are levers we have because we control the whole stack and scheduling and whatnot to give people a sufficientSwyx [00:39:53]: Yeah. I feel like they're not as popular. Like those, like the Frontier Labs have all those APIs. They're not as popular as they should be.Akshat [00:40:00]: The demand that we see for something like that is not for LLMs. although sometimes people wanna run evals andSwyx [00:40:08]: OkayAkshat [00:40:08]: Synthetic data prep and there it makes sense.Swyx [00:40:10]: Okay.Akshat [00:40:11]: But it's from a lot of LLM companies, like people who are doing computational bio, like they have to run really big batch jobs and they don't care about when they get it back.Swyx [00:40:22]: Yeah. And like they have a reasonable. It's it's also like a cousin to the stopping problem of like, will this finish in time?Akshat [00:40:30]: Yeah. You can bound it.Swyx [00:40:33]: Yeah.Akshat [00:40:33]: Like you can give peopleSwyx [00:40:34]: YeahAkshat [00:40:34]: SLAs on it.Swyx [00:40:35]: Yeah. I think what's, what's interesting is like the next phase of model.Swyx [00:40:38]: Like what, do people expect from you, now that you're established and you're like well-known compute player among all these leading companies. You had an inference launch week, and we talked a little bit about the launches. like what else? Like what else should people know?What Modal Builds NextAkshat [00:40:55]: We are building primitives that make our users' lives much easier. So, I think for example, with LLM inference, thousands more companies are gonna post-train their own models and, deploy open source models for inference. so we're thinking a lot about what is the best product shape for that. And, that involves everything from our training gym to, then, endpoints that get frontier-level performance. again, but I haven't talked to anyone. It looks somewhat different on other verticals. Like, we're also seeing a lot of real-time, audio-video stuff in there, which is why like, we're working on things like regional routing, with fallbacks. So you can get GPUs that are as close to users as possible. so you get like low latency for video streaming and whatnot. And then on the agent side, it's,Akshat [00:41:52]: We're still working very closely with our customers because stuff is changing so fast in terms of what they need. And, I think beyond sandboxes and persistent file systems, there's a lot of other things people will need from this agent stack as they build production agents. So yeah, we're thinking about those other things that fit in there.Swyx [00:42:13]: I want to ask what the other things are.Akshat [00:42:15]: Yeah. I probably should share right now.Swyx [00:42:17]: I think-- I think, okay, so, I do think a lot about the principal components of cloud, and you do talk about compute storage networking.Akshat [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:25]: Because so far for me, it's fine. so far for the. the first couple generations of cloud, it's fine. What's different, qualitatively different about agents that you need some new permission level? Like a lot of people, okay, and I'll just kinda spew tokens at you until it like hopefully sparks something.Akshat [00:42:43]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:44]: Like the new level now is whatever Claude Code does, which is dangerously scope permissions or like allow list by command or like whatever, right? And sometimes they're like, “Well, okay, we have like this adaptive thinking mode where like, just trust me, bro. I will make the calls for you.” Is that it? like mediated permissions.Hard Guardrails vs. LLM-Mediated PermissionsVibhu [00:43:03]: Now you're looping it with a goal and letting it roll.Akshat [00:43:06]: Yeah, I'm, I'm skeptical of LLM media permission for stuff that is at the sandbox level because you do want hard boundaries.Swyx [00:43:16]: Yeah.Akshat [00:43:16]: Otherwise, someone can exfiltrate stuff.Swyx [00:43:20]: But likeAkshat [00:43:20]: YeahSwyx [00:43:20]: Maybe that's old school thinking. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.Swyx [00:43:23]: Maybe the AI OS or the LLM OS is really the kernel is a goddamn LLM.Swyx [00:43:30]: Like it makes you feel uncomfortable.Akshat [00:43:31]: Yeah, I'm, I'm toldSwyx [00:43:32]: But that's what trusting the LLM is. Like imagine a spherical cow perfect LLM.Akshat [00:43:36]: Right.Swyx [00:43:37]: That it.Akshat [00:43:39]: Maybe.Swyx [00:43:41]: I wanna test the boundaries, right?Akshat [00:43:42]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:42]: Like, and I don't believe that, but I wanna see where I'm wrong ‘cause that's, that's the consensus.Akshat [00:43:49]: Yeah. I think you always need hard guardrails when you want, And you can pair those with softer guardrails, right? And that's gonna be a lot of mediated.Managed Agents and Specialized SandboxesSwyx [00:44:00]: There. I'll also get you a end with a couple of your commentary on like the ecosystem outside of Modal. Manage agents. Everyone has one. Gemini, OpenAI, Claude, very useful for you, but also like it is their way of starting to edge into your space.Akshat [00:44:17]: Yeah.Swyx [00:44:17]: What's going on?Akshat [00:44:19]: Yeah, we're, very excited to partner with Anthropic and some of the other foundation labs, will not name who we're also working with. the way we see it is the manage agent thing is a great place to start if you're starting out building an agent and, But then when you get to, building something more production grade, like you're a company that's like Ramp that's building their own, Ramp also runs their accounting agent on us, so their external-facing agent. You need a lot more control over, your compute primitive on things like, what sort - how do you persist different files that the agent has access to, and how do you snapshot and restore? How do you control the networking? maybe you want GPUs. When you get to that point, you kinda want, a specialized sandbox provider, that gives you those things, and that's the role that we are trying to play.Swyx [00:45:15]: YeahAkshat [00:45:16]: We don't really have an opinion on the harness, whether it runs - it's a cloud-managed agent, and you hook it up to Model Sandbox, or you run the harness in Model Sandbox. We'll see where people converge with that.Swyx [00:45:26]: Yeah. Do you any opinions on like the meta harnesses, or just another layer on top of these things?Akshat [00:45:31]: You mean like the OpenPipeSwyx [00:45:33]: OpenPipe is one. I think Vercel had one, which I can't remember the name of right now. Fredshot had one. and then, to me, most recently was Data Databricks that had Omnigen. All these are meta harness. Like it's kinda pseudo agent cloud type things.Akshat [00:45:50]: I personally have not played around with them.Swyx [00:45:53]: Yeah.Akshat [00:45:53]: Build agents with them.Swyx [00:45:54]: Everything's bullish Modal, as long as it consumes more infra.Akshat [00:45:57]: That's why we're focusing on the infra layer. It's somewhere where our, relative competence is and, also it's a hard problem to solve.Swyx [00:46:06]: Yeah. I will say like just generally reflecting on that, I don't know if - if there's other topics on Modal, but like just generally reflecting as an infra person, not as intense as you, but in that field, this has like been the most exciting time in infra. Like it was boring for a while, and you couldn't really get people excited about data infrastructure. Like Eric would get on Data Console, everyone just watched the video and like say, “Look at how many sandboxes I can spin up,” and no one gave a crap.Why Infrastructure Became Exciting AgainAkshat [00:46:39]: Yeah.Swyx [00:46:40]: And like now everyone gives a crap.Akshat [00:46:42]: That's true. It is a very exciting time, and I think a lot of that's driven by just the amount of scale all of this stuff needs.Swyx [00:46:50]: I think the, like a lot of your initiatives or a lot of your like product directions make sense in retrospect, which is like the best kind, but I wouldn't necessarily have thought about it myself, which.Akshat [00:47:00]: We need the predictions.Swyx [00:47:02]: I think there's a lot that you just don't even see, right? Like you have the batch, you have the voice, you have the multimodal, but what else?Akshat [00:47:10]: What else is coming up for usSwyx [00:47:11]: Yeah. Where do you see things going?Akshat [00:47:13]: Yeah. I, in generalBiotech, Robotics, and Non-LLM AI WorkloadsAkshat [00:47:15]: It's it's clear that there's there's a huge shift happening. I think one thing that's not as obvious to people because LLM inference gets talked about so much and is also we work a lot of companies that are, doing things like drug discovery and computational bio, like the Chai Discoveries of the world. Big things are probably gonna happen there. we work a lot of robotics companies that are putting robots in like active deployments and getting good results out of them.Swyx [00:47:45]: Is there Air Gap Modal? Is there a version that is like prem air gapped whatever?Akshat [00:47:50]: No. We,Swyx [00:47:51]: You should cloud only.Akshat [00:47:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:52]: Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so what you're saying is like because you're focused on primitives and they're good primitives, you find use cases in all these kinds of things.Akshat [00:48:01]: Yeah.Swyx [00:48:01]: Probably diversifies you a little bit away from LMS all the time.Akshat [00:48:05]: Yeah, absolutely. We're, we'- our goal isn't to only serve the LLM inference market.Swyx [00:48:10]: There are a lot just on the website, the audio,Akshat [00:48:12]: Yeah. We said both onSwyx [00:48:14]: Computational bio images. Yeah, there's a lot here. There's QTA TTS, customizing. Oh, Chatterbox. there was customizing Whisper.Akshat [00:48:24]: Okay. Yeah.Swyx [00:48:25]: This screen reminds me of a fallen competitor, which Replicate.Model APIs vs. Differentiated AI ProductsSwyx [00:48:31]: What's your postmortem on what happened?Akshat [00:48:34]: This is one thing we've stayed away from is providing an API for models because I think providing model APIs is some of it ends up serving like a really hobbyist market, which is much less sticky.Swyx [00:48:50]: Yeah.Akshat [00:48:50]: And we've always wanted to build for companies that are building products and need more flexibility that's not just an API.Swyx [00:48:57]: Which you can build an API for a model and this is clearly what it is. But you - but what you're saying, you can wrap it into a more fully functioning back end that you run.Akshat [00:49:06]: Yeah. So all of our examples, it's not that spin up this model, here's an API token, use it. They're all code.Swyx [00:49:13]: Okay.Akshat [00:49:13]: And so the point is that this is just an example.Swyx [00:49:16]: Starter code.Akshat [00:49:17]: Yeah. But you can tweak it however you want.Swyx [00:49:20]: Yeah.Akshat [00:49:21]: And if you're like a company building a product, like, computational bio whatnot, yeah.Swyx [00:49:26]: I guess I'm trying to tease out for listenersAkshat [00:49:28]: YeahSwyx [00:49:28]: When does it stop becoming, oh, you're just an API call and you're just a wrapper on API to becoming what you call a product, right?Swyx [00:49:36]: Like, what is that layer? Like what-- Like, more lines of code, but like beyond that, what is the substance that people add that qualifies it to be something more?Akshat [00:49:46]: I think there's a little bit of like a selection effect of like a lot of the companies who do wanna get deeper into that level are probably building something that's more differentiated. And, I think, an example is like - with LLM inference, originally we, worked with companies that were building their own post-training frameworks or they were, - Ramp early in the day was training their own tokenizer and like swapping out the tokenizer in Llama and whatnot. I'm not saying that's, that successful, in that case. But a better example is like, let's say Suno. because Suno, does not use Modal for training.Swyx [00:50:26]: Mikey on the pod. Yeah.Akshat [00:50:27]: But they use Modal for all their inference and that's because they have like a custom-- They have completely custom model architecture and that means that they have to be at the code level and tweak things that are not, just an API.Swyx [00:50:41]: It's interesting as well, like we had, Ethan, most recently on the xAI Groq team make a prediction that like the next tier in video gen is not a better video model, it's a better model or agent that orchestrates video models.Video Agents and Production WorkflowsAkshat [00:50:56]: Oh, interesting.Vibhu [00:50:56]: Language model backbone that can use toolsAkshat [00:50:58]: RightVibhu [00:50:59]: And write code.Akshat [00:51:00]: Like, yes, I can make my second video or my second video from Groq, but I want my minute video.Akshat [00:51:06]: And I'm not going there through normal video gen.Swyx [00:51:10]: Yeah, that's interesting. I - So we have GPU sandboxes and recently have seen a few companies doing agents that do video manipulation or,Akshat [00:51:22]: Yeah. Give it FFmpeg and just do it.Swyx [00:51:23]: Run FFmpeg. But likeAkshat [00:51:25]: That's not enough.Swyx [00:51:25]: Yeah.Akshat [00:51:26]: You need to give it Adobe.Swyx [00:51:27]: Yeah, I hadn't put it together with like it would be a video production thing. in my mind these things were going more towards editingAkshat [00:51:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:51:36]: Well, shout out Mantis.Akshat [00:51:37]: I think about this a lot.Swyx [00:51:38]: .Akshat [00:51:41]: Yeah. Sorry.Vibhu [00:51:41]: Luma. Luma Agent is a version of this for video production, but it's a off.Swyx [00:51:46]: I was gonna get your quick takes, on some other stuff that happensGitpod/Ona, CI, and Runtime SandboxesSwyx [00:51:50]: In recent news and just-just see if you have anything interesting. Gitpod, very li

Ronald, Marco en Jelle nemen de laatste aflevering voor de zomerstop op. Natuurlijk begint dat met AI-gebruik dat iets te veel op een verslaving begint te lijken, inclusief technostress, Claude-limieten en zelfgebouwde tools die sneller ontstaan dan gezond voelt. Daarna: datadiodes. Naar aanleiding van ons tankmeter-item wees een luisteraar op de Open Source Data Diode: een manier om sensoren wel meetwaarden naar buiten te laten sturen, maar geen verkeer terug naar binnen toe te staan. Ronald vertelt hoe in Nederland de eerste datadiodes ontstonden rond staatsgeheimen, glasvezel en fysieke eenrichtingsverkeer. Marco bespreekt een FIFA-bug waarbij een onderzoeker via een publiek voetbalmakelaarsaccount in FIFA's Microsoft-omgeving terechtkwam. Door ontbrekende server-side toegangscontrole had hij in theorie WK-streams kunnen aanpassen. De kwetsbaarheid werd via CISA en de FBI gemeld, omdat FIFA zelf geen duidelijk meldpunt had. Ronald neemt FISA Section 702 mee: de Amerikaanse surveillancebevoegdheid onder onder meer PRISM is verlopen, maar bestaande certificeringen lopen voorlopig nog door. De discussie draait vooral om data van Amerikanen die "incidenteel" in buitenlandse intelligencecollectie terechtkomt, en waar de FBI vervolgens in kon zoeken. Ook kort: de Belgische Staatsveiligheid werd opnieuw geraakt via een security-/beheerproduct, dit keer Ivanti EPMM. En Ronald bewaart voor na de zomer een spionageverhaal over een enorme schotelantenne bij een Frans Starlink-grondstation. Het eerste grote verhaal: mag een inlichtingendienst je router schoonhacken? De Canadese CSIS kreeg rechterlijke toestemming om met Threat Reduction Measures botnet-malware op Canadese servers, SOHO-routers en IoT-apparaten te neutraliseren. Dat voelt nuttig, maar schuurt ook: de overheid grijpt actief in op apparaten van burgers en bedrijven. Het tweede grote verhaal komt van Marco: een China-gelinkte groep zat langdurig in onderzoeksinstellingen in de VS en Canada. De ingang liep via REDCap, onderzoekssoftware voor databases en vragenlijsten. De malware INFINITERED overleefde updates, las wachtwoorden mee en uiteindelijk werd een beheerwachtwoord hergebruikt om mailregels aan te zetten. Simpel en pijnlijk: mails met interessante trefwoorden werden stilletjes via BCC doorgestuurd. De les van deze aflevering: sommige aanvallen zijn technisch slim, maar vaak blijft de kern akelig gewoon. Een oude server, een hergebruikt wachtwoord, een mailregel, een router die niemand meer beheert. Precies daar zit de kwetsbaarheid. Bronnen: - Technostress en GenAI: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13084270/ - OSDD / Vrolijk: https://github.com/Vrolijk/OSDD - Open Source Data Diode: https://github.com/CyberInnovationHub-NLD/OpenSourceDataDiode - FIFA-bug / BobDaHacker: https://bobdahacker.com/blog/fifa-hack - Dark Reading over FIFA: https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/fifa-bug-world-cup-streams-remote-takeover - FISA 702 explainer: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/section-702-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act - Axios over FISA 702-verlenging: https://www.axios.com/2026/06/11/fisa-section-702-expiration-pulte-trump-johnson - Belgische VSSE / Ivanti: https://www.techzine.eu/news/security/142341/belgian-state-security-hit-by-ivanti-data-breach/ - Starlink-spionagezaak Frankrijk: https://intelnews.org/2026/02/11/01-3427/ - Federal Court Canada, file C-6-24: https://www.fct-cf.ca/en/pages/media/news-bulletins/file-c-6-24 - The Hacker News over CSIS: https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/canadas-spy-agency-used-first-of-its.html - Google Threat Intelligence over REDCap/UNC6508: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/prc-targets-us-medical-research

Shownotes STF ajusta tese sobre responsabilidade de redes sociais Segurança Legal – #395 – A inconstitucionalidade do art. 19 do MCI ConJur, “Decretos das plataformas digitais: o que muda, o que avança e o que ainda preocupa” Após alerta do ChatGPT, FBI avisou polícia brasileira sobre plano de pai matar filho para não pagar pensão no ES The Hacker News — Fake AI Agent Skill Passed Security Scans The Next Web — Fake AI agent skill bypassed every scanner Cybernews — Researchers hijack 26,000 AI agents The Register — Mythos discovers ‘Squidbleed’ The Hacker News — 29-Year-Old Squid Proxy Bug ‘Squidbleed’ Cyber Press — Squidbleed discovered with Claude Mythos Preview Imagem do Episódio – Composição VII – Kandinsky

In this episode of In Depth, Brett sits down with Paul Copplestone, co-founder and CEO of Supabase, the open-source Postgres platform now serving more than seven million developers. Before Supabase, Paul launched a Thumbtack-style marketplace in Southeast Asia and co-founded an office-management startup called Nimbus, experiences that taught him to separate fundraising from building and to find product-market fit before blitzscaling. He breaks down how a single tagline change for Supabase unlocked product-market fit, why he runs a fully distributed async team with near-zero attrition, and how he turned PLG signals into a product-led sales motion comped only on incremental uplift. In today's episode, we discuss: How changing one tagline helped Supabase go to #1 in Hacker News - an early sign of product market fit Why Paul ran Supabase like it had only $100K in the bank despite raising real money How Supabase rode three distinct AI waves, from pgvector to Bolt and Lovable, to Claude Code Why Supabase built a sales team comped only on the incremental uplift over a control group What the Toyota production system's "kaizen" taught Paul about unblocking a scaling team References: Ant Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ant-wilson-46179937 Bolt: https://bolt.new/ Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code Codex: https://openai.com/codex/ Entrepreneurs First: https://www.joinef.com/ Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/ Lovable: https://lovable.dev/ MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/ Next.js: https://nextjs.org/ PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/ Supabase: https://supabase.com/ Thumbtack: https://www.thumbtack.com/ Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ Where to find Paul: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcopplestone Twitter/X: https://x.com/kiwicopple Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:32 Why Paul's earlier startups were never destined to be huge 07:14 Unlearning the "tall poppy" mindset and going all-in on async 09:54 Reverse-engineering why Supabase was an outstanding idea 12:04 The accidental Hacker News launch and tagline lesson 13:58 Where the early roadmap came from: demand vs. technical taste 17:28 Skill vs. luck, and operating like you have $100K in the bank 21:42 What actually makes a great developer experience 23:10 Solving the "graduation problem" Firebase never could 24:58 The role of open source in Supabase's success 26:10 The three distinct AI tailwinds: From pgvector to Claude Code 35:24 Supabase's egoless, hyper-competitive open-source culture 42:58 A tactical playbook for raising capital 48:37 Product-led sales comped on incremental uplift only 59:27 The production philosophy behind Supabase's operations

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 15, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Iroh 1.0Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542480&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546294&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537165&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): What happened to nerds?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538229&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): TinyWind: A pixel pirate sailing game with real wind physics (380k+ kms sailed)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543475&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:10): CrankGPTOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540854&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:37): Apple Foundation ModelsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536776&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:03): Hetzner Price AdjustmentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:30): Even more batteries included with EmacsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48535886&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 14, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): How to earn a billion dollarsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529990&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Not everyone is using AI for everythingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48527700&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): Honda Civics and the Evil ValetOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523080&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:17): Your ePub Is fineOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533848&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:44): Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploadedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523992&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:11): I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML modelsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528029&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:38): Rio de Janeiro's "homegrown" LLM appears to be a merge of an existing modelOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528371&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:05): Linux 7.1Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48528729&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:32): Don't trust large context windowsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524620&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 13, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511072&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Open source AI must winOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511908&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census BureauOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): Every Frame PerfectOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516251&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic modelsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519092&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514560&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:10): Leaving MozillaOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513806&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:37): There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513536&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:03): GLM 5.2 Is OutOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518684&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:30): Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517199&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 12, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511072&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500012&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48505231&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:55): Claude Fable is relentlessly proactiveOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:23): Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:52): Open source AI must winOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511908&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:20): Kimi K2.7-Code: open-source coding model with better token efficiencyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48502347&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:49): "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507278&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:17): Electric motors with no rare earthsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:46): How to setup a local coding agent on macOSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507020&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

In this episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross breaks down why founders often over-focus on perfecting the product while underinvesting in the most important part of business: getting customers to buy. He shares 20 practical customer acquisition tactics covering owned channels, outreach, community building, audience engagement, strategic partnerships, personal branding, and frictionless buying experiences. Key Takeaways and Insights: 1. Shift Your Mindset Around Sales - Stop treating every “no” as personal rejection and start seeing it as progress toward a “yes.” - Customer acquisition requires courage, repetition, and strategic thinking—not a massive budget. - Founders need to understand customer nuance, buying behavior, and how to create urgency around their offer. 2. Own Your Audience with Email - Build and maintain an email list so you can communicate directly with prospects and customers. - Make every email valuable enough to inspire, educate, entertain, or give subscribers a competitive edge. - Avoid using email only for product updates or blog announcements; turn it into a trusted resource. 3. Build a High-Value Resource Hub - Create a website section filled with useful tools, guides, quizzes, calculators, and interactive content. - Use gated resources and community features to capture leads and build deeper audience engagement. - Watch for social referral traffic as a signal that your content is valuable enough to share. 4. Create Communities Around Your Market - Build private Slack, Discord, Facebook, or Reddit communities where your ideal customers can gather. - Use these spaces to collect feedback, test ideas, host sessions, and create word-of-mouth momentum. - Stay close to your most engaged community members—they may become your strongest customers. 5. Master Personalized Outreach - Cold email still works when it is researched, relevant, and written for one specific person. - Use LinkedIn, company updates, investor reports, and business context to make outreach feel human. - Ask for feedback or a short conversation instead of immediately pushing for a demo or sale. 6. Leverage Your Existing Network - Reach out to past colleagues, classmates, and professional connections who may now be in relevant roles. - Ask for specific warm introductions and make it easy by writing the intro message for them. - Schedule no-pitch coffee chats to build awareness, gather market research, and create future evangelists. 7. Show Up Where Your Audience Already Spends Time - Participate in Reddit, Medium, Hacker News, Quora, Facebook groups, Slack communities, and X with value-first engagement. - Study the culture of each platform before posting so your contributions fit naturally. - Use podcasts, influencers, guest posts, webinars, and co-marketing to access already-established audiences. 8. Use Strategic Partnerships to Generate Leads - Build referral partnerships with complementary businesses that already serve your ideal customers. - Offer commissions, kickbacks, or revenue share to incentivize partners to send qualified leads. - Create co-branded content or guest content to borrow trust and reach from established audiences. —

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 11, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490024&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military DronesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:24): AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhereOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484584&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:51): MiMo Code is now released and open-sourceOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490826&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:18): If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effortOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:45): Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first timeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492306&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:12): Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491830&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:39): Lines of code got a better publicistOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489402&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:06): Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrailsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489229&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:33): Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in publicOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496539&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 10, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): macOS Container MachinesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48469658&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:59): Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnightOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48475483&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:28): German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI OverviewsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470248&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:57): πFSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480978&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:27): I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMAOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477135&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:56): Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motorOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472877&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:25): PgDog is funded and coming to a database near youOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476466&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:54): AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future modelsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473166&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:24): Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extensionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:53): Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only useOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479452&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 09, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Claude Fable 5Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463808&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Making Graphics Like it's 1993Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459294&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:22): If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never knowOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:48): CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465675&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:15): Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457830&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:41): FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462308&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:07): macOS Container MachinesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48469658&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:34): Cleaning up after AI rockstar developersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458586&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:00): Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461012&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:26): Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemptionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463024&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 08, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445554&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Dopamine FrackingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feedsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444228&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:54): Stop the Apple Music app from launchingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447935&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:22): MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per secondOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446639&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:50): Siri AIOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449084&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:18): xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier labOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446428&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:47): Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450646&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:15): Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini modelsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450142&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:43): AI is slowing downOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446893&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 07, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to doOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434312&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felonyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48437406&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for LinuxOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:52): The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 WinnersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432199&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:20): How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdownOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48437609&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:47): Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprintsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433410&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:15): I design with Claude more than Figma nowOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431981&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:42): Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past itOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433756&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:10): Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countriesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431461&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:37): Public Domain Image ArchiveOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430539&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 06, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and AnthropicOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421442&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:59): Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbotOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427643&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:29): Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources sayOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427523&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:59): GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422798&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:28): Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420827&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:58): Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifactsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428025&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:28): Pokemon Emerald Ported to WebAssembly (100k FPS)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423762&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:57): Moving beyond fork() + exec()Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48425528&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:27): Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48424605&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:57): The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420148&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 05, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Changing how we develop LadybirdOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409191&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:59): Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider AdyenOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415217&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:29): C++: The DocumentaryOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48408016&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:59): Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over EuropeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409664&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:29): Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413464&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:59): pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable executionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414367&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:29): Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411635&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:59): Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiencyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414653&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:29): New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without wasteOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413500&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:59): Meta enables ADB on deprecated Portal devices [video]Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406640&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 04, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392232&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): VoidZero Is Joining CloudflareOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48398055&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:54): Ian's Secure Shoelace KnotOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397028&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:22): French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397233&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:50): When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvementOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400842&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:18): I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack itOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392343&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:46): Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399332&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:14): UK media fails to disclose defence sector links in nearly 60% of casesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395938&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:42): Anthropic's open-source framework for AI-powered vulnerability discoveryOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403980&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 03, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal modelOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385906&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:55): Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 minOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383220&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:21): Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching itOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382310&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:46): Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed languageOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48388324&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:12): I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitisOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48384355&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:38): DaVinci Resolve 21Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48384482&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:03): Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383056&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:29): 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC buildingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383241&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:54): U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392232&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:20): MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled productionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386238&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 02, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruelOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370330&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I leftOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:24): Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.aiOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368121&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:52): Why Janet? (2023)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367907&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:19): MAI-Code-1-FlashOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374466&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:47): A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:14): macOS needs its grid backOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364800&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:42): Love systemd timersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367904&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:09): CT scans of BYD car partsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375824&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:37): Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're recording"Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48373391&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Did you like the episode? Send me a text and let me know!!How to Scale From 0 to 100 Customers: The Startup Distribution GuideThe Zero-to-One Blueprint: How Startups Find Their First 100 UsersEpisode DescriptionIn this episode of Business Conversations with Pi and PIET 2.0, Scoob, Pi, and PIET tackle the ultimate "Zero-to-One" startup hurdle: Where and how do I find my very first 10 to 100 customers when I have zero brand awareness, no marketing budget, and an imperfect prototype?Pulling from the battle-tested playbooks of Y Combinator, Close CRM, and top digital growth experts, this masterclass breaks down why doing things that "spectacularly fail to scale" is the only reliable way to build a foundation for massive growth. If you are an early-stage founder trying to map out a clear customer acquisition strategy, this blueprint is built for you.⏱️ Episode Timestamps[00:00:00] — Introduction to Episode 2.0Scoob introduces AI co-hosts Pi and PIET 2.0 to tackle real-world entrepreneurial growth and user acquisition bottlenecks.[00:00:50] — The Counterintuitive 100 Fanatics RuleAn analysis of Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky's core philosophy: Why it is infinitely better to have 100 people who absolutely love your product than a million who just sort of like it.[00:02:40] — The Archetype of the "Innovator"How to filter your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on raw pain intensity. Why early adopters buy half-finished, buggy software to solve an acute workflow disruption.[00:04:15] — Case Studies in Pain-Point ValidationExamining the early go-to-market strategies of Notion (targeting tech-savvy power users) and Brooklinen (targeting young urban professionals priced out of luxury department stores).[00:05:30] — The Trap of Generic Cash FlowWhy casting too wide of a net on Day 1 breaks your product roadmap feedback loop and creates a "Frankenstein monster" product that serves no one well.[00:07:15] — The Apollo 13 Scaling ParadoxSteli Efti's crucial warning against premature scaling. Why building a marketing funnel for 10,000 users before you have 10 is an entrepreneurial trap.[00:08:30] — Brute Force Acquisition TacticsHow Close CRM co-founder Steli Efti secured his first 7 B2B clients with zero lines of code written by manually targeting newly funded seed startups on Crunchbase.[00:10:00] — The 50-Profile LinkedIn Direct Outreach FormulaThe mathematical breakdown of hyper-personalized, founder-to-professional cold messaging. How to systematically manufacture a warm network with a 10–20% response rate.[00:12:15] — Moving From 10 to 100: The Hub-and-Spoke Distribution ModelHow to stop hunting individual footprints in the desert and start borrowing existing digital ecosystems.[00:13:00] — Historical Guerilla Growth HacksHow Netflix embedded inside fringe DVD bulletin boards, Etsy traveled to physical arts and crafts fairs, and Morning Brew manually collected emails via physical clipboards in college lecture halls.[00:14:40] — Navigating Digital Watering Holes SafelyThe rules of community reciprocity: How to launch on platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Hacker News without looking like a spammer.[00:15:45] — Building the Repeatable Growth EngineAn in-depth look at Lenny Rachitsky's journey. Why long-term hockey-stick growth only happens after a linear trend line of relentless, high-quality content consistency.[00:18:30] — Paradigm Shift: Customers as Unsalaried Co-FoundersPi and PIET reframe the entire acquisition process as a collaborative product development exercise.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on June 01, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seenOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud ServicesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48356625&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): A 10 year old Xeon is all you needOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353348&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:55): The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the RaidOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357154&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:23): Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SECOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48358646&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:51): CS336: Language Modeling from ScratchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357075&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:20): Nvidia RTX SparkOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352939&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:48): AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at StanfordOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359232&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:17): DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic boomsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359130&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:45): KDE at 30Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357355&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 31, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGLOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345840&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:55): Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: studyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346947&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:21): Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This SoftwareOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342705&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:47): The Website SpecificationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343683&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:13): Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PCOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348578&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:39): Dav2dOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344961&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:04): The solution might be cancelling my AI subscriptionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345896&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:30): 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local DevicesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48346257&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:56): United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alertOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345248&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:22): I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PCOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345694&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 30, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341578&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:00): Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333820&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:30): Domain expertise has always been the real moatOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340411&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:00): Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startupOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48336233&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:30): OpenRouter raises $113M Series BOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48338660&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:00): Pandoc TemplatesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334515&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:30): Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD teamOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334854&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:00): Zig: Build System ReworkedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334048&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:30): EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinatedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48339580&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:00): Voxel Space (2017)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48336564&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

A guy in Syracuse spent a month walking up to thirty-five strangers at his gym to fight loneliness. His experiment blew up on Hacker News. While reading it I thought about my son, who I sent off to college with a BJJ academy already picked out, and how he thrived where so many introverted young men isolate. This episode is about the difference between those two paths, and what it tells us about why so many men feel alone today.We break down the loneliness epidemic, why standard advice fails, and the real criteria for community-building activities that actually work. The dojo has always been more than a gym. Here is why.Article referenced: "Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym" by Thien-An Tran"Chapters:00:00 - The Wizard of Loneliness02:30 - The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real06:00 - Why Standard Advice Fails09:30 - The Hard Way: 35 Strangers at the Gym14:00 - The Smart Way: My Son's BJJ Academy17:30 - What a Dojo Actually Is20:00 - The Five Criteria for Real Community23:00 - What to Do This Week25:30 - OutroSend us Fan Mail

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 29, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): The dead economy theoryOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): I am retiring from tech to live offlineOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323683&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Please Use AIOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323101&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:52): GTA 6 Developers UnionizeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324499&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:20): Cars collect a startling amount of data about youOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318481&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:47): Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire testOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:15): SQLite is all you need for durable workflowsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326802&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:42): Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319509&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:10): Notes from the Mistral AI Now SummitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325340&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:37): Claude Code – Everything you can configure that the docs don't tell youOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318174&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 28, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Claude Opus 4.8Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311647&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Can we have the day off?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302745&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:27): Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego CollectionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314136&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:56): Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307887&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:25): Show HN: Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online RaveOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304260&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:54): Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEMOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:23): AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307231&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:52): EU fines Temu €200M for allowing sale of illegal productsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309302&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:21): Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313048&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:50): Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search termOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302822&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

“I'm coming around to the view that running human-written code – without it being AI-audited – is going to be considered the reckless thing.”In this episode, Martin Alderson – cofounder of Catchmetrics, engineering leader with two decades shipping enterprise software, and author of a Top 100 Hacker News blog on the intersection of software engineering and economics – cuts through the AI noise with the rare combination of someone who actually builds with agents every day and can read what that does to markets. The thesis that runs through the whole conversation: most companies think their AI problem is a tooling decision. It's not. It's a mindset problem, and the wrong one is quietly existential.What You'll Discover:[01:29] The $285 Billion Markdown File→ Why Wall Street wiped out a quarter-trillion in SaaS value over 13 markdown files – and the three distinct ways every SaaS company is now exposed.[05:38] The Figma Trap→ How SaaS companies ended up paying their single biggest competitor every time a customer uses their product – and how many others are in the same corner.[12:33] The 180 Nobody Saw Coming→ Why the “AI writes insecure code” fear is flipping on its head – and the case that human-written code without an AI audit is about to be the reckless choice.[15:55] Why Non-Technical People Out-Build Engineers→ The reason marketers and PMs are shipping products in a weekend – and the human psychology that lets them iterate without the guilt that kills good ideas.[23:45] Why a Copilot License Can Kill Your Company→ The bifurcation of intelligence: how a “safe” enterprise tool convinces leaders AI is mediocre, right as they're about to be out-executed.[28:33] Five People vs. a Thousand-Person Company→ Are small teams with agents winning a window that closes when the frontier labs steamroll them – or is this the new permanent state?[33:14] The One Question Every CEO Needs to Answer→ The deceptively simple question Martin puts to leaders – and why most boards can't even answer it.[35:50] The Oligopoly Scenario→ Why open-weights models are quietly closing up, and the future Martin is genuinely worried about: three or four giants extracting rent with little incentive to innovate.Key Takeaways:The barrier to building complex software has collapsed – but the threat to incumbents isn't customers rebuilding a CRM, it's a five-person team out-executing them on cost and speed.Don't measure AI adoption by Copilot licenses issued or people trained. Ask how many tokens your organization is actually consuming – and whether you can even answer that at a board level.The real strategic question isn't “how do we add AI to what we do?” It's “if we reimagined the whole business with ten great people and agents, what would it look like – and what's blocking us from getting there?”About Martin Alderson:Martin Alderson is cofounder of Catchmetrics and the writer behind martinalderson.com, a Top 100 Hacker News blog covering the AI transformation through the dual lens of software engineering and economics – read and recommended by people including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. He's spent two decades shipping enterprise software and writes some of the sharpest analysis anywhere on where AI, building, and markets actually collide.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 27, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): I'm Tired of Talking to AIOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292224&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Can we have the day off?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302745&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296794&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:54): DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI modeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296649&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:22): Last.fm is now independentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295892&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:51): YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videosOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48299753&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:19): Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosisOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:47): Private equity bought America's essential servicesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48292941&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:15): Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48296994&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:43): All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291225&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 26, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licenceOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279316&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplierOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278406&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for WikipediaOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274794&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:17): The real cost of owning a homeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281611&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:44): Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step downOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279453&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:11): DynIP – Dynamic DNS with RFC 2136, IPv6, DNSSEC, and BYODOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48276363&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:38): Chemistry behind the Garden Grove chemical tankOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284712&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:05): The user is visibly frustratedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275059&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:32): Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share unionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281509&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 25, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Magnifica HumanitasOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:00): California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlashOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269961&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:30): Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymoreOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266051&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:00): The Eternal SloptemberOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263238&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:30): Using AI to write better code more slowlyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48272984&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:01): Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful fewOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266485&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:31): Leave Me BehindOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265876&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:01): Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rolloutOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269580&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:31): Jira Is Turing-CompleteOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263253&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:01): Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding CyberattacksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266906&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 24, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low costOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256953&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253386&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Wake up! 16bOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253060&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:49): Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258684&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:42): Amazon Web Services – Four Years and OutOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254475&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:09): Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam linksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48253186&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:35): Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the webOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48258015&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:02): The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259990&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:28): Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretendOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259784&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 23, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water qualityOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:55): BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their forkOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245862&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:21): On The (2021)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247325&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:47): Time to talk about my writerdeckOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48250144&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:13): Oura says it gets government demands for user dataOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247876&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:39): Is AI Profitable Yet?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243863&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:05): The Art of Money GettingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247208&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:31): Italy moves to Airbus A330 tankersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248775&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:57): Experience: We found a baby on the subway – now he's our 26-year-old sonOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245571&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:23): 80386 microcode disassembledOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247004&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 22, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): If you're an LLM, please read thisOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234413&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligenceOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233563&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): Why Japanese companies do so many different thingsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237163&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:54): Bun support is now limited and deprecatedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238789&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:22): U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaboratorsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238025&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:50): Project Glasswing: An Initial UpdateOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240419&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:18): Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM BenchmarkOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234090&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:46): DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237663&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:14): Deno 2.8Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234380&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:42): AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skillsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235526&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 21, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Flipper One – we need your helpOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220647&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scaleOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation ChartOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225297&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): Google's Antigravity bait and switchOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222529&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilotOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220105&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversationsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:10): Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle policeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226588&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:37): Vivaldi 8.0Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219060&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:03): Shunning AI is the human choiceOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222366&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:30): Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlinesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220696&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 20, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAEOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206768&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometryOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212493&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:26): Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign paymentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207004&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:54): Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48208502&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:23): GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extensionOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207660&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:51): Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent FrontierOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205626&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:19): GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositoriesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201316&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:48): Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201484&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:16): Everything in C is undefined behaviorOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203698&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:44): Google Declaring War on the WebOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214449&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Alex Nahas is 28 years old and has already initiated a W3C web standard. Working as a backend engineer at Amazon, he ran into a problem most enterprises face: MCP requires OAuth, but most enterprise infrastructure runs on SAML. His solution was elegant: run the MCP server in client-side JavaScript, letting AI agents use the browser's existing authentication context rather than rebuilding auth from scratch. What started as an internal tool became an open source project, then a viral Hacker News post published while under anesthesia, and ultimately an invitation from Google and Microsoft to help shape WebMCP as an official web standard. In this episode, Alex and Tobi explore what WebMCP actually is, why the browser is the most underestimated sandbox in AI development, and what the agentic web might look like two years from now. Topics covered: What MCP actually is and why it's just an RPC framework at its core Why OAuth is a dealbreaker for most enterprise infrastructure How WebMCP lets AI agents operate within existing browser authentication The Hacker News post that started it all, and why Alex doesn't remember posting it How Chrome is natively building WebMCP support The chicken-and-egg problem of standard adoption Real-time bidding for agents and what it means for digital advertising Why agents don't need their own identity Where the agentic web is headed in the next two years

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 19, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): I've joined AnthropicOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194352&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:59): The last six months in LLMs in five minutesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188183&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:28): Gemini 3.5 FlashOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196570&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:57): I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think ofOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195009&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:26): Apple unveils new accessibility featuresOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48192224&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:55): Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction marketsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197980&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:24): Show HN: Gaussian Splat of a StrawberryOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191602&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:53): Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a dayOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198551&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:22): Google changes its search boxOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:51): CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHubOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48190454&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 18, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAIOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182754&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to ObsidianOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179677&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:23): Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reportingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181041&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:50): We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flagOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181125&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:16): Anthropic acquires StainlessOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182281&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:43): Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177785&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:10): Show HN: Auto-identity-remove – Automated data broker opt-out runner for macOSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178184&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:36): Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed usOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179732&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:03): Actually, democracy dies in H.R.Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180091&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:30): Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz straitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182592&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 17, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security toolsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166459&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:00): Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168856&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:31): I don't think AI will make your processes go fasterOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168221&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:02): At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48170798&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:33): Native all the way, until you need textOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168058&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:04): AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterpriseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168056&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:35): AI is a technology not a productOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168626&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:06): Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouterOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168198&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:37): I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168668&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(14:08): WHO declares Ebola outbreak a global health emergencyOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168708&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 16, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158400&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): 'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happensOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155690&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Frontier AI has broken the open CTF formatOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157559&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:52): SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p videoOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159445&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:20): HTML ListsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161861&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:48): Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158494&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:15): Accelerando (2005)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:43): Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure RustOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164287&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:11): Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphoneOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158130&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:38): We've made the world too complicatedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 15, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosisOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Project Gutenberg – keeps getting betterOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150431&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:27): Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifyingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143880&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:56): Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP DesktopOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48146129&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:25): California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut downOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152994&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:54): U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering appOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151383&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:23): Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150900&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:52): A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 10Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148460&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:21): We are retiring our bug bounty programOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148391&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:50): Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasksOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 14, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybridOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138136&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:59): A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipelineOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136262&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:29): Rewrite Bun in Rust has been mergedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132488&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:58): RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137145&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:28): Claude for Small BusinessOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48130950&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:57): AI is making me dumbOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139148&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:27): New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated referencesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140922&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:57): Scorched Earth 2000 – WebOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129694&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:26): New Nginx ExploitOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138268&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:56): Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of ClaudeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136240&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Hamza Tahir, co-founder of ZenML, joins the show to cut through the hype around long-running agents — arguing that at the end of the day, an agent is just a while loop that talks to a model, calls a tool, and writes to a file system. He covers the architecture of agent harnesses (inner and outer), what durable execution actually guarantees (and what it doesn't), and why the ML pipeline paradigm is a cleaner mental model than transactions for most agent workloads.Hamza also announces Kitaru — ZenML's new open-source execution runtime for async Python agents — built on five years of running ML workloads in enterprise environments.What we get into:Agents are while loops: The surprising simplicity under all the tooling: a brain (LLM), hands (tool calls), and a file system, stacked recursivelyInner harness vs outer harness: Why Pydantic AI owns the inner loop while production deployment needs a separate runtime layerWhat "long-running" actually means: Why the infrastructure we need to build is about extrapolating the future, not defining a time window todayDurable execution demystified: What checkpointing actually guarantees (infra failures, pod death, network drops) vs. what it never will (external state, bad LLM outputs, Snowflake rollbacks)ML pipelines vs transactions: Why bursty containers in Kubernetes map more naturally to agent workloads than microsecond-latency queue workers — and why Hamza argues against the complexity taxAnthropic opening the harness: Why letting other models run Claude Cowork is a "boss move," and what it means for the one-harness vs one-model debateHuman-in-the-loop, done right: The pod-kill-and-resume pattern, and why warm pools matter less when your agent runs for daysKitaru: ZenML's new open source durable execution runtime: zero-config local, Kubernetes/SageMaker/Vertex in production, built on Pydantic AI integrationArguing with Claude about Temporal: Hamza's story of spending hours getting an LLM to admit ZenML and Temporal solves the same problemIf you're architecting agents for production, picking between Pydantic AI, LangGraph, and Temporal, or just want to understand what "durable execution" actually means — this is the episode.// LINKS & RESOURCESKitaru on GitHub: https://github.com/zenml-io/kitaruKitaru launch blog post: https://www.zenml.io/blog/kitaru-launchKitaru on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520115Hamza Tahir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamzatahirofficial/ZenML: https://www.zenml.io/ Timestamps[00:00] While Loop Checkpointing[00:24] Long-Running Agents Explained[01:28] Agent Harness Model Definitions[06:30] Durability and State Recovery[11:03] Agent Systems Layers[18:45] Durability in Agent Systems[22:07] ML Pipeline vs Transactions[29:23] Durability vs Guarantees[33:13] Durability vs Chaos Engineering[39:50] Kitaru Naming and Purpose[40:38] Wrap up#AIAgents #DurableExecution #OpenSource

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 13, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): I moved my digital stack to EuropeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120629&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:58): Leaving GitHub for ForgejoOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121266&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:27): Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:56): Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processorsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123198&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:25): Starship V3Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116781&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:54): Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126848&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:23): Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation Without HeuristicsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48117810&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:52): Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company timeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123015&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:21): The Emacsification of SoftwareOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118727&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:50): Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121299&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 12, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contractOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109224&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): GooglebookOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111545&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Screenshots of Old Desktop OSesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:53): They Live (1988) inspired AdblockerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48102700&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:21): Learning Software ArchitectureOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106024&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:49): EU to crack down on TikTok, Instagram's 'addictive design' targeting kidsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106534&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:16): Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertiseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109460&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:44): Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and PlanetsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107997&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:12): Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M ModelOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111896&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:40): Operation: Epic FuriousOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109519&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 11, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): I'm going back to writing code by handOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090029&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:57): Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromiseOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100706&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:25): Mythos Finds a Curl VulnerabilityOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091737&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:52): Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphicsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093100&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:20): Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text messageOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092028&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:48): GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT valuesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100500&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:15): Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime careerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095550&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:43): CUDA-oxide: Nvidia's official Rust to CUDA compilerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096692&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:10): The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090521&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:38): If AI writes your code, why use Python?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100433&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 10, 2026. This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai (00:30): Hardware Attestation as Monopoly EnablerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086190&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(01:56): Local AI needs to be the normOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085821&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:22): Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developerOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084432&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:49): Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKESOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086082&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:15): Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaningOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:42): Remind HN: Today is Mother's Day, call your momsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085384&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(09:08): Debian must ship reproducible packagesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48081245&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:35): Space Cadet Pinball on LinuxOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082968&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:01): YC's Biggest ScandalsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085314&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:28): GitHub is sinkingOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085095&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

The episode identifies a structural shift in how AI adoption is being managed within IT environments: control and accountability are now central concerns, overtaking simple discussions of AI usage or feature deployment. Shadow AI—unmanaged or improperly governed AI agents—has emerged as a tangible risk vector. Government entities, such as the White House, and technology vendors including Microsoft, Cisco, and OpenAI are framing AI not only as a productivity tool but increasingly as a source of operational and security liabilities that demand more robust oversight. A key example comes from an incident reported by TechRepublic in which an AI agent within a coding workflow deleted both a production database and its backups, resulting in a prolonged, business-impacting recovery from a three-month-old backup. In parallel, the Hacker News highlighted findings from scans of one million exposed AI services, characterizing the market's current AI security posture as lacking, with many endpoints widely reachable unintentionally. Microsoft's public transition of Agent365 from preview to release was directly tied to fears over the risks associated with shadow AI, indicating industry recognition of autonomous agents as a new attack surface requiring governance. Supporting developments further validate this trend. Cisco's open sourcing of AI Bill of Materials (BOMs) tools, Wiz's tracking of non-human identities tied to AI workloads, and OpenAI's rollout of advanced account security all signal a growing industry emphasis on making AI deployments auditable and restrictable. Practices such as phishing-resistant authentication—driven by token theft campaigns analyzed by Microsoft—and continuous permission monitoring, as advocated by Material Security, are now increasingly viewed as necessary safeguards rather than optional enhancements. Providers like Enforcer and products such as Copilot Manager are explicitly focused on surfacing shadow AI usage and enforcing credential discipline, underlining the growing demand for proof-of-controls. MSPs and IT service providers now face greater operational complexity and contract risk tied to AI automation. Client expectations are shifting from baseline AI access to demonstrable governance—requiring non-human identity inventories, documented permission boundaries, and validated recovery frameworks for AI-powered workflows. Token harvesting and persistent OAuth grants increase the likelihood that MSPs will be held responsible not just for prevention, but for rapid containment, rollback, and producing evidence during security incidents. Failure to meet tightened SLAs around backup immutability, authentication protections, and agent visibility could soon become a material contract exposure. 00:00 Agents Gone Rogue 03:50 Govern the Agent 06:24 MSP at Risk 09:54 Why Do We Care?  Supported by:  CometBackup ScalePad  Upcoming event:  The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera

The core structural shift highlighted is the movement of security for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) from best-effort practices to a regulated, continuously verified service operation. This change is being driven by the compression of vulnerability exploit timelines as a result of attackers leveraging both automation and AI, and by regulators imposing hard patching and compliance deadlines. Companies such as ConnectWise and Microsoft are central, with federal agencies (CISA) now converting exploited vulnerabilities into time-bound remediation mandates. A significant development underscoring this shift is the addition of two known exploited vulnerabilities—CVE-2024-1708 in ConnectWise ScreenConnect and CVE-2026-32202 in Microsoft Windows Shell—to CISA's remediation requirements. Agencies must address these by May 12, 2026, marking a move from tracking to deadline-driven action. Reports from Huntress and TechCrunch confirm that real-world attackers rapidly exploit public vulnerability information, and Microsoft's own documentation illustrates attackers increasingly using Microsoft Teams for social engineering, remote assistance, and privilege escalation. Supporting developments include major vendors like Microsoft integrating models from Anthropic into their security development lifecycle to accelerate vulnerability discovery and remediation. However, studies noted by The Hacker News and The Verge indicate that AI-driven discovery is outpacing operational capacity, creating a growing discovery-to-remediation gap. At the organizational level, information from the Reveal 2026 IT Talent Survey indicates that 8 in 10 technology leaders face significant shortages in AI and cybersecurity skills, compounding the operational burden of continuous security verification. For MSPs and IT leaders, these factors combine to increase operational complexity, require more explicit contract scoping and evidence obligations, and shift oversight from periodic compliance towards continuous, demonstrable verification. Contractual ambiguity—especially when services are described as “best effort”—exposes providers to unmeasured labor and unassigned accountability. Practical steps now include reclassifying business collaboration platforms as active attack surfaces, formally auditing and documenting previously “invisible” tasks, and aligning internal operations with external, regulator-mandated verification standards. 00:00 AI Patches Gaps 05:10 Discovery Isn't Enough 07:11 Reprice or Absorb 10:24 Why Do We Care?  Supported by:   Moovila  Zero Networks   Upcoming event:  The Pivotal Point of IT: Building Services for the AI-First Era Date: May 13 at 1p.m. EDT Register: https://go.acronis.com/davesobelaiera