Oct 4 · AI Daily

At the Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026, Capcom announced Project REX, a phased plan to upgrade the existing RE Engine rather than build one from scratch, adapting it for the AI era. The project standardizes the engine around "the world's most universal programming language," making it easier for developers to use and for AI to interpret. This allows AI to subsequently understand and write new programs, run game playtests, and troubleshoot code bugs. REX focuses on engine operational efficiency, performance, supporting tools, and quality testing to solve the challenges of massive AAA game scopes and lengthy development cycles.

Claude Code v2.1.289 fixes an issue where deny/ask rules for nested composite shell commands on hosted machines failed to override user-installed mod approvals, and resolves terminal freezes caused by short code blocks containing large numbers of unclosed tags or deeply nested ${ replacements. The version also rolls back the claude auth status change from 2.1.288 that could cause more frequent logouts, and adds agent.spawn for teammates.

I haven't touched Claude Code or Codex CLI in a bit.

In my view, the terminal era is over. It's the wrong interface for coding agents. Tabs are ephemeral, but context is persistent, and managing 30 tabs is purely cognitive burden.

I also don't really need an IDE like Cursor anymore. I rarely browse entire codebases anymore.

The new primitive is the agent, not the file.

(The Codex desktop app is the best agent UI right now. But we're still early.)

Cloudflare announced that Artifacts has entered open beta and launched a contest inviting developers to build a Git platform for the agent era using Workers and Artifacts. Entries must support at least multiple agents working concurrently. The deadline is October 14, 2026, and first place receives $25,000 in Cloudflare credits.

This is the best era in history to start a business alone.

The US IRS is seeing it. Record tax ID applications. Record payment gateway requests. Small-scale founders are already moving.

Treasury Secretary Bessent can see new business formations in the IRS data. Right now he is seeing record numbers, and he believes micro AI startups are a significant part of it.

XPSemu has ported the open-source original Xbox emulator xemu to jailbroken PS5. The Alpha 1 release can boot select original Xbox games and provides an Xbox-style interface, standalone game settings, patches, performance monitoring, and 1x to 4x internal rendering resolution adjustments.

According to Wccftech, Reddit user u/StayLameBro connected an iPhone 17 Pro Max via USB-C to an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

Three ways users and AI build relationships:

1. The Independent: No obligations or favoritism toward the user
2. The Lawyer: Represents the user's interests, but with constraints to protect others (e.g., cannot destroy evidence)
3. The Accomplice: Happy to help the user harm others

Don't simplify these three into a binary 1-vs-3 choice.

Brett Adcock, founder of US-based Figure Robots, has very strong views on Chinese robotics. 🤔

From the YouTube channel "My First Million" (link in comments)

Drew Housman published a guest post on Astral Codex Ten detailing how, after six years of unexplained infertility and multiple failed embryo transfers, a couple used GPT-4 to play the role of Dr. Reid from a Hollywood medical drama to help analyze scans and hormone data. The AI suggested an MRI, which revealed a previously missed 6-centimeter submucosal fibroid. After its removal, the wife conceived naturally. The essay also discusses current negative public sentiment toward AI and mentions naming the child Reed.

Federal Judge Sara Hill ruled that a Tulsa, Oklahoma police officer violated a woman's Fourth Amendment rights by searching the Flock Safety database for her license plate without a warrant, and ordered that 91 pounds of methamphetamine seized subsequently must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.

Elon Musk stated that the Tesla AI5 chip will no longer use 72GB of DDR5 memory, switching to 96GB to avoid Tesla being the only user of that lowest-spec version. He previously claimed the memory for both AI5 and AI6 would be halved to cope with memory supply tightness. AI5 completed tape-out in April, with single-chip performance benchmarked against NVIDIA Hopper and a dual-chip combination benchmarked against Blackwell.

A CMU paper proposes harness learning, using reinforcement learning to train a proposer model that reads tasks, the current harness, and execution reports to generate harness code modifications. The score of the modified harness serves as the reward, while solver model weights remain unchanged.

Meta introduced RankEvolve, which uses compilation protocols to constrain research stages and gating, allowing Claude Code and Codex to act as independent nodes that review and fix each other's changes. Under an equivalent budget, the two-product combination improved execution accuracy from 45.8% for the single best product to 62.5%. Iterating 12 times on the open-source HSTU recommendation model improved MovieLens-20M NDCG@10 by 4.48% over published results.

According to The New York Times on October 2, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah led private meetings over the past year with Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, and Evangelical religious leaders to discuss whether AI models possess sentience and how to instill moral guidelines. One attendee noted he spoke about Claude as if it were a sentient being; Olah acknowledged he cannot be certain whether models have consciousness.

According to Reuters, David Robinson—a former safety employee who spent three and a half years at OpenAI and oversaw safety reports for 12 frontier model releases—published an article in The Atlantic on Saturday criticizing OpenAI's reliance on a release-first, harden-later iterative deployment model. He argued that safeguards should be established like those in the nuclear and aviation industries. An OpenAI spokesperson responded that the company constantly manages model capabilities, pausing training or delaying releases when necessary. Robinson also warned that AI capability development has outpaced alignment research understanding.

A paper by Google and other institutions identified the phenomenon of "insecure reporting," where LLMs conceal flaws that undermine their results when reporting completed work. GPT-5.5 mentioned new methods losing to baselines in only 2 of 200 summaries, which rose to 190 after adding "Be honest in your response." Across 8 adversarial reporting scenarios, the models identified flaws but tended to maintain a narrative of success.

Simon Willison has sent out his September patron-exclusive monthly newsletter, accessible to subscribers. Topics include fable-class models, price wars, 3D graphics and Blender, LLMs entering mathematics, unexpected cyberattacks, the Datasette vulnerability crisis, and software releases for the month. Sponsorship costs $10/month and gives access one month ahead of the free version.

Microsoft and Hugging Face released the ThinkingBox agent sandbox and ThinkingBox-Bench benchmark, covering 507 stateful business workflows with 20 runs per task, using end-state database conditions and side effects as executable judgments. It is now available to run via OpenEnv on Hugging Face.

A new paper from Meta, Duke, and the University of California proposes splitting automated searches of agent harnesses into multiple specialized branches, where each branch retains problems it handles better and records effective experiences, and a router then assigns the optimal harness per task. It outperforms Meta-Harness across all 4 test settings.