There’s a handmade, retro-looking radio sitting in our office that plays only four pre-programmed stations, none of which are run by humans. This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously. In the past, we’ve let our AI agents run a store, a cafe, and various vending machines. Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector. — Read More
Monthly Archives: May 2026
Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated ‘Podcasts’ Featuring Chats Between Two Robot ‘Co-Hosts’
The podcast sector suddenly may have a big new player: Amazon‘s Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant.
Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday. — Read More
agent memory: an anatomy
every agent memory library uses the same words: episodic, semantic, sometimes procedural. they’re cognitive science’s vocabulary, lifted into the API. the engineering often isn’t lifted with them. a library can have a procedural field that uses the same storage and retrieval as semantic — a label, not a separate system. the deeper slip is the word memory itself: most of what these libraries build is narrower than that, and the narrower term sharpens the problem.
the terminology comes from a 1972 chapter by Endel Tulving.1 he argued that what people had been treating as one thing — memory — was at least two: memory for events (what happened, where, when), and memory for facts (the capital of France, water’s boiling point). he called them episodic and semantic. — Read More
Of Hammers and Nails: What AI Can and Cannot Do for a Data Analyst
Every few years, a new technology arrives with the same promise: this one will transform the organisation, eliminate the grunt work, and make whole categories of expensive people redundant. AI, and the large language models driving its current moment, is the latest. In data and analytics, the claims have been particularly bold — the well-prompted chatbot will soon replace the analyst, we are told. Having spent the past year rolling AI tooling out across a large organisation, the reality is more interesting, and more mixed, than that.
Start with what works, because something genuinely does. AI tools have made writing code significantly faster. That matters more than it might sound. In teams that haven’t yet built mature data assets (data models), coding and data preparation is the job — easily 80 to 90 percent of what analysts actually spend their time on. Anything that speeds this up is a meaningful productivity gain. — Read More
The AI Bifurcation of Tech: Why the fundamentals matter more than ever
It’s unclear right now how AI is going to play out for most companies, and I don’t think anyone has a clean answer yet, including me. But there’s a pattern I keep coming back to, and it has less to do with what AI eventually becomes and more to do with what it can already do.
I don’t think the capability curve breaks at some single moment we’d call AGI. It just keeps climbing. Each release adds capability somewhere, and we don’t need to reach the top of the curve for the bottom of it to start reshaping things.
This past Tuesday at Google I/O, Antigravity 2.0 built a functioning operating system from scratch in twelve hours. …Take the staging with whatever grain of salt you want. The point underneath is what “good enough” looks like in mid 2026. … Not because of where it ends up, but because of what it can already do.
A capable agent loop, called many times in parallel, with reasonable cost and reasonable latency, is enough to recreate most of what the application layer of software currently sells. The curve keeps going from here. The question that follows is which kinds of companies sit downstream of that engine and which don’t. — Read More
Threat Modeling MCP Server
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for comprehensive threat modeling with automatic code validation
This server provides tools for threat modeling, including business context analysis, architecture analysis, threat actor analysis, trust boundary analysis, asset flow analysis, code security validation and comprehensive report generation. — Read More
Rethinking organizational design in the age of agentic AI
Amid rapidly growing adoption of enterprise-level AI agents, there’s a disconnect emerging between ambition and execution.
Although 85% of organizations say they want to be agentic within the next three years, 76% say their current operations and infrastructure can’t support that change. They cite a lack of readiness across people, processes, and workflows. — Read More
PMs and designers are about to win the AI era
Macro Evals for Agentic Systems
When an agentic system fails, the problem is often larger than a single bad response. A handoff may happen too late, a specialist agent may miss the same signal across many runs, or a review process may trigger for the wrong class of cases. To improve the system, teams need to see recurring behavior across the whole population of traces.
This cookbook walks through a macro-eval workflow for a multi-agent system. We use a synthetic EV order workflow where specialist agents handle pricing, compliance, supply, factory routing, scheduling, and release decisions while market and operational conditions change.
The notebook uses precomputed synthetic traces and saved lower-level eval labels, so you can run the full workflow without an OpenAI API key. — Read More
Karpathy said vibe coding is obsolete. What he described instead is product management.
Last week, Andrej Karpathy stood in front of a room at Sequoia‘s AI Ascent event and told everyone that vibe coding (a term he invented and made popular) was already obsolete. The future, he said, is agentic engineering. He went on to list exactly what agentic engineering actually involves:
preserving quality
writing design specsvsupervising plans
inspecting diffs
writing tests
building evaluation loops
managing permissions
… [S]trip the engineer-specific vocabulary, and you have product management. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 