Recently, local AI assistants have exploded. Tools like OpenClaw now let anyone run powerful AI agents on their own hardware—no cloud subscription required. Many people still don’t understand what this actually means.
Some say big companies are panicking because everyone’s buying Mac minis to run AI themselves. This isn’t entirely true.
What big companies fear isn’t you buying that machine. It’s not even you canceling ChatGPT. What they really fear is this: the way compute power is consumed is changing from continuous payment to one-time ownership. — Read More
Recent Updates Page 49
Google adds music-generation capabilities to the Gemini app
Google announced on Wednesday that it’s adding a music-generation feature to the Gemini app. The company is using DeepMind’s Lyria 3 music-generation model to power the feature, which is still in beta.
To use the feature, you’ll describe the song you want to create, and the app will generate a track along with lyrics. For instance, you could ask Gemini to create a “comical R&B slow jam about a sock finding its match,” and the app will generate a 30-second track along with cover art made by Nano Banana. — Read More
The Mythical Agent-Month
… Among my inner circle of engineering and data science friends, there is a lot of discussion about how long our competitive edge as humans will last. Will having good ideas (and lots of them) still matter as the agents begin having better ideas themselves? The human-expert-in-the-loop feels essential now to get good results from the agents, but how long will that last until our wildest ideas can be turned into working, tasteful software while we sleep? Will it be a gentle obsolescence where we happily hand off the reins or something else?
For now, I feel needed. I don’t describe the way I work now as “vibe coding” as this sounds like a pejorative “prompt and chill” way of building AI slop software projects. I’ve been building tools like roborev to bring rigor and continuous supervision to my parallel agent sessions, and to heavily scrutinize the work that my agents are doing. With this radical new way of working it is hard not to be contemplative about the future of software engineering.
Probably the book I’ve referenced the most in my career is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, whose now-famous Brooks’s Law argues that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. Lately I find myself asking whether the lessons from this book are applicable in this new era of agentic development. Will a talented developer orchestrating a swarm of AI agents be able to build complex software faster and better, and will the short term productivity gains lead to long term project success? Or will we run into the same bottlenecks – scope creep, architectural drift, and coordination overhead – that have plagued software teams for decades? – Read More
Master Any Skill Faster With an AI Learning System
You can learn almost anything online.
So why does it still feel slow?
Most “learning” is simply the collection of information. Tabs. Notes. Videos. Highlights.
But skill only grows when you do three things again and again:
Try → Get feedback → Try again.
AI can make that loop faster — if you use it like a system, not a chat. — Read More
Top 10 YouTube Channels for Learning AI in 2026
Around 2.5 billion people used YouTube in January 2025, and a decent chunk of them are trying to figure out this whole AI thing. The platform has quietly become the best place to learn artificial intelligence without spending thousands on courses or going back to school. You can find everything from mathematical breakdowns to practical coding tutorials, and most of it is actually free.
The problem is not finding content but finding good content. YouTube is full of channels that either oversimplify to the point of being useless or overcomplicate to the point where you need a PhD to follow along. After watching dozens of hours of AI tutorials and checking what people are actually recommending in 2026, I put together this list of ten channels that actually teach you something useful. — Read More
AI Tried to Replace Software Engineers — Here’s What Actually Happened
Every few months, we hear the same prediction:
“Software engineers will be obsolete in 6 to 12 months.”
This time, the warning came with a bold experiment.
The Cursor team — backed by billions in venture capital — decided to prove that AI agents could replace engineers. Instead of just talking about it, they launched a real test:
Hundreds of AI agents working nonstop for a week to build a web browser from scratch.
Building a browser is one of the hardest engineering challenges in modern software. Even Microsoft struggled with it for years. So if AI could pull this off, it would be a huge milestone.
But what happened next tells a very different story. Read More
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era
I have written eight of these guides since ChatGPT came out, but this version represents a very large break with the past, because what it means to “use AI” has changed dramatically. Until a few months ago, for the vast majority of people, “using AI” meant talking to a chatbot in a back-and-forth conversation. But over the past few months, it has become practical to use AI as an agent: you can assign them to a task and they do them, using tools as appropriate. Because of this change, you have to consider three things when deciding what AI to use: Models, Apps, and Harnesses. Models are the underlying AI brains; Apps are the products you actually use to talk to a model, and Harnesses are what let the power of AI models do real work. Until recently, you didn’t have to know this.
It means that the question “which AI should I use?” has gotten harder to answer, because the answer now depends on what you’re trying to do with it. So let me walk through the landscape. — Read More
AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL
The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree:
In the latest OpenSSL security release> on January 27, 2026, twelve new zero-day vulnerabilities (meaning unknown to the maintainers at time of disclosure) were announced. Our AI system is responsible for the original discovery of all twelve, each found and responsibly disclosed to the OpenSSL team during the fall and winter of 2025. Of those, 10 were assigned CVE-2025 identifiers and 2 received CVE-2026 identifiers. Adding the 10 to the three we already found in the Fall 2025 release, AISLE is credited for surfacing 13 of 14 OpenSSL CVEs assigned in 2025, and 15 total across both releases. This is a historically unusual concentration for any single research team, let alone an AI-driven one. — Read More
Why I don’t think AI is a bubble
Most of the people I like think AI is a bubble. This is a tricky topic to discuss, because the “bubble” framing couples financial and technical issues. It’s like a sports fan debating “Is this player overrated?“. The answer depends on how good you think that player is, and how good you think other people think they are.
I don’t have anything much to add to the financial part of the “AI bubble” conversation. Various equity prices are based on very optimistic estimates about how AI will progress. This post is about the technological question. I’ll leave it to you to judge what sort of forecast any given asset price actually represents.
The main case I want to make is that performance probably won’t plateau — or at least, the common arguments for why it will plateau don’t add up. — Read More
BCIs in 2026: Still Janky, Still Dangerous, Still Overhyped
Alright, another year, another batch of venture capital pouring into ‘mind-reading’ startups that promise to turn your thoughts into Twitter threads. Frankly, it’s exhausting. We’re in 2026, and the fundamental problems that plagued Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) a decade ago are still here, just wearing slightly shinier packaging. If you think we’re anywhere near seamless neural integration that lets you control a prosthetic arm with the fluidity of a natural limb, or hell, even reliably type at 60 WPM purely by thinking, you’ve been mainlining too much techbro hype. Let’s pull back the curtain on this circus, shall we? Because from an engineering perspective, most of what you hear is, generously, aspirational fiction. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 