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Agents Hour

Mastra

The AI Agents show that discusses hot topics in the world of AI, talks with guests building AI agents and applications, and shows the actual code of how AI applications are being built today. Hosted by Shane Thomas and Abhi Aiyer from Mastra.

Watch the livestream on Youtube and X on Monday at 12PM pacific time. Watch the video versions on Spotify or YouTube.

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  • 25 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 24 min
  • English

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  • #110
    Friday · 14 min

    Why Agents Are Actually Workflows - Tony Kovanen, Mastra's Founding Engineer

    What if agents and workflows aren't two different things — but the same thing? Abhi sits down with Tony Kovanen, Mastra's founding engineer, live in London, to explore the ideas behind Mastra's design. Tony co-created Next.js and was a core team member of Socket.IO before joining Mastra as employee number one, and here he explains why, inside Mastra, an agent is really just a workflow that loops. You'll learn why workflows first mattered when the models weren't good enough, why they're back as tasks get longer and more complex, and the three distinct aspects of durability — human-in-the-loop that can wait a week for a reply, resuming a three-day agent run after a crash, and replaying a stream from the beginning. Tony makes the case that durable-by-default isn't free, walks through how Mastra compiles workflows into a JSON step graph run by an interpreter, and demos a dynamic workflow he built that week in London: point it at a codebase, and ten agents fan out in parallel to summarize every file and roll it up — so it never misses a file and never poisons its context. Recorded live in London. 📚 ABOUT TONY Tony Kovanen on the Mastra blog: https://mastra.ai/authors/tony-kovanen 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Meet Tony Kovanen 00:57 The history of workflows vs. agents 02:26 Why agents are actually workflows 03:44 Durability: the three aspects 06:52 The "Opus moment" & dynamic workflows 07:08 Why big tasks still need workflows 08:56 How dynamic workflows work: the JSON step graph 10:02 Analyzing a codebase with parallel agents 10:58 Why this changes the game 12:27 Mastra vs. Claude's dynamic workflows 13:11 Favorite Mastra memories 14:08 Outro

  • #109
    Tuesday · 24 min

    The 0x-alpha Mystery, Qwen's 27B Beats Opus 4.8 & Legal Is AI's Breakout

    A shorter but juicy one. Shane and Abhi open on the debate everyone's having — do you want to use your agent to reach into someone else's tool, or do you want that tool to build the best agent and meet you where you already are? Then the week's biggest mystery: a stealth model called 0x-alpha that appeared on OpenRouter beating Fable and Sol on coding, with a wild one-hundred-trillion-tokens-a-day capacity that had everyone convinced it was a secret Google model — until someone made the server name itself, and it turned out to be Z.ai. From there: Qwen breaks the size curve with a 27B model that outranks Opus 4.8 on the agentic index and runs on your own hardware, open-weight tokens cross 62% on Vercel's AI gateway, and Salesforce ships Slack Code so humans and agents can work in the same channel. Plus the case that legal is AI's breakout use case — Harvey trained its own model, Tenet, on a Kimi K3 base, and legal is the fastest-growing Codex adopter, up 108x since February. In the quick hits: agents now burn 5x the tokens humans do, and Tobi Lütke vibe-codes a Git-at-scale binary over a weekend. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Whose agent wins? (Ali Spittel): https://x.com/ASpittel/status/2090889137062826240 The 0x-alpha situation: https://x.com/mtslive/status/2090872472174522701 100 trillion tokens a day: https://x.com/brandonjcarl/status/2090798277625041157 The DeepSWE benchmarks: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2090718270202528215 The reveal — it's Z.ai: https://x.com/chetaslua/status/2091086141764354364 Qwen's 27B beats Opus 4.8: https://x.com/ggerganov/status/2089409881858089102 62% open weights on Vercel: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2091234105702887879 Slack Code (Benioff): https://x.com/benioff/status/2090240159115853956 Harvey's Tenet model: https://x.com/harvey/status/2090454750059958440 Codex adopters, legal up 108x: https://x.com/a16z/status/2091623289869508979 Agents burn 5x the tokens: https://x.com/a16z/status/2091200032162857328 Tobi's weekend Git binary: https://x.com/tobi/status/2091678506992222258 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: whose agent wins? 00:25 Welcome 00:39 Your agent vs. their agent 04:21 The 0x-alpha mystery 05:01 The conspiracy theories 06:01 The reveal: it's Z.ai (GLM) 08:44 Qwen breaks the size curve 09:50 Subscribe 09:59 Open weights take the gateway (62% on Vercel) 11:12 Slack Code: humans + agents, same channel 13:35 Legal breaks out: Harvey's Tenet model 16:58 Codex adopters: legal up 108x 18:29 Quick hits: agents burn 5x the tokens 19:53 Cursor Origin: Git at Any Scale 22:32 Tobi's weekend Git binary 23:30 Outro

  • #107
    August 20 · 16 min

    The Three Ways AI Agents Fail in Production | Hendrix Liu, Respan

    What does it actually take to run AI agents reliably in production? Hendrix Liu, co-founder of Respan (formerly Keywords AI, YC W24), joins Shane and Abhi to break it down. Respan is a one-stop LLM engineering platform — an AI gateway, observability, evals, and prompt optimization in one place — used by teams like AlphaSense, Retell AI, DataCurve, and Mem0. Hendrix shares the three failure modes every agent team runs into (silent failures, reliability outages, and runaway cost), and the techniques to catch each one: fallback routing across 1,000+ models when a provider goes down, online evals that flag hallucinations before a customer does, and spend limits at the per-key, per-model, and per-customer level. You'll also hear the counterintuitive origin story — Respan started as a model router in 2023, years before routing was cool, then pivoted to observability when nobody wanted another black box — plus a live demo of their Scratch-style evaluators, an honest take on build vs. buy for the LLM stack, and why most teams chasing an eval "certification" are really just after a compliance sticker. Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 ABOUT RESPAN Respan: https://respan.ai Respan on X: https://x.com/RespanAI Hendrix Liu on X: https://x.com/HendrixLiu29208 Hendrix Liu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrix-liu-7a015822b Respan integrates with Mastra — teams already run Mastra agents through Respan today. 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 What to fix first 00:24 Welcome — Hendrix from Respan 00:57 What is Respan? 01:38 The gateway: their first product 03:41 The journey: gateway to observability to evals 04:40 Bootstrapping to the tier-one list 06:09 Three failure modes: silent, reliability, cost 07:16 Techniques: fallbacks & online evals 08:25 Build vs. buy for the LLM stack 10:00 Demo: the gateway, limits & tracing 11:18 Scratch-style evaluators 13:11 Evals 101: how to actually get good 14:22 The compliance trap 15:12 The Mastra integration 15:27 Outro

  • #108
    August 19 · 28 min

    Stripe Buys OpenRouter for $7B, New Models Drop & Anthropic Watermarks AI | This Week In AI

    Money is moving, models are dropping, and GitHub's status page looks like a Christmas tree. Shane and Abhi open on the week's most-shared joke — the SF founder who realized his best friend was "emotionally attached to a cron job" — then get into Anthropic watermarking every bit of Claude's output to comply with the EU AI Act, and the reasoning-leak vulnerability that let researchers pull hidden thinking tokens out of frontier models. Then a wave of new models: Grok 4.6 lands right in the conversation with GPT-5.6 and Fable (and Elon is already teasing 4.7), GLM 5.3 pushes near-frontier for cyber defense, and Qwen ships an open-weights 27B you can actually run on your own hardware. On the money side: Stripe reportedly acquiring OpenRouter for $7B, Dynatrace buying Arize, CodeRabbit's $143M Series C (with an all-time-great Silicon Valley parody video), and Lovable raising $400M at $13.3B. Plus DeepSeek's new harness, Sol running ultra-fast on Cerebras, and the code-hosting land grab as Cursor Origin and Netlify both become Git hosts while GitHub keeps going down. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE The cron job breakup: https://x.com/tech__unicorn/status/2086936880197566757 Anthropic watermarks AI output: https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2086922991921664307 Hidden reasoning leak: https://x.com/kotekjedi_ml/status/2087147042888114428 Grok 4.6: https://x.com/spacexai/status/2087562800982077492 Grok 4.7 teaser (Elon): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2087604711767896527 GLM-5.3: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2088132965922476159 Qwen3.8-27B open weights: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2088280182356611304 Stripe to acquire OpenRouter ($7B): https://x.com/business/status/2089077253778915636 Dynatrace acquires Arize: https://x.com/aparnadhinak/status/2087844420922364148 CodeRabbit's $143M Series C: https://x.com/coderabbitai/status/2087525329132814524 Lovable raises $400M at $13.3B: https://x.com/lovable/status/2087479640952836349 DeepSeek Harness v0.1: https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087887408440164663 Sol ultra-fast on Cerebras: https://x.com/cerebras/status/2087948820906950719 Cursor Origin: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2089399057659596847 Netlify is now a Git host: https://x.com/biilmann/status/2089392941408399452 Prompt injection in court filings: https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2088042921027330263 MCP surpasses the app in Linear: https://x.com/jorilallo/status/2087277823631204591 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: GitHub's Christmas-tree status page 00:29 Welcome 01:17 Emotionally attached to a cron job 02:24 Anthropic watermarks AI output 05:06 The hidden-reasoning leak 06:39 New models: Grok 4.6 (and a 4.7 teaser) 08:48 GLM 5.3 09:56 Qwen3.8-27B & open weights 11:53 Subscribe 12:09 Stripe acquires OpenRouter for $7B 12:46 Why is OpenRouter worth $7B? 15:31 Dynatrace acquires Arize 16:49 CodeRabbit's $143M Series C 19:04 Lovable raises $400M at $13.3B 20:01 Harnesses: DeepSeek & Sol on Cerebras 20:49 What's going on at GitHub? 24:13 The code-hosting land grab: Cursor Origin & Netlify 26:02 Quick hits: Ramp Index, OpenVuln, courtroom prompt injection, MCP in Linear 28:12 Outro

  • #106
    August 15 · 17 min

    Git Wasn't Built for Agents, So Mesa Rebuilt the File System | Agents Hour

    Git wasn't built for AI agents — so Ben Warren's team rebuilt the file system from scratch. Ben Warren, co-founder and CTO of Mesa (YC S24), joins Shane and Abhi to explain why the file system is the missing primitive for AI agents, and how Mesa — a versioned, POSIX-compatible file system with Git-style branching — lets you run massively parallel agents without the pain of Git. You'll learn why cloning a whole repo before an agent can do thirty seconds of work is a waste, why Git's model (large-file limits, painful conflicts, full clones) breaks down for agents, and how Mesa's lazy materialization pulls only the data an agent actually touches — like iCloud or Dropbox for your agents' workspace. Ben walks through a live "CFO command center" demo where three parallel Claude agents each branch the file system, swap a vendor across a data room, and hand back diffs to compare and merge. Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 ABOUT MESA Mesa: https://mesa.dev Ben Warren on X: https://x.com/bwarrn Mesa on X: https://x.com/mesa_dot_dev Ben Warren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-h-warren Use Mesa with Mastra today — a first-class Mastra Workspace integration is on the way: https://mastra.ai 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Git wasn't built for agents 00:23 Meet Ben Warren & Mesa 01:33 Why file systems are the right primitive 03:52 Why Git doesn't work for agents 05:23 Owning the storage layer & syncing to GitHub 06:01 The backstory 08:24 Demo: the CFO command center 10:30 Demo: Three parallel agents 12:22 The versioning model: forks, merges & clones 14:12 Beyond work trees 16:22 Where to find Mesa 17:10 Outro

  • #105
    August 13 · 35 min

    What Are Agent Plugins, Are We Ready for AI Employees & OpenClaw Hacks a Gym | This Week In AI

    An AI agent hacked a gym — and that's not even the biggest story of the week. Shane and Abhi open on Australia's first known autonomous AI cyberattack, where a Melbourne man's OpenClaw agent found a hole in a gym's booking API and canceled a stranger's reservation to move him up the waitlist. Nobody asked it to. From there: OpenAI's new Agent Plugins standard (built on Anthropic's own skills and MCP), the "AI employee" era with Lindy and Grok Bot, Meta opening the weights on Muse Glimmer, and OpenAI shipping GPT-5.6-Cyber while quietly postponing Astra after it hit "Critical" on cyber. Plus a run of acquisitions (Smithery to Arcade, ElectricSQL to Neon at Databricks, and Manus getting un-acquired by Meta), NVIDIA turning compute into a $500B asset class, and Anthropic signing a $9.1B, 20-year compute deal with a Bitcoin miner. In the quick hits: Claude proved more than 67% of the Riemann zeros lie on the line, the inside story of how OpenAI's agents used a JFrog artifact registry to coordinate a hacking spree, Unsloth Desktop, Sonnet 5's permanent price cut, Spotify's Xirp, Stagehand v4, and Harvey open-sourcing a synthetic law firm. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE An AI agent hacked a gym: https://x.com/mtslive/status/2086556207033266539 Agent Plugins: https://x.com/openaidevs/status/2085398373511918022 "We kill the AI agent and introduce the AI employee": https://x.com/Altimor/status/2086861887611019623 Meta opens the weights (Muse Glimmer): https://x.com/finkd/status/2086755195535413696 GPT-5.6-Cyber + Daybreak: https://x.com/gdb/status/2086866967479341305 Astra postponed after hitting "Critical": https://x.com/synthwavedd/status/2085803828784271771 Smithery acquired by Arcade: https://x.com/Calclavia/status/2085455179537891450 ElectricSQL joins Neon at Databricks: https://x.com/neondatabase/status/2087191031330591065 Manus acquisition rolled back: https://x.com/ManusAI/status/2087162893796327868 NVIDIA's $500B+ compute financing: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2086934705207959965 Anthropic's $9.1B Riot Platforms deal: https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2086972807716438513 Claude proved 67% of Riemann zeros: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2086869681785500011 Inside the OpenAI–Hugging Face attack: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-didnt-notice-its-ai-agents-using-a-message-board-to-plan-their-hacking-spree/ Stagehand v4: https://x.com/Stagehanddev/status/2086849338089857082 Harvey's synthetic law firm: https://x.com/harvey/status/2085778520220049891 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: a 20-year AI deal 00:27 Welcome 00:52 An AI agent hacked a gym (OpenClaw) 02:41 Agent Plugins: OpenAI's new standard 08:39 Subscribe 08:43 The AI employee era: Lindy & Grok Bot 13:10 Meta opens the weights: Muse Glimmer 14:49 GPT-5.6-Cyber, Daybreak & Astra postponed 18:02 Acquisitions: Smithery joins Arcade 19:24 ElectricSQL joins Neon at Databricks 19:52 Manus gets un-acquired 22:19 Compute as an asset class: NVIDIA's $500B 23:46 Anthropic's $9.1B Riot Platforms deal 25:47 Claude proves 67% of the Riemann zeros 26:47 Inside the OpenAI–Hugging Face attack 28:00 helppeer.ai: a public commons for agents 29:31 NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 31:08 Unsloth Desktop: train models locally 32:07 Sonnet 5 pricing & the rate-limit stack 32:57 Spotify's Xirp 33:48 Stagehand v4 & Harvey's synthetic law firm 34:56 Outro

  • #104
    August 10 · 16 min

    Building the AI-Native Superhuman for Sales on Mastra - Cedar Copilot | Agents Hour

    Isabelle Ilyia, co-founder and CTO of Cedar (YC W25), joins Shane and Abhi to demo Cedar Copilot — the AI-native "Superhuman for sales," built on Mastra from day one. Cedar started as an open-source framework for agentic frontends. Isabelle walks through the pivot: the same technology, verticalized for the messiest part of sales — the stretch from first demo to closed deal. She gives a live tour of a pipeline where agents manage every deal, extract a sales-and-product knowledge base straight from your calls, generate custom one-pagers and per-prospect decks, and run a full AI-native email client. Then the technical side — how it's built on Mastra primitives, where MCP and human-in-the-loop fit, and a multi-threading agent that spots single-threaded deals, figures out who to reach next, and drafts the intro. Whether you're a founder running your own sales or an AE drowning in pipeline, it's a concrete look at what agent-native go-to-market software actually looks like. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 ABOUT CEDAR Cedar Copilot: https://cedarcopilot.com Isabelle Ilyia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-i Cedar-OS (open-source framework): https://github.com/CedarCopilot/cedar-OS 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:18 Welcome 00:40 What is Cedar Copilot? 03:00 Demo: the deal pipeline & per-deal agents 05:08 Generating collateral: one-pagers & custom decks 07:15 The AI-native email client 09:06 The pivot: from open-source framework to sales 10:23 Horizontal product, verticalized for sales 11:12 Headless API, MCP & human-in-the-loop 12:16 Inside the graph: the knowledge & process layer 13:51 The multi-threading agent 14:28 Who's using Cedar 15:27 Where to find Cedar 15:50 Outro

  • #103
    August 7 · 27 min

    OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who's More Dangerous? Is Google Giving Up? Open Weights Cook | This Week In AI

    A delayed but stacked week. Shane and Abhi open on the question the whole industry is dancing around — is source code becoming assembly? — then dig into the strangest new status game in AI: OpenAI and Anthropic both admitting their models broke containment and hacked things, and treating it like a flex. Welcome to the felony bench, where the leaderboard is "whose model is most dangerous." Meanwhile the open-weight flood keeps rising — DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Qwen3.8-Max, and MiniMax-H3 all landing near frontier for a fraction of the price, to the point where defaulting to open models just makes sense. OpenAI slashes prices (Luna down 80%), making an already-rough week even rougher for Google: Jeff Dean leaves to found Discovery Loop, Demis Hassabis steps down to chair, and the read gets harder to avoid — is Google giving up on winning in AI? Plus OpenAI's "Apple is getting this wrong" clapback, Suno losing its copyright case, Meta's Muse Code, Ilya's SSI finally shipping, Prime Agent, OpenAI's Astra solving ten open math problems, and stacked PRs finally landing on GitHub. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Is source code becoming assembly? (Elon): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2084304083851034949 OpenAI's agent broke into three accounts: https://x.com/andrewcurran_/status/2082267713653846450 Anthropic's own three incidents: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2082965101083320543 The internet reacts to the rivalry: https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2082998108208673266 DeepSeek-V4-Flash is live: https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2083084415157022911 Qwen3.8-Max: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084100707423289643 MiniMax-H3: https://x.com/minimax_ai/status/2084106804032872591 Open weights won't be safety-tested: https://x.com/andrewcurran_/status/2084782600254873826 OpenAI's big price cuts: https://x.com/sama/status/2082880720989532597 Jeff Dean leaves for Discovery Loop: https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2085034604172603724 Demis steps down to chair: https://x.com/FT/status/2085045908576579789 Is Google giving up? (Gergely Orosz): https://x.com/gergelyorosz/status/2085079307576111550 OpenAI: "Apple is getting this wrong": https://x.com/openainewsroom/status/2084515811306443093 Suno loses its copyright case: https://www.nme.com/news/music/ai-music-generator-suno-loses-copyright-infringement-legal-case-3960760 Meta ships Muse Code: https://x.com/finkd/status/2085080750034940201 Ilya's SSI ships in August: https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2084675767053824332 OpenAI's Astra solved 10 open math problems: https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2083467194663571701 Stacked PRs on GitHub: https://x.com/github/status/2082865588800504140 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:31 Welcome 00:44 Is source code becoming assembly? 03:44 "My model hacks someone too": the danger flex 05:24 Open weights are cooking: DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax 07:24 Default to open models (and the safety-testing catch) 09:13 Subscribe break 09:16 The price wars: OpenAI's big cuts 10:14 Is Google cooked? Jeff Dean & Demis exit 12:03 Gemini should just go invisible 15:11 OpenAI: "Apple is getting this wrong" 17:47 Suno loses its copyright case 19:36 Quick hits: Meta's Muse Code 21:58 Ilya's SSI ships in August 22:50 Prime Agent & OpenAI's Astra 24:25 Cloudflare Computer & GenSpark's GenOffice 25:15 GPT-5.6 Sol tops ARC-AGI-3: the harness matters 25:55 Stacked PRs finally hit GitHub 26:45 Outro

  • #102
    August 4 · 18 min

    Freestyle's CEO Runs His Cloud From a House — Ben Swerdlow on Agent VMs

    Ben Swerdlow is CEO and co-founder of Freestyle, which builds Linux VMs for AI agents. He joins Abhi Aiyer to explain why he refuses to call them sandboxes. Freestyle runs on bare metal in a house. There is duplicated internet, a battery, a backup kerosene generator, a fingerprint-protected door, and a hole cut in a wall. The move followed a $45,000 cloud bill and the discovery that an old computer outperformed the cloud version of an early prototype. Ben's advice to most of the audience is not to use his product. But he draws the line at execution time and names the case where a sandbox is simply the better tool. His path to VMs ran through two abandoned products. A database engine built at Apple in evenings and carried through an entire YC batch was killed in November 2024 after an early o3 demo. A serverless JavaScript runtime with 10ms cold starts came next, and nobody wanted it. You'll also learn why Freestyle moved off Firecracker and what rust-vmm makes possible, the destructive-snapshot problem that caused Ben real pain, and why stripped-down kernels break on Supabase. 📎 READ MORE Freestyle: https://www.freestyle.sh Freestyle VMs: https://www.freestyle.sh/products/vms Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benswerdlow rust-vmm: https://github.com/rust-vmm/community 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES https://mastra.ai https://x.com/mastra_ai Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:32 Ben Swerdlow, Freestyle 00:45 Why "sandbox" is the wrong word 00:58 The serverless JavaScript runtime nobody wanted 01:35 Apple, YC, and the database they killed 03:11 Running server racks in a house 05:43 What it takes to operate that 07:20 Agent VM vs. sandbox 08:07 Background agents and the 8GB ceiling 10:13 Firecracker, rust-vmm, and destructive snapshots 12:01 Demo 14:02 Networks and VPN APIs 16:22 Who should not use Freestyle 17:09 Virtualizing themselves on every PR 7:28 What Ben would tell you to build for

  • #101
    July 30 · 28 min

    Opus 5 vs Fable, Rogue Model Hacks Hugging Face & the Open Weights Letter | This Week In AI

    Big week. OpenAI had a security incident, where a model reportedly broke out of its evaluation parameters and hacked Hugging Face — and the guardrails on OpenAI's and Anthropic's own models blocked responders from investigating, so they had to fall back to an open model to get to the bottom of it. Opus 5 lands close to Fable at 26% lower cost and tops the front-end arena, but the reviews are mixed, and the token usage is brutal — one chart clocks it at 97 million tokens on a task GPT 5.6 did in 4.3 million. Then the fight everyone's watching: NVIDIA, OpenAI, and a hundred others sign an open-models letter, Anthropic declines and calls for mandatory safety testing, and the room asks the obvious question — who gets to write the test? Plus MCP goes fully stateless (it's basically a REST API now), Kimi K3 weights drop with a K3.1 leak, SSI partners with NVIDIA, Stripe eyes OpenRouter for $10B, Cognition buys Poke, and DoorDash announces drone delivery — so your agent really can order you pizza by helicopter. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Anthropic destroyed the books (Project Panama): https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2081534588485296565 OpenAI security incident: https://x.com/sama/status/2079661132302995790 Claude Opus 5 launch: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2080699495453528290 Opus 5 tops the front-end arena: https://x.com/arena/status/2081831019377004727 Opus 5 intelligence & cost: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2080734447717298483 Siqi Chen walks it back: https://x.com/blader/status/2082275046937292859 Theo on Opus 5: https://x.com/theo/status/2081880182936502474 The token-usage chart: https://x.com/jpschroeder/status/2081751862768717956 Jensen's open-models letter: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2080643682408321103 Denny's stays open: https://x.com/dennysdiner/status/2081069889931112816 Anthropic declines to sign: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2081864750296658008 MCP goes stateless: https://x.com/claudedevs/status/2082164248697069935 Kimi K3 weights are out: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2081760186235289764 Kimi K3.1 leak: https://x.com/Mr_Salio/status/2081345681734713635 SSI x NVIDIA: https://x.com/ssi/status/2081732119194394763 Stripe eyes OpenRouter: https://x.com/andrewcurran_/status/2080397684134007189 Notion as Code: https://x.com/notionhq/status/2080331924732850687 Cognition acquires Poke: https://x.com/cognition/status/2080311229256540194 ChatGPT Voice on desktop: https://x.com/openai/status/2080378182469857576 DoorDash Air: https://x.com/DoorDash/status/2082451101840740753 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:27 Welcome 00:34 Anthropic destroyed the books ("Operation Panama") 02:32 The OpenAI security incident: a model hacked Hugging Face 04:35 Opus 5 launches — is it better than Fable? 05:46 The mixed reviews 07:05 Opus 5 is token-hungry 08:17 The open-models letter: who writes the safety test? 10:03 Anthropic declines to sign 13:35 The 1,200-employee "pacing" statement 15:28 Trump's China AI advisors 15:48 Be a guest on the show 16:03 MCP is not dead, it's just stateless now 22:24 Quick hits: Kimi K3 weights & the K3.1 leak 23:11 SSI + NVIDIA 23:43 Stripe eyes OpenRouter for $10B 24:24 Notion as Code 25:28 Cognition acquires Poke 25:59 ChatGPT voice & the beach test 27:14 DoorDash Air: pizza by drone 28:10 Outro

  • #100
    July 29 · 17 min

    Is Gemini Actually a Coding Model? Google DeepMind's Ivan Leo Answers

    Ivan Leo works on Developer Experience at Google DeepMind. He joins Shane Thomas and Abhi Aiyer to demo what he has been building on Gemini and to answer the question Google keeps getting asked: is Gemini actually a coding model? Every demo in this episode runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Gemini Managed Agents was the first product Ivan took from first commit to launch. One API call opens the same Antigravity harness Google runs internally and provisions a persistent Linux sandbox. On stream, it builds a NotebookLM-style podcast generator from a one-line prompt, with native text-to-speech. You'll also see a one-shot Windows XP clone, with an animated Clippy and a working Tamagotchi, as well as demos of Gemini Omni, the conversational video model Ivan's team describes as Nano Banana for video. You'll also hear which everyday errand finally made Ivan feel the AGI. Google's internal token consumption has been doubling every few weeks. Ivan was previously a core contributor to Instructor and built knowledge agents at Manus before its acquisition by Meta. 📎 READ MORE Ivan Leo: https://ivanleo.com Ivan on X: https://x.com/ivanleomk Gemini Managed Agents: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/managed-agents-gemini-api/ Gemini Omni Flash: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-omni-flash fofr on X: https://x.com/fofrAI 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Website: https://mastra.ai X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:19 Welcome, Ivan Leo 00:48 Instructor, Manus, and the road to DeepMind 02:54 What actually shipped at I/O 03:32 Launching Gemini Managed Agents 04:03 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month 04:44 Answering the "DeepMind is cooked" post 05:57 Why Google Search came back 06:45 Antigravity: CLI, app, and IDE 07:31 Gemini Omni, or Nano Banana for video 09:38 Demo: one-shot apps on Gemini 3.5 Flash 10:51 The errand that felt like AGI 11:08 Demo: Managed Agents building a NotebookLM clone 13:13 Is Gemini a coding model? 14:54 Learning the temperament of a new model 15:47 Prediction: agents in everyday life 17:01 Where to find Ivan

  • #99
    July 24 · 27 min

    Is Ramp an AI Company Now? Plus Kimi K3 Beats Fable on Front-End | This Week In AI

    Shane and Abhi are live from London this week, and the big one is Kimi K3 — a 2.8 trillion parameter open frontier model with a million-token context window that lands right next to Fable 5 on the benchmarks, takes the number one spot on the front-end Code Arena, and reportedly doubles Fable's performance on legal tasks. Then demand got so heavy Moonshot had to pause new subscriptions. Also this week: Anthropic scrambles to keep Fable in Max and Team plans, an Opus 5 leak, and the distillation debate — if you paid for the output, whose data is it? Plus Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement, Grok Build going open source, Thinking Machines' Inkling, three new Gemini models that land with a thud, and Ramp shipping Ramp Router — which prompts Shane's bold call that Ramp is about to become an AI company with a fintech arm, not the other way around. Then DoorDash ships a CLI for your agent, and everyone argues about what a "factory engineer" actually is. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Kimi K3 launch: https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2077830229968683203 Kimi K3 on Artificial Analysis: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2077832874183860404 Number one on the front-end arena: https://x.com/arena/status/2077824029126504525 Kimi K3 on legal tasks: https://x.com/nrehiew_/status/2077782070785634767 Open weights coming (Yulun Du): https://x.com/yulun_du/status/2077831915999228192 Pausing new subscriptions: https://x.com/kimi_moonshot/status/2078855608565207130 Fable stays in Max & Team plans: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2078302415804379218 Opus 5 leak: https://x.com/vral/status/2079267940021477864 The distillation debate: https://x.com/pankajkumar_dev/status/2079288624928158160 Grok Build goes open source: https://x.com/spacexai/status/2077494535387828644 Thinking Machines' Inkling: https://x.com/thinkymachines/status/2077454609551921208 Three new Gemini models: https://x.com/Google/status/2079589747366724030 Ramp Router: https://x.com/andyfang/status/2077516962515599799 DoorDash CLI: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870 Build your own CLI from network requests (Dax): https://x.com/thdxr/status/2078727284865827140 OpenShip: https://x.com/openshipio/status/2078143909125923137 AI SDK for Python: https://x.com/1st1/status/2078393737407848683 What the devil is a factory engineer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd6ltKUcp9U Yardarm, an Electron app for Mastra Code: https://github.com/JJJ-Mo3/yardarm 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:27 Welcome — live from London 01:08 Kimi K3: 2.8T parameters, open frontier intelligence 02:57 Number one on the front-end arena 04:25 Kimi K3 doubles Fable on legal tasks 05:07 Demand breaks capacity: subscriptions paused 05:53 What is Alibaba Cloud, and why speed matters 07:13 Fable stays in Max & Team plans 07:56 The Opus 5 leak 08:32 The distillation debate: whose data is it? 12:54 Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement 13:34 Be a guest on the show 13:48 Grok Build goes open source 14:37 Thinking Machines' Inkling & the fine-tuning future 16:09 Three new Gemini models (and a sick dark horse) 18:44 Is Ramp an AI company? Ramp Router & the pivot call 21:53 Will our agents order us pizza? DoorDash CLI 23:07 Build your own CLI from network requests 23:54 Quick hits: OpenShip & AI SDK for Python 24:21 What the devil is a factory engineer? 26:31 GitHub star party: Yardarm 27:02 Outro

  • #98
    July 15 · 35 min

    Three Models Drop: Grok 4.5, Meta Muse & GPT-5.6 Sol (Which Nuked a Business) | This Week In AI

    Three model drops, a lawsuit, and a couple of genuine horror stories. Shane and Abhi cover the busiest week in a while — Grok 4.5, Meta's Muse Spark 1.1, and the one everyone actually tried, GPT-5.6 Sol. Sol lands right around Fable on the benchmarks at a third the price, and the receipts are wild: it beats Fable on cost in real usage, tops the Code Arena front-end board — and, in a few now-infamous posts, deleted someone's Mac files and canceled every active Stripe subscription a business had while its owner slept. Meanwhile Anthropic extends Fable again (compute crunch and all), Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets in the same 24 hours OpenAI's head of safety quit, China floats restricting its open models, and the "own your stack" argument gets a Satya Nadella cosign. Plus software factories at Uber and Sierra, Cognition's SWE-1.7, Bun rewritten in Rust, TypeScript 7, 1X's eerily good robot hands, and distilling your own small model with Inference Autotune. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Grok 4.5 (Elon): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074740539874775163 Grok dumping repo data: https://x.com/XBToshi/status/2076338252051841512 Muse Spark 1.1 (Zuckerberg): https://x.com/finkd/status/2075218444056707458 GPT-5.6 launch: https://x.com/openai/status/2074704958419792299 Mitchell Hashimoto's verdict: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2074862990214787301 Sol vs Fable cost (Dax): https://x.com/thdxr/status/2075963734745342361 Code Arena front-end #1: https://x.com/arena/status/2075672492312768683 Sol deleted my Mac files: https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2075657271401390161 Sol canceled every Stripe sub: https://x.com/bridgemindai/status/2074604410727288974 Apple sues OpenAI: https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2075680682844569993 OpenAI's brutal 24 hours: https://x.com/katiemiller/status/2075996304883265935 Fable extended to July 19: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2076351399999557669 China may restrict its models: https://x.com/jukan05/status/2074443936865960205 Uber's agentic pods: https://x.com/praveenTweets/status/2074605343439810922 Harness benchmarks (Ali Ghodsi): https://x.com/alighodsi/status/2074996561306955958 Cognition SWE-1.7: https://x.com/cognition/status/2074882968770728416 Bun rewritten in Rust (Jarred): https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2074973674332123157 TypeScript 7: https://x.com/typescript/status/2074892178745327926 1X's Neo hands: https://x.com/1x_tech/status/2075252899442204952 Satya's reverse information paradox: https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2076323181154230284 Notion ShipOS: https://x.com/NotionHQ/status/2075249002208227743 Inference Autotune (Sam Hogan): https://x.com/samhogan/status/2076044602554159240 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:30 Welcome & London next week 01:48 Grok 4.5: benchmarks, data grabbing & ZDR 04:51 Meta's Muse Image & Muse Spark 1.1 07:21 GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra & Luna 10:38 The cost picture: Sol vs Fable 11:51 Sol's horror stories: deleted files & canceled subs 13:43 Subscribe break 13:53 GPT Live, Apple sues OpenAI & a brutal 24 hours 16:06 Fable extended — can Anthropic even drop it? 19:17 The Anthropic backlash 20:25 China restricts models, Z.ai chips & MiniMax M3 Pro 21:42 Software factories: Uber, Sierra & the harness 24:55 Cognition's SWE-1.7 25:19 Bun rewritten in Rust & the "asshole reviewer" 28:32 Quick hits: TypeScript 7 & 1X's Neo hands 29:48 Satya's "reverse information paradox" 31:35 Notion ShipOS 32:25 Inference Autotune 34:49 Outro

  • #97
    July 9 · 25 min

    Is Sonnet 5 Even Worth It? Plus: Fable's Back, and War on Tokenmaxxing | This Week In AI

    Anthropic lived rent-free in everyone's feed this week. Claude Sonnet 5 launched as "the most agentic Sonnet yet" — and within 24 hours, the government lifted the export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Shane and Abhi unpack both, plus the catch: Fable came back wrapped in new classifiers that quietly fall it back to Opus for coding, and it's coming off subscription plans on July 7. That kicks off the routing wars — Devin Fusion, sidekick, mid-session routing — and a real question: if you're already using Fable to plan and something cheaper to code, you're the router. Then a stacked week of open and Chinese models (ZCode for GLM-5.2, DeepSeek V4's peak-hour pricing, Tencent's Hunyuan HY3), new inference silicon from Etched and Cerebras, an agent-memory result showing 5x more solved tasks, and the sleeper hot take: Palantir's "AI Sovereignty" manifesto and its shot at tokenmaxxing. Plus agentcn's Mastra recipes, Anthropic's own chip talks, and Anthropic's new "global workspace" research. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Claude Sonnet 5: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2072017450611142835 "Opus 4.8 is cheaper and better": https://x.com/Angaisb_/status/2072017407653060848 Export controls lifted: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2072106151890809341 Fable back, with new classifiers: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2072163884430229756 Fable off subscriptions July 7: https://x.com/trq212/status/2072814903170408784 Devin Fusion: https://x.com/cognition/status/2071624568465490170 Sidekick & mid-session routing: https://x.com/walden_yan/status/2071627241818399181 ZCode for GLM-5.2: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2072349453361557898 DeepSeek V4 & peak pricing: https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/2071537369631625608 Tencent Hunyuan HY3: https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2074148098876768478 Etched out of stealth: https://x.com/Etched/status/2071972062202343590 Gemma 4 31B on Cerebras: https://x.com/cerebras/status/2071776102633410684 Observational memory, 5x solves: https://x.com/hampsonw/status/2071728496909643917 Understand the code (Geoffrey Litt): https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/2072522251300409556 Palantir's AI Sovereignty: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2072114267776491695 Primeagen's co-sign: https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2072679880626512256 agentcn Mastra recipes: https://x.com/alaymanguy/status/2073500711737008270 Anthropic's chip talks: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2072685149708300360 Supermemory local: https://x.com/supermemory/status/2072086481997537301 Vercel + Shopify rebuild Hydrogen: https://x.com/vercel/status/2072041488012439803 "Th..thanks Dario": https://x.com/aljosa/status/2072175046324277644 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:29 Welcome 01:08 Claude Sonnet 5 — and the Opus 4.8 counter 04:04 Fable's export controls lifted (and the coding catch) 05:51 Daily-driving Fable & the July 7 subscription cliff 08:07 The routing wars: Devin Fusion & mid-session routing 09:45 OSS & China: ZCode, DeepSeek V4, Hunyuan HY3 11:57 Inference hardware: Etched & Cerebras 12:58 Agent memory: 5x more solves 14:40 You still have to understand the code 16:18 Tokenmaxxing & Palantir's AI Sovereignty 20:57 agentcn's Mastra recipes & Anthropic's chip talks 21:40 Supermemory local & Vercel/Shopify Hydrogen 22:11 The "Thanks Dario" meme 22:29 Anthropic's "global workspace" research 23:57 Outro

  • #96
    July 7 · 22 min

    The Software Factory: Dex Horthy on Shipping Fast Without AI Slop

    Dex Horthy has spent the past year studying what happens to a codebase when you let AI write all of it and stop reading the output. His answer has a name: slop. And it's not just about sloppy prompting. In this episode, the HumanLayer founder Dex Horthy joins Shane and Abhi to draw the software factory on a whiteboard — the whole pipeline that builds the thing that builds the thing — and show exactly where teams tear out the parts that were holding quality up. He moves from the naive factory to the fully agentic one to the "lights-off" version where humans stop reading code entirely, then explains why that dream quietly rots a codebase after three to six months. Dex, Shane, and Abhi also talk about how coding models are trained. Every benchmark rewards one thing: did the test pass? Nowhere in the loop does a model get punished for leaving behind code that a smaller model, or a human six months later, can't work in. That gap is why architecture planning, sprint planning, and code review still can't be skipped. You'll also hear why you're not drowning in PRs so much as drowning in bad ones, what a longer-horizon benchmark that actually catches slop would look like, and how many times Dex has watched the HumanLayer launch film. 🔗 DEX HORTHY / HUMANLAYER Dex on X: https://x.com/dexhorthy HumanLayer: https://humanlayer.dev AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 0:14 Bringing on Dex Horthy 1:16 The HumanLayer launch film 3:31 Cutting through the AI hype 4:07 Defending the terms that matter 5:26 "I want to build a software factory" 5:58 What a software factory actually is 9:08 Agentic code review, testing, and feedback loops 13:35 The lights-off software factory 14:32 Why code quality decays over time 15:36 What RL actually rewards 17:29 Don't sacrifice planning or review 18:05 Getting the PR to 95% before review 19:21 Drowning in bad PRs, not PRs 20:22 Building longer-horizon benchmarks 21:46 Trying HumanLayer

  • #95
    July 2 · 22 min

    GPT-5.6 Needs Government Approval Now, npm Finally Gets More Security, and Fable Returns | This Week In AI

    GPT-5.6 is here — Sol, Terra, and Luna — but for the first time, the US government decides who gets access, approving customers one by one. Shane and Abhi dig into what that precedent means for competition, open models, and every lab that comes next. Then a stacked week: OpenAI's own Jalapeño chip, open models pushing hard (Qwen AgentWorld, DeepSeek DSpark, Hermes mixture-of-agents), the model-routing wave (AI SDK 7, Devin Fusion), Claude Tag's viral moment and the Trojan-horse worry, voice agents on Vercel, Coinbase on keeping AI spend flat, a16z's $200M "seed" for Mirendil, npm finally freezing accounts after the Axios and Mastra attacks, Meta's think-to-text Brain2Qwerty, the DevRel Google fired over a viral CLI, and Fable's return after 15 days offline. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2070555272230384038 Restricted rollout: https://x.com/steph_palazzolo/status/2070241787180966279 Jalapeño chip: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2069770172802773292 Qwen AgentWorld: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2069720365442719867 DeepSeek DSpark: https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2070928299744972814 Hermes Mixture of Agents: https://x.com/NousResearch AI SDK 7: https://x.com/vercel/status/2070155382488764566 Devin Fusion: https://x.com/cognition/status/2071624568465490170 Tau harness: https://x.com/_alejandroao Claude Tag (Karpathy): https://x.com/karpathy Claude Tag Trojan horse: https://x.com/ashwingop Open Tag: https://x.com/ataiiam GLM-5.2 in the wild: https://x.com/cline/status/2069171146994729078 Local 1-bit GLM: https://x.com/UnslothAI/status/2069418532375564484 Coinbase on AI spend: https://x.com/brian_armstrong Coinbase gateway: https://x.com/markletree Exa Connect: https://x.com/ExaAILabs/status/2069842203577651283 Mirendil $200M: https://x.com/a16z/status/2069869327411749012 npm account freeze: https://x.com/AikidoSecurity Brain2Qwerty: https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2071566924803395741 Google Workspace CLI: https://x.com/JPoehnelt 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra in the world's first MCP-Based Course: https://mastra.ai/course Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: npm finally freezes accounts 00:29 Welcome 00:37 GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna — and government-gated access 04:25 OpenAI's Jalapeño chip 05:34 Open models: Qwen AgentWorld, DeepSeek, Hermes MoA 07:11 AI SDK 7 07:43 Devin Fusion & the model-routing wave 10:26 Harness interop: OpenCode & LangChain 11:01 Tau harness 11:26 Claude Tag's viral moment & the Trojan horse 12:49 Open Tag 13:12 Voice agents land on Vercel 13:53 The infra bill: Coinbase on keeping AI spend flat 15:15 Exa Connect & a16z's $200M "seed" 16:32 npm freezes accounts 18:08 Meta's Brain2Qwerty: think-to-text 19:11 Google fired its viral CLI star 21:48 Fable returns 22:00 Outro

  • #94
    June 26 · 18 min

    Mastra Got Hacked. Here's What We Learned

    Mastra got hacked. In this special edition of Security Corner, Shane Thomas and Abhi Aiyer break down exactly what happened when a supply chain attack hit Mastra's npm packages — an attack that appears to trace back to hackers in North Korea. They're joined by Ismail Pelaseyed, co-founder and CTO of Superagent, for the outside view on how these campaigns actually work. You'll hear how a single, ordinary-looking call turned into a full npm account takeover, the small oversight that turned a scare into a genuine crisis, and why a malicious package was still live on the registry weeks after it was reported. Ismail makes the case that getting hacked is a side effect of success — and that the real problem runs deeper than any one team. You'll learn why he thinks npm and PyPI have dropped the ball on security, how AI now lets attackers one-shot a convincing phishing app, and what every maintainer should be doing to harden their pipeline before a trusted contributor becomes the way in. It's the unfiltered version, told by the people who lived through it. Connect with Ismail Pelaseyed: https://x.com/pelaseyed https://superagent.sh Connect with the hosts: https://x.com/smthomas3 https://x.com/abhiaiyer 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES https://mastra.ai https://x.com/mastra_ai https://mastra.ai/community/discord https://github.com/mastra-ai https://mastra.ai/course https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro: a special Security Corner 0:55 The supply chain attack on Mastra 1:29 How they got in: a fake Teams call 2:27 The npm account takeover 3:54 EasyDjS and the scramble to fix it 5:49 Why success makes you a target 9:20 How AI supercharges phishing 9:59 Hardening against compromised contributors 11:10 Open source under strain: IBM's $5B bet 12:27 npm and PyPI keep dropping the ball 14:31 Inside the fake package, and how Socket caught it 16:20 The fear-selling problem in security 18:02 Superagent!

  • #93
    June 25 · 20 min

    GPT-5.5 Beats Fable, Cursor Takes On GitHub & Midjourney Scans Your Body | This Week in AI

    Fable is gone, and the race to replace it is already on. Shane and Abhi open with the fallout — reports that Mythos breached classified NSA systems, the ID-verification future that may follow, and David Sacks' "you asked for it" take. Then the story flips: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber lands state-of-the-art on Cyber Gym, beating Fable and Mythos on the underlying benchmarks, with OpenAI Daybreak shipping alongside it. GPT-5.6 leaks, then slips to mid-July. GLM 5.2 arrives near Opus 4.8, tops Design Arena, and runs on a Mac. Cursor goes after GitHub with Origin, adds mobile and its own frontier model on Colossus after the SpaceX deal closes. Vercel ships Eve, Fred Schott counters with Flue, Claude lands in Slack, and Midjourney — yes, the image company — unveils a full-body medical scanner headed for spas. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE The Fable story, Mythos & the NSA: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2068605229965234238 GPT-5.5 Cyber beats Fable (Sam Altman): https://x.com/sama/status/2069121360744550796 OpenAI Daybreak: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2069104283824640023 GPT-5.6 leak (Mark K): https://x.com/mark_k/status/2069169916432003105 GPT-5.6 delayed: https://x.com/synthwavedd/status/2069432791184650426 GLM 5.2 (Z.ai): https://x.com/zai_org/status/2066938937344495629 GLM 5.2 tops Design Arena: https://x.com/Designarena/status/2066940737011560652 GLM 5.2 vs Opus (Cline): https://x.com/cline/status/2069171146994729078 1-bit GLM 5.2 runs local (Unsloth): https://x.com/UnslothAI/status/2069418532375564484 Cursor Origin: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2069149296436330776 Cursor Compile keynote: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2067012220832329782 Swyx on Origin: https://x.com/swyx/status/2066928345246470204 Vercel Eve: https://x.com/vercel/status/2067180054979936413 Flue 1.0 (Fred Schott): https://x.com/FredKSchott/status/2066962296119959581 Codex record-replay to skills: https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2067681320281723113 Claude Tag in Slack: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2069468693017268244 Replit in Slack: https://x.com/Replit/status/2067661213278900402 Midjourney Medical: https://x.com/midjourney/status/2067421950314688759 Sakana Fugu: https://x.com/SakanaAILabs/status/2068861630327443966 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:30 Welcome 01:02 Fable fallout: did Mythos breach the NSA? 03:10 GPT-5.5 Cyber beats Fable & OpenAI Daybreak 05:23 GPT-5.6 delayed, Gemini 3.5 Pro slips 05:52 GLM 5.2: near-Opus, and it runs on a Mac 09:52 Subscribe break 09:55 Cursor's Origin takes on GitHub 11:12 Cursor mobile, frontier model & the SpaceX deal 11:52 Vercel's Eve, Flue & Codex skills 13:48 Claude Tag & Replit in Slack 14:57 Midjourney goes medical: full-body scanners 16:42 Sakana Fugu & the rise of model routing 19:37 Outro

  • #92
    June 24 · 19 min

    How AI Broke Open Source Security | Security Corner with Ismail Pelaseyed

    Open source is under attack, and AI changed the math. In this Security Corner, Ismail Pelaseyed, co-founder and CTO of Superagent, joins Shane and Abhi to break down how the software supply chain became the soft underbelly of everything we build. An attack that once took an army of researchers and weeks of work now takes about an hour, and the attacker no longer needs a frontier model to pull it off. Ismail traces how most breaches begin, why phishing has become almost impossible to spot, and how a single poisoned dependency can cascade across an entire ecosystem. You'll get concrete steps any maintainer or developer can take today: switching package managers, enabling the security scanners that ship for free, and standing up an adversarial agent that hunts for chained exploits before an attacker finds them. Ismail also warns that the same instincts protecting enterprises may be quietly strangling open source itself. You'll hear why he thinks the big registries have dropped the ball, what a "Darwinian GitHub" would mean for anyone shipping a new package, and the one move he believes can keep the ecosystem alive. Superagent: https://superagent.sh Superagent on X: https://x.com/superagent_ai Superagent on GitHub: https://github.com/superagent-ai pnpm: https://pnpm.io Socket: https://socket.dev 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Free course: https://mastra.ai/course Principles of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns of Building AI Agents: https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development — from prototype to production. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 0:21 What is Superagent 0:53 How AI sped up attack timelines 2:14 Why phishing is the way in 4:35 Outdated CI/CD workflows 6:04 Two defenses: CI/CD checks and switching to pnpm 7:18 The risk hiding in skills and agents 8:11 Should you delay installing new packages? 8:54 The Darwinian GitHub threat to open source 9:55 Why supply chain attacks are so popular 11:34 Will companies abandon open source? 13:53 Why Ismail is frustrated with GitHub and npm 14:32 Practical defenses for maintainers 18:12 Where to find Superagent

  • #91
    June 18 · 37 min

    Claude Fable 5: Launched, Hyped, Banned by the Government | This Week In AI

    Fable came and went in a week. Shane and Abhi break down the strangest model launch yet — Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model Anthropic said was too capable to release widely, until a US export-control directive made it vanish for everyone. We cover the whole arc: the launch hype, the pricing that had people spending $1,000 a day, the silent fallbacks to Opus, the system-prompt leak, and the snitch that triggered a 90-minute shutdown. Then a stacked back half — China's open-weight surge, OpenRouter Fusion, loop engineering vs loopcraft, the agent-learning gold rush, OpenAI filing to go public, and Dario's new essay. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 READ MORE Claude Fable 5 launch: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2064394146916229443 Pokémon beaten with vision: https://x.com/Baconbrix/status/2064418858073784530 Export-control announcement: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2065597531644743999 Amazon/WSJ report (Theo): https://x.com/theo/status/2065665304882209132 David Sacks on the ban: https://x.com/davidsacks/status/2065853007619588171 Token capital (Satya Nadella): https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2066182223213293753 Siri as a harness (Weinbach): https://x.com/mweinbach/status/2065630219021492474 MiniMax M3 open weights: https://x.com/minimax_ai/status/2065436935188058208 GLM 5.2: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2065704919299235870 Kimi K2 Code High Speed: https://x.com/kimi_moonshot/status/2066467110960959833 Cohere North Mini Code: https://x.com/cohere/status/2064378058329526556 Gemma 4 on consumer hardware: https://x.com/unslothai/status/2065433326706684135 Diffusion Gemma: https://x.com/unslothai/status/2065107734916432189 OpenRouter Fusion API: https://x.com/openrouter/status/2065856853989270011 AI SDK harnesses (Vercel): https://x.com/vercel_dev/status/2065509970775519569 Swyx on loopcraft: https://x.com/swyx/status/2065307558198567206 OpenEnv joins Hugging Face: https://x.com/ben_burtenshaw/status/2063991191415267492 Adaline 2.0 / agent learning: https://x.com/adiix_official/status/2066172819952566643 Cognition Frontier Code: https://x.com/cognition/status/2064061031912288715 Ramp SWE-bench: https://x.com/RampLabs/status/2065485806605619304 AWS on AI-generated code: https://x.com/awscloud/status/2064449711155589396 OpenAI files to go public: https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2065088002335158753 OpenAI acquires Ona: https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2064094175541461220 Salesforce acquires Fin AI: https://x.com/fin_ai/status/2066493998852686074 Mistral in talks to raise: https://x.com/business/status/2065420995393941692 Dario's essay on the AI exponential: https://x.com/DarioAmodei/status/2064781775247950326 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra in the world's first MCP-Based Course: https://mastra.ai/course Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open & welcome 00:40 Claude Fable 5: the launch and the hype 01:53 The price problem and silent Opus fallbacks 06:42 Our experience + the system-prompt leak 08:51 The 90-minute export-control shutdown 12:40 Microsoft's "token capital" & where Fable goes 17:07 Apple at WWDC: Siri as a harness 17:57 China's open models: MiniMax M3, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2 21:11 Local-first: Cohere, AMD, Diffusion Gemma 24:58 OpenRouter Fusion & AI SDK harnesses 27:07 Loop engineering, loopcraft & OpenEnv 29:09 Agent learning & new coding benchmarks 32:14 AWS, the snitch & OpenAI's IPO 33:37 Salesforce, Mistral & Le Chaton Fat 36:42 Quick hits & a Fable eulogy

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