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The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AI
A Reuters report details 'Project OT,' a January plan to cut many Meta teams by 60% through layoffs and reallocation, betting AI-native teams of 3-5 could match the output of 10-20 person groups. The full plan did not go ahead, but some teams still saw 30-40% cuts and struggled to cope with the workload.
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Rigorous Yet Sustainable Human Reviews in the AI Era
Mandatory AI checks paired with manual spikes for complex changes keep developers sharp. Teams can boost velocity by skipping peer reviews on low-risk PRs and using AI approvals, provided most developers are code owners and teams are small.
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An Accidental Blackboard
Thoughtworks put 10 engineers in a Barcelona office to build an airline IROps system in four days using a fully agentic workflow it called 'hyper-agentic.' Directing the agents to continually commit and rebase in a shared monorepo caused them to spontaneously coordinate through shared plan files, reinventing the 1980s 'blackboard' pattern from AI research, prompting a new project called Talwrn to formalize it.
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The economics of agent scale: tokens, ROI, and building platforms for AI-first teams (Part 2)
Andi Gutmans, Google's head of Agentic Data Cloud, tells Stack Overflow's Peter O'Connor that once teams run dozens or hundreds of agents rather than a handful of people, the model itself is rarely the bottleneck; the harder problem is finding the least context needed for a reliable result at the lowest cost. He argues 'token maxing' is the wrong goal and says platform teams should treat 'the agent' as its own persona to build for.
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OpenAI spends $1 billion to expand Daybreak to defend power, water, and banking
OpenAI president Greg Brockman unveiled Daybreak for Frontline Defenders, expanding the company's $1 billion Daybreak cyber-defense initiative to subsidize protection for water, electricity, and banking systems, including a pilot with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. OpenAI also said its new GPT-6 Astra model has crossed the 'Critical' cybersecurity threshold in its Preparedness Framework.
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