Daily Kickoff

Up to seven things a day for people building with AI. Fewer when there aren't seven.

  1. The Pulse: tech companies move to open AI models

    Uber cut its cost per AI request 34% and per-session cost 52% after shifting workloads to open models, while AT&T's switch to open models cut its AI bill 56% with only a 2% quality drop. Pinterest's CEO said work that cost $100 on a closed frontier model now costs $8 using open models.

    Pragmatic Engineer Blog engineering leadership

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  2. AWS open-sources Pizza Bot: email-style inbox for background AI agents

    AWS has open-sourced Pizza Bot, an email-style inbox app for managing AI agents that keep working after a user logs off, built on LangChain's DeepAgents and LangGraph. It's now a standalone community project with no AWS support, running on macOS, Windows and Linux with a choice of models including Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI or Ollama.

    The New Stack agentic coding

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  3. Session Traces and Cost Controls Help Diagnose AI Agent Failures

    Drawing on months of running AI agents in production, StackGen principal engineer Sabith K Soopy describes using Langfuse to capture nested session traces of every LLM call, tool execution and sub-agent delegation. The approach pairs hard iteration caps and per-tool call limits with cost-anomaly monitoring to catch runaway spend and tool-call loops before they surface as outages.

    InfoQ AI/ML agentic coding

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