Newsletter · Weekdays & Sundays
The Agentic Brief
Agentic AI in four minutes a morning. Curated by a pipeline I built, reviewed by me before it goes out.

Today's daily
Most of a harness-evolution gain is overfitting and extra compute
Plus: Monzo's 1,800 agent tasks a day, and a credential the agent thought was yours. 5 min.
Oct 22, 2026 · 5 min
Subscribe
Get the brief in your inbox
Pick daily, weekly, or both. Nothing is gated either way: every issue is on the site and in the feeds.
- Weekdays at 8:45am IST, one lead story and 6 to 9 items.
- Sundays, an argued synthesis rather than a recap.
- One click to leave, and quiet days say so in the subject line.
Every weekday a pipeline reads 82 feeds, the Hacker News stories that clear 80 points, 15 company engineering blogs, and 12 accounts on X. It picks the one story that changed something, writes it up with the caveat attached rather than buried, and lines six to nine items up behind it. Then it stops.
On Sunday it does the thing a daily structurally can't. One argued observation connecting the week's stories, the items whose significance only showed up in hindsight, and the two or three good things that nobody clicked. It ships at the same time every weekday because software doesn't oversleep, it says so out loud when the day was quiet instead of padding, and every issue carries a corrections section whether or not there is anything in it. What it reads, which model does which job, and what I check before a send are all written down on the how-it-works page.
This week's weekly
The score and the job came apart
Plus: a 1983 paper that explains this week, and a privacy leak nobody has confirmed. 8 min.
Aug 10 to Aug 16, 2026 · 8 min

Recent issues
Full archive →- Daily
Most of a harness-evolution gain is overfitting and extra compute
Plus: Monzo's 1,800 agent tasks a day, and a credential the agent thought was yours. 5 min.
Oct 22, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Claude Code's Bash tool changed 12% of calls carrying code or escapes
Plus: UndoBench, a Copilot CLI secret leak, and what Codemode is for. 5 min.
Oct 07, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Branch steering breaks the Dual-LLM guarantee for computer-use agents
Plus: swarms borrowing public URL scanners, pipelines that go wrong under replay. 5 min.
Oct 06, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
VS Code rebuilt its release process around agents and now ships weekly
Plus: an agent that writes its own tools, and a support bot at 80%. 5 min.
Oct 05, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
Six ways an agent harness can run something other than what you approved
Plus: elaborate harnesses lose to a plain coding agent. 5 min.
Oct 02, 2026 · 5 min

- Daily
A forged chat-template marker loses most of its authority as ordinary subwords
Plus: 5 papers, 3 builder posts, 9 quick links. 5 min.
Oct 01, 2026 · 5 min

Every meme the pipeline has drawn, winners and runner-ups, lives in the hall of fame.
Feeds
- /newsletter/feed.xml both cadences, full text
- /newsletter/daily/feed.xml dailies only
- /newsletter/weekly/feed.xml weeklies only
- /feed-all.xml the brief plus the blog






