#Agent

Paper: Nubank cuts AI agent update cycles from 3 weeks to under 5 days

The paper presents a hypothesis-driven simulation workflow using the Snowglobe simulator to screen candidate customer-experience agents before deployment, tested on Nubank's Card Delivery agent and its successor Card Management. Across 4 deployed versions, simulated and production version-level binary evaluator scores showed high correlation, and simulation-guided iteration raised transactional net promoter score by 36.69 points in a live A/B test. Screening open-weight configurations in over 16,000 simulated conversations led to a model that increased self-service rate by 8.82 percentage points in a subsequent live A/B test, with no statistically significant change in tNPS.

Sierra inducted into JPMorganChase Hall of Innovation

Sierra announced its induction into JPMorganChase's Hall of Innovation, presented to co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor at J.P. Morgan's 18th annual Technology Innovation Symposium in Palo Alto on October 29. The Hall of Innovation, established in 2011, recognizes privately held technology companies that have made a significant impact at JPMorganChase through innovation, business value, and close collaboration. Chase CIO Gill Haus cited Sierra as a strong collaborator on agentic AI, and Taylor said the company believes the future of customer experiences will be agentic.

0.167.0

Codex 0.167.0 adds an agent command center opened with `codex agents --no-daemon`, unread-result markers in the command center and session picker, cross-backend session switching from the terminal picker, local image attachment previews, and a Google Cloud Vertex AI setup wizard. Bug fixes keep saved chats visible across model provider changes, preserve transcript history when Ctrl+L clears the terminal, and resolve network approval prompts when their requests end. Documentation and chores cover managed network constraints under [permissions.network], DotSlash manifest updates, and reduced jemalloc arena counts for Linux musl builds.

Show HN: Open-world text adventure played through AI agents

Eremoterra lets you pick any parcel of Earth, hand a prompt to an AI agent such as ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor, and have it describe and build on that patch as if no one had ever lived there. Trying a patch is free for a night; keeping it costs USD 1, a price that rises about 0.7% each time another 0.1% of the planet's 233,280,000 parcels is claimed and doubles every 10%. Patches carry a server-rendered chronicle of events, can be shared by link without an account, and can be populated by a people you define.

Perplexity launches its own take on AI agents for work

Perplexity has launched always-on "Teammates" that can take on multiple roles within a workspace, pulling existing projects, skills, and memory from Perplexity tools, and building on Perplexity Computer to support collaboration and ongoing, large-scale work. Each Teammate can be assigned different jobs that run simultaneously, with progress tracked through individual threads in the Perplexity app and interaction available in Slack, but the feature requires the $200/month Max plan. CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X that the company envisions "every org having hundreds of teammates working for each person."

AgentSight: System-wide AI agent profiling and monitoring with eBPF

AgentSight is a local-first, top/strace-like observability tool for AI agents that uses eBPF and TLS traffic tracing to connect prompts, model calls, and tool decisions to their real effects on the machine, without requiring an SDK, proxy, or vendor integration. It works with existing agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and OpenClaw, offering live session views, process/file/network tracking, saved SQLite session reports, a web UI, and OpenTelemetry export. The project is MIT-licensed and installable via Homebrew, Cargo, release binaries, or Docker, with eBPF requiring Linux kernel 4.1+ and sudo access for live capture.

Airbnb says it’s launching an AI travel agent in the first half of 2027

Airbnb announced in its Q3 shareholder letter that its AI travel agent will launch in the first half of 2027, using a travel-specific interface that composes components like maps, photos, comparisons, calendars, and itineraries in real time rather than relying on text-heavy chat. CEO Brian Chesky said general-purpose agents aren't suited to travel planning, and the agent will also help guests during trips with reservation changes, payment issues, refunds, rebooking, and 24-hour safety support. The news came alongside Q3 revenue growth of 19% to $4.87 billion, and Airbnb raised its 2026 revenue growth forecast to the high teens.

Accelerators take care of the basics

Sierra describes Accelerators, prebuilt packages for high-volume workflows such as order tracking, appointment scheduling, claims intake and ID verification, which come with basic integrations and guardrails and are customized for a business using Ghostwriter. Accelerators are maintained by Sierra but track customer changes separately so updates can be reviewed before being applied, and they connect to a company's existing software systems. The first Accelerators are available today in Agent Studio, with user-built and shareable Accelerators planned.

Ask HN: In the age of agentic AI, do you still pair program?

A Hacker News poster asks how pair programming and mob/ensemble programming will evolve or disappear in the age of agentic AI, noting their team used to run mob sessions over Zoom with a driver, navigator, note-taker and observers. They found mob programming draining and pair programming somewhat better, and argue that with agents it no longer makes sense to gather everyone on a call to watch someone else's agent work.

Getting started with Web Answer on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Amazon announced the general availability of Web Answer on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a managed Gateway tool that takes a natural-language question and returns a synthesized answer with source citations in seconds, replacing a self-built search, retrieve, synthesize, and citation pipeline. The post contrasts it with Web Search (which returns ranked URLs and lets you keep your own model), then walks through granting the Gateway service role bedrock-agentcore:InvokeWebAnswer, creating a Web Answer target, and calling it from a Strands agent. It is available in us-east-1 at $10 per 1,000 tool calls, with a 10 transactions per second per account rate limit.

The benchmark where AIs have to lie to win

The author built a Blood on the Clocktower benchmark, spending about $20,000 in API credits on 386 games, to test AI social deception, multi-agent coordination and long-horizon reasoning. GPT-6 Astra ranked best, roughly 430 Elo points above Claude Opus 4.6, with OpenAI models notably stronger on the good side because they weigh evidence more skeptically. The code and a playable website are available at clocktowerbench.com.

Build Live Apps in Cursor

Cursor now lets users build and deploy live apps directly from the editor: a cloud agent scaffolds the web app, sets up a Postgres database if needed, configures authentication behind Cursor SSO, provisions hosting, and returns a shareable link at a chosen domain. Publishing runs deterministic and agentic security checks, and nothing goes live until checks pass and the user explicitly publishes; team admins can view all apps and secrets, add review rules, approve blocked publishes, and unpublish apps. The capability is available on all paid plans with cloud agents enabled, deploying from new or existing repos on Cursor Origin and GitHub, with GitLab support coming soon.

Show HN: Agentshield Zero-leak kernel sandbox and secret defense for AI coding

AgentShield v1.2.0 wraps AI coding agent processes (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, Antigravity) in OS-level kernel sandboxes, using Bubblewrap plus Landlock on Linux, Seatbelt on macOS, and AppContainer on Windows to trap unauthorized syscalls and block credential exfiltration via CIDR egress filtering. It also redacts environment secrets in memory, offers a Ctrl+. QuickFix redactor for exposed keys, and prevents agents from reading /proc/self/environ or ~/.ssh. A Pro tier adds a macOS/Windows menu-bar GUI, cloud audit log backup, and centralized policy sync.

AI SRE Teammate

Sera is an AI SRE teammate that, when an incident opens, checks alerts, recent code changes from tools like GitHub and GitLab, observability data and past incidents to surface a likely cause with a confidence level and supporting evidence. It integrates with ServiceNow, Datadog, Grafana, Slack, MS Teams, Jira and 250+ other tools, and the vendor cites results including 95% alert noise cut at Chalo, 60% lower incident management cost at Razorpay, 37% MTTR reduction at Cisco and <5 min ack at Bajaj Finserv Health. It offers data isolation and an audit trail with SOC 2 certification, plus an interactive demo walkthrough.

OpenAIs GPT-6 Cyber can both break into systems and propose how to fix them

OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Cyber, a model trained to find software vulnerabilities, build working exploits, and suggest patches, which it says stayed within its guardrails in 99.93 percent of cases without safety instructions and 100 percent with them. OpenAI reports the model found 81 previously unknown severe vulnerabilities in Firefox and reproduced 1,724 Linux kernel vulnerabilities with 948 working exploits, at a compute cost of $1,213,430. Access is initially limited to select Daybreak Red customers via the API and Codex, and all benchmark numbers come from OpenAI with no independent testing published so far.

Featured coverage of this story: 《GPT‑6 Cyber: Advancing the frontier of aligned cybersecurity agents》

Wallet screening your AI agent can call over MCP

Prax offers free wallet screening exposed over MCP at https://mcp.orabrain.com/mcp, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code can call screen_wallet natively to check sanctions, exploits, phishing, scams and mixer exposure with readable reasons. The free tier allows 10 lookups a day with a work email and no card, and a REST/OpenAPI option is also available.

Vera Delivers the Best of Both Worlds: Highest Throughput and Fastest Agents

NVIDIA says its Vera CPU outperforms both the fastest and the most energy-efficient x86 CPUs in a 100-megawatt data center comparison, delivering 1.6x more agents per watt versus the fastest x86 CPU and 2x faster agent speed with leading energy efficiency versus the most energy-efficient x86 CPU. Early adopters report production-style gains, including Perplexity running agentic coding tasks 1.5x faster, DeepInfra reaching up to 2.2x the speed of the best x86 processor on agentic orchestration, and ClickHouse scaling near-linearly across 176 cores on its standard binary. Daytona brought 1,000 agent sandboxes online in 10.8 seconds versus 88.4 seconds with x86, and Modal achieved up to 2x sandbox throughput per core versus comparable x86 hardware.

Introducing Emergent: The Founder-Generated Startup List

Newcomer and Felicis asked current and former founder speakers from the Cerebral Valley AI Summits to nominate seed-stage or earlier companies with generational potential, producing the Emergent list of 29 startups, each with a blurb from the nominating founder. The list highlights agent tooling, hardware, open source, and AI-native services, with Felicis' own analysis pointing to agent infrastructure, healthcare, bio, and creator tools. Many of the founders will attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on November 12 in San Francisco.

Tencent Launches Hy4, One of the Leading Open-Source AI Models

Tencent announced Tencent Hy4, its latest-generation large language model, which it says ranks among the world's leading open-source models, with model weights and system cards planned for release in the coming days. Hy4 adds visual understanding and computer-use capabilities for the first time, along with improvements in instruction following, long-context comprehension and long-horizon agentic tasks, and is available across Tencent Cloud TokenHub, WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao, WeCom's AI Assistant (Dayuan) and ima, with API access via OpenRouter, Hermes and OpenCode. Pricing remains about US$0.90 per million input tokens, US$2.70 per million output tokens and US$0.045 per million cached input tokens, with Hy4 Flash scheduled for release soon.

Meta says US users can now video chat with their Muse AI avatar

Meta announced that Muse Voice, which lets U.S. users call and video chat with its consumer AI agent Muse, is now available to everyone in the U.S. The feature, first shown at Meta's September Connect conference, uses new Muse Realtime Avatar and Muse Realtime Voice models to power a customizable animated avatar that responds with expressions and gestures matching the conversation's tone. Meta plans to bring real-time conversations to its AI Glasses and an upcoming "Muse Charm" device, following a Tamagotchi-like wearable it intends to launch before year-end.

Muse has a voice mode now

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta's Muse AI agent now supports real-time voice conversations, with avatars that animate in sync with the agent's speech. Users can adjust the voice tone by asking the agent or through avatar settings. The voice mode and expressive avatars are rolling out now in the US for the app, with support coming "soon" for Meta's AI glasses and its forthcoming Muse Charm gadget.

Show HN: Resilient AI Worker Queue with Redis, BullMQ, and Budget Kill Switches

This post presents a production template for running fault-tolerant AI agent queues with automatic model failover across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Ollama), jittered exponential backoff retries, and a Redis-backed token-budget kill switch that halts jobs before exceeding spend limits. It uses BullMQ and Redis for dead-letter queues and concurrency limits, plus structured logging for Datadog, Grafana Loki, or CloudWatch. The community edition is MIT-licensed, with a $39 enterprise license adding dashboards, distributed rate-limiting middleware, and setup guidance.

Show HN: Replay three AI agent approval failures in five seconds, in Python

Call4Agents is a zero-dependency Python library that adds once-only actions, approvals bound to exact arguments, undo, idempotency keys and record/replay/diff to existing agents built on LangGraph, Pydantic AI, the OpenAI Agents SDK, MCP or plain Python. Its `call4agents incident` and `call4agents quickstart` commands reproduce crash-and-resume double actions (e.g. 2 emails without the kit, 1 with it) in real processes, and version 0.6 is Apache-2.0 with an optional PostgreSQL backend for multiple machines.

Show HN: GPT-Live and GPT-Realtime: Arch Trade-Offs Behind Continuous Voice AI

A developer's LiveKit issue report found that 14 of 75 appointment-cancellation requests were not delegated to the backend within six seconds, and five were never delegated, even though the agent sometimes told callers the cancellation was underway. The post argues that GPT-Live's continuous voice frontend decides when to hand work to a reasoning backend, so delegation failures, overlapping-speech confirmations, and intent changes can leave backend intelligence and tools unused, while the closed model cannot be fine-tuned to fix them. It recommends measuring time to first substantive information and verified task completion rather than time-to-first-audio alone, and notes that preventive speech guardrails add latency and playback-state complexity.

Redditor uses AI to get Switch games running natively on Apple TV

Redditor u/FloatingFalafel released TVPort, an open-source fork of the nxnative toolkit that recompiles Switch and Switch 2 games for Apple TV 4K using a Mac, built with Claude Opus 5.5. The project reportedly backs up save files to Mac or iCloud and offers 30 fps or 60 fps targets, with Super Mario Odyssey said to run at 60 fps with occasional slight stutters and audio issues around waterfalls, while The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom experienced thermal throttling and may never run on the Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen. The repository contains no game files, so users must supply their own legally obtained copies.

Show HN: Is Android ready for AI agents? What broke in 3324 actions on 45 phones

Between 8 October and 3 November, AI assistants made 3,324 actions on 45 Android phones through Opposable, an app that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code or Codex use the phone; 91% of actions worked, and of the 305 failures, 140 came from the phone or OS, including 108 where the phone had dropped off the relay. The author reports that 27 of the 45 phones dropped off at least once, with 7 of 9 Xiaomi and 14 of 20 Samsung phones affected against 2 of 5 Pixels and 1 of 4 Motorolas, and argues Android lacks a supported way to stay reachable on demand and any way to distinguish agent input from the owner's. The post also notes screenshots worked 95% of the time, taps and swipes 99%, typing 85%, and that 3,048 of the 3,324 actions came through Claude.

Claude AI can plug directly into your bank account

Anthropic is launching a Personal Finance feature that connects Claude to bank and card accounts through the Plaid platform, letting users ask questions like where their money went this month and get spending breakdowns by category. Access is read-only, Claude cannot move, manage, or invest money, and it does not see banking passwords, though it can view account names, balances, credit limits, and up to two years of transaction history. The beta rolls out this week to Claude Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers in the US, following a similar ChatGPT feature introduced in May.

Claude can now analyze your spending with its new Personal Finance tool

Anthropic announced that Claude is gaining a "Personal Finance" tool that lets users connect bank and credit card accounts through Plaid and ask questions about their finances, with read-only access that cannot move, manage, or invest money. The tool summarizes spending by category, flags potential issues like duplicate charges and unexpected fees, and explains financial concepts such as APR, and it is rolling out in beta this week to Pro, Max, and Ultra plan users in the U.S. Anthropic says conversations in the Personal Finance hub are not used to train its models.

Introducing Personal Finance in Claude

Anthropic is launching Personal Finance in Claude, which lets users in the US securely connect bank and card accounts through Plaid with read-only access and ask questions about balances, transactions and spending in everyday language. It starts rolling out in beta this week on the Pro, Max and Ultra plans in the US, and Claude cannot move, manage or invest money, shows no ads or sponsored recommendations, and does not offer its own financial products. Conversations in the Personal Finance hub are not used to train models, accounts can be unlinked anytime, and Anthropic says Claude can make mistakes, so important figures should be checked with your bank.

A builder’s guide to scaling Databricks Apps

This guide outlines scaling Databricks Apps across four stages—design, build, test and deploy, and operate—starting with agreed latency and peak-load targets before any code is written. It recommends keeping app compute for serving the UI, sending heavy work to purpose-built services, using async code, splitting soft and hard state so sessions can be rebuilt on any instance, and letting load tests and telemetry determine instance size, worker count and instance count. It also covers connection budgeting for Lakebase, graceful shutdown within the 15-second SIGTERM window, and monitoring and alerting in production.

GitLab Integration

Amp now integrates with GitLab on gitlab.com and self-managed instances, letting users start projects from GitLab repositories and giving Orbs a signed-in glab so the agent can open and comment on merge requests and read issues and pipelines. Amp can subscribe to comments and CI for merge requests it opens, and users can ask Amp to start a new orb for every new merge request or issue in a project, managed under Settings → Integrations & MCP → GitLab. Each person connects GitLab in Settings → Integrations & MCP, then a group Owner installs Push Updates once for the workspace.

Show HN: Magertron – AI Orchestrator for agents' tools, APIs, LLMs and streams

Magertron is an AI orchestration platform that governs model inference and tool calls across vendors through a single Envoy-based gateway, with features including MCP server lifecycle management, a governance policy engine, RBAC, and OCSF-aligned audit events. It offers a free tier for up to 20 MCP servers with no signup, plus Pro ($499/mo), Business ($30,000/yr), and Enterprise plans, and ships an Apache 2.0 CLI called mcpctl. Version 4.2.32 adds OPA support.

We built the necessary security layer between your database and your AI Agents

This Medium article presents a 2026 guide on connecting an AI agent to a database safely, framed as a security layer between the database and AI agents. The submission links to the article and its Hacker News discussion thread, which had 2 points and no comments.

Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit

GitHub Next describes PDD Kit, a toolkit for Proof-Driven Development that turns a developer's intent into a formal specification in Verus, proves the agent's code meets that spec for every input, and falls back to tests where proofs cannot reach. The team applied it to Pet Store, a roughly 5,000-line Rust full-stack app, formally verifying its login logic while the developer reviewed the intent rather than reading generated code line by line. PDD Kit labels each result as either formal verification or empirical evidence and asks developers to sign off on each trusted component.

Introducing Latency Metrics for Mastra Observability

Mastra now records TTFC (time to first chunk) and TTFT (time to first token) on every span, from model calls up to agent runs, so traces, spans, and threads can be filtered and sorted by these metrics on Mastra platform and Studio. The metrics work on self-hosted projects using DuckDB, PostgreSQL, or ClickHouse, and are queryable via the Mastra CLI ([email protected]+), Client SDK (@mastra/[email protected]+), and observability endpoints. Studio support requires [email protected] and @mastra/[email protected] or later.

Vetto ScienceBench: Expanding Scientific Capabilities of Frontier AI Models

Vetto ScienceBench introduces 50 new data-analysis tasks in the Terminal-Bench Science format across 14 scientific disciplines, each reviewed for quality and audited per trial, where the best of 13 frontier models passes 49% of trials and most fail over 80%. Tasks require agents to explore data, choose a method, check its assumptions and deliver an answer or pipeline graded against held-out ground truth, with data features like instrument artifacts or selection effects that defeat textbook approaches. In about two thirds of failures the model had already seen the problem in its own output and then dismissed it as noise or corrected it with the wrong model, and a one-line warning raised GPT-6.1 Sol's pass rate from 29% to 39% without improving outcomes once the problem was noticed.

Agents aren’t humans (but they kinda are)

This post argues that remotely hosted personal AI Agents act as intermediaries between Users and Sites, stripping Sites of the identity, reputation and accountability signals they rely on for security, fraud prevention and monetization. It proposes the Intermediation Principle and surveys emerging standards — Web Bot Auth, MOLE, OAuth, AIPREFs and the new Trusted Agent Delegation coalition — while noting Cloudflare's new tools for seeing Agents, setting per-Agent access policies, and tying Agents back to users via Account Abuse Protection.

An AI agent for generating data pipelines from Slack requests

GoDaddy's domain data platform team built Pipeline Build Agent, a conversational AI agent on their go-agent-python SDK deployed via Katana that turns a single Slack message into a complete data pipeline, reducing a task that took 2–4 hours to minutes. A manager agent routes intent to a Pipeline Creation Agent (checks S3 schemas, generates PySpark jobs, DAGs, and policy files, opens a PR) or a Column Addition Agent (finds the pipeline, propagates changes downstream, opens a PR), with both querying the Lake Naming Standards knowledge base before generating code. The team enforces one PR per run with update_pr_files as the only correction path, and plans to add Redshift and S3 CSV export destinations plus pre-PR syntax validation.

Basemodo: AI lets anyone build. We let anyone deploy

Basemodo is a hosting service for apps built with AI agents, offering deployment via a CLI command or an MCP server for tools like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Each app is private by default, comes with sign-in, a SQLite database, daily backups, cron, logs and secrets, and is reachable at a basemodo.app address plus two custom domains with HTTPS. Plans start at $5 per month for one app, and invited users never pay.

Axiom Math wants to keep AI slop out of mathematics

Axiom Math, a $1.6B startup founded in March 2025 by Stanford math Ph.D. dropout Carina Hong, announced it has formally verified the Stacks Project, translating its roughly 7,654 pages into about 16 million lines of computer-checked Lean code using a fleet of AI agents. The company argues that verified results become building blocks for future proofs and that the approach can extend to software written by AI agents.