标签：#aie

Nearly half a century ago, the free software movement made a demand that was both technical and moral: Users should have the freedom to understand, run, modify, and share the software on which they depended. It was a demand born from practical life with machines. A printer that couldn't be fixed. A program that couldn't be studied. A system that asked its users to accept dependence as the price of progress. That belief shaped modern computing and gave us the tools and norms that made the internet, open infrastructure, and collaborative software development possible. Today, that belief faces its hardest test. The technology has changed, but the warning signs are familiar. In 1980, at the MIT AI Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a new Xerox 9700 printer was installed. The previous printer had come with source code that could be modified, inspected, recompiled, and reinstalled. Richard Stallman had changed that software to message users when their print job was done or when there was a jam, a small but meaningful feature since the printer sat several floors away. The new printer arrived with software preloaded and installed, no source code available, no way to modify it. If you needed help or new features, you hoped and prayed Xerox would listen. That loss of agency, alongside other anti-consumer shifts in early software, helped push him toward GNU and the free software movement: the belief that software should be free as in freedom, free to inspect, run, study, modify, understand, and redistribute. AI and inference services today are not too dissimilar. Closed frontier intelligence can make entire companies, governments, developers, and communities dependent on systems they cannot inspect, reproduce, modify, or meaningfully contest. At the dawn of this AI moment, we were promised unfettered intelligence across our products, companies, and codebases. We were told we'd be free to build whatever we wanted. At first, with tab completions. Then whole function blocks.

by Peter Yang, Behind the Craft Today, I want to share 18 hot takes on where I think the AI market is headed. AI is in a weird place right now. The government is restricting access to frontier models, enterprises are becoming conscious of token costs, and everyone’s trying to rebuild their product for agents first instead of humans. I’ve interviewed dozens of AI leaders and spent far too much time following these topics on X/Twitter. Here are 18 hot takes on where I think AI is headed next: The frontier-only AI stack is collapsing The AI super app era is here Traditional software risks becoming a dumb pipe for agents Cloud agents and collaboration are the next wave The Frontier-Only AI Stack Is Collapsing Tokenmaxxing at frontier API prices makes no sense. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months, Microsoft moved engineers off Claude Code due to cost, and companies are realizing that running everything on frontier models can get expensive fast. Tokenmaxxing makes sense when you’re on a subsidized $200/month plan but is unsustainable at API rates. Companies will rely on a portfolio of models. Coinbase recently cut its AI spend nearly in half by switching engineers to Chinese open-source models like GLM and Kimi. Airbnb and Pinterest have done the same with Alibaba’s Qwen models. I believe that this will be the default path forward — using frontier for high-stakes work and cheaper models for everything else. China’s open-source strategy is working. Chinese models are taking market share from frontier models at US companies. China is also building the full AI stack — from energy (e.g., solar, nuclear) to data centers to domestic chips. The Chinese government is planning a $295B investment in AI data centers with at least 80% of the chips built domestically. Frontier labs are in a catch-22 situation. If they release great open-source models, they might undercut their own frontier API revenue. If they gate the best models behind a trusted list, companies

By Hiral Shah, Senior Director, Product Management, Docusign A major recurring theme among the engineering teams at this week’s AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco is the push to move specialized AI models out of research and directly into high-volume production. At Docusign, that optimization challenge happens at massive scale: we handle millions of transactions daily and have nearly 1.9 million customers in over 180 countries. Organizations have historically lost significant value every year to the friction, delays, and missed obligations that come from treating these agreements as static documents rather than live sources of business data. Much of that trapped value sits inside tables: the pricing schedules, SLA obligations, and contractor rate cards that define enterprise relationships but are often the hardest part of a contract to extract accurately. To solve this, we integrated NVIDIA Nemotron Parse , a vision-language model purpose-built for document understanding, directly into our document processing pipeline. Docusign and NVIDIA took the AI Engineer World’s Fair stage this week to give attendees a look at how the architecture works under the hood. Here’s what that looks like: Why Contract Tables Break General-Purpose AI Contracts routinely contain merged cells, multi-page structures, mixed formatting, and nested layouts that general-purpose vision language models (VLMs) and broad AI models weren't designed to handle. The result is inaccurate extractions that require manual correction, slowing down the workflows they are intended to accelerate. Our teams watch this operational friction play out across real enterprise scenarios every day: System Downtime: When a critical system goes down, operations teams need to know immediately which SLA notification requirements apply and to whom. Resource Tracking: When business stakeholders ask legal what hourly rate was agreed to in a contractor engagement, the answer is often buried deep inside a rate card tabl

by Sergey Karayev, cofounder @ Superconductor Recently, my wife and I sat down to plan an upcoming trip. Naturally, we each asked an AI. Trouble was, I had my chat and she had hers, and they knew nothing about each other. So we served as couriers between chatbots: her idea pasted into my chat, my hotel booking screenshotted into hers, the itinerary reconciled by hand in a Google Doc. I bring this up because your team probably works the same unfortunate way: each person in their own chat or coding agent session, with precious little shared. I've been building software with the same set of people for over a decade. In the past year, we all got a superpower: coding agents that can do extremely impressive things. But each one (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) was built for a single player. That's fine and dandy if you're vibe-coding your own little app. It's just you and Claude, and it's absolutely magical. But put that same agent on a team and the magic fades quite a bit. The model is no longer the bottleneck. Coordination is. You don't know who's working on what. You can't see that an agent already tried the approach you're about to attempt, and abandoned it. You spend an hour re-deriving context that a teammate has, because it's trapped in their private chat. Now let me tell you of a better way. On the Superconductor team, every coding agent session is in the cloud, open to anyone else on the team to join. What this enabled was transformative. Code review improved first. My teammate reviews my work by joining the session I built it in. The session holds the full history of decisions, including the dead ends. Instead of Slacking me "why'd you name it this way?" she asks the agent. She gets her answer, and I never waste time answering. She also doesn't have to check out the branch locally — the live app preview in the cloud sandbox does the job. Handoffs became easy. If I have to pass a feature to a teammate, he picks it up with full context: what's done, what's left,

As you'd expect, there were robots aplenty at the AI Engineer World's Fair Expo, although with mixed...

When we met James Yang and Anish Paleja on Monday morning, The Daily Context team simply thought,...

In his keynote on Wednesday, Benoit Schillings, vice president of Technology at Google DeepMind and...

As we initially covered yesterday, after some heavy lobbying by Anthropic, U.S. Commerce Secretary...

Fable is back. The Commerce Department announced yesterday it has lifted the export controls it...

Look at tomorrow's track list and count the rooms that have absolutely nothing to do with...

I’m at the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco this week. The event has every major brand-name...

I’ve been covering Warp for a couple of years now, and its rapid evolution from a command-line...

If you’ve spent any time poking around the AIE World’s Fair 2026 website, you may have come across...

The AI Engineer World's Fair here in San Francisco is fundamentally a conference for practitioners —...

Many of the sessions from Tuesday, especially on the main stage, revolved around the idea of software...

As you’d expect, the opening keynote of the AI Engineer World’s Fair was kicked off by one of its...

As AI agents work under increasingly less human supervision, the need for a trustworthy, secure work...

Software engineers have become overreliant on models to build applications, and it’s time to put...

I was taking a break from the AIE Workshops on Monday and stepped out by the food stands to check out the crepes. That's when I saw a line literally wrapping the entire length of the Moscone West windows looking out onto Fourth Street. I couldn't imagine what a several-hundred-person line was for, and when I went to ask, they told me it was for the Context Engineering Workshop. That sent me down a rabbit hole exploring and understanding and learning. So now, for you, I will share what I got. For the past couple of years, the AI world was obsessed with prompt engineering, aka the art of speaking to a machine. But as developers move from simple chatbots to complex autonomous agents, a new discipline has taken center stage: context engineering. Mike Swift ( @theycallmeswift ), CEO of Major League Hacking ( @mlhacks ) , gave me some critical background. He pointed me to Dex Horthy of HumanLayer (who is actually speaking later this week), who basically coined the term at the first AI Engineer World's Fair. Dex's core thesis, said Swift, is that "agents get bad after about 100,000 tokens," which represents roughly 10% of their total available context window. So context engineering is essentially managing an AI's working memory. Context engineering, Swift noted, is "managing how many times the loop goes around to how much you have to remember every time you do it." It is a counterintuitive concept for humans; the more we talk about a subject, the deeper our shared understanding becomes. But models work the opposite way. They lose focus as their context window fills up. For many developers, meticulously curating this working memory is a practical necessity. I sat down with Ben Halpern ( @ben ), founder in residence at MLH and co-founder of DEV, who told me that context engineering is the "latest frontier of the optimization point" where developers can leverage their expertise. Beyond just keeping models coherent, Ben pointed out that developers who are doing product work ma

Yesterday, we kicked off our physical newspaper, The Daily Context, at the AI Engineer World’s Fair...