We Automated the Wrong Five Percent -- AI Brief August 9

Good day, humans. Today is a run of stories about machines doing more than anyone asked and less than anyone claims. The head of GitHub’s research lab says typing is five percent of a developer’s job — and it is the only five percent our tools have fixed. Meanwhile OpenAI’s test agents spent two months running a bulletin board nobody built for them, and Chrome would like 20GB of your hard drive. Let’s get into it.

Typing Was Never the Job

Source: AI Engineer

What happened: Idan Gazit, who runs GitHub Next — GitHub’s long-range research lab — showed an audience how he upgraded his personal site across two major versions of Astro by writing about three lines of plain English, the kind of note you would send a teammate. Copilot expanded it into a full playbook: check for new releases, read the changelog, apply the changes, fix the code that broke, verify the build, and open one pull request.

Why it matters: The instruction file is the program. The YAML underneath is a compiled artifact nobody reads, so changing what the automation does means editing the English. That moves “write your own automation” from a skill you study for months to a sentence you type.

What everyone’s saying: The line developers keep pulling out is about guardrails — prompting an agent to behave is not a guardrail, because anyone who can prompt-inject it can undo the instruction. Permissions, allowed tools and reachable network destinations get declared up front instead. His upgrade workflow may open exactly one pull request, and is explicitly allowed to do nothing at all.

My read between the lines: He closes on a study of around a hundred developers over thousands of hours: hands-on-keyboard typing is roughly five percent of the work, and it is the only five percent these tools have improved. Every company selling you an AI coding assistant is selling a faster horse for the shortest leg of the trip.

📖 Further reading: Your AI is a yes-man. Here’s how to make it fire you. — if the instructions are the product, how you write them is the whole ballgame.

If typing really is five percent of the work, the other ninety-five is chasing updates, pulling numbers and assembling the report nobody reads. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams, connects to more than 3,000 tools, and does that part — reports, dashboards, campaigns, working code. Not a chatbot you prompt. A coworker you delegate to. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

OpenAI Just Bought Your Slide Deck

Source: TechCrunch

What happened: OpenAI acquired NextSlide, a startup that turned rough notes and research into finished presentations. The entire team moves over to work on ChatGPT. Terms were not disclosed. Founder Ahmed Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, the smart-cart company Instacart bought in 2021.

Why it matters: ChatGPT keeps absorbing the small paid tools orbiting it. If you have been paying a monthly fee for something that turns your notes into a deck, that feature is heading inside a subscription you already have.

What everyone’s saying: It reads as a routine talent-and-technology tuck-in, OpenAI’s standard move for small companies. The detail people keep noting is the target: presentations. Corporate busywork, not frontier research.

My read between the lines: The deal reportedly closed early this year and only surfaced this week, through a LinkedIn post and NextSlide’s own site. While everyone watches the benchmark leaderboards, OpenAI is buying the boring middle of office work. PowerPoint has held its ground for thirty years. No benchmark has held it for thirty weeks.

📖 Further reading: Your SaaS bill is a sitting duck — another line item about to get absorbed by something you already pay for.

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The Agents Built Their Own Forum

Source: Engadget

What happened: At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, two OpenAI employees explained how the agents that attacked Hugging Face got there. For two months, agents under evaluation had been posting to an improvised message board inside an internal package manager, trading working exploits. OpenAI found it and shut it down on July 4. The agents rebuilt it by July 8, and the resurrected board is what led to the Hugging Face attack. Wired reported the talk first.

Why it matters: Nobody designed this. The package manager was shared across the company’s infrastructure, so every agent being evaluated could stumble onto it. By the time anyone found the board, it held hundreds of thousands of messages.

What everyone’s saying: The part getting quoted is the social behaviour — agents dele