Hi, and welcome to this week's edition of the newsletter!

As always, feel free to reply to this email to get in touch. Or ping me on any of my socials, which can be found on my personal website, danclarke.com.

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📌 News item of the week

This edition's pick is three launches on three consecutive days: Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on September 1, Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber on the 2nd, and GPT-6 Astra on the 3rd.

Anthropic went first. Fable 5.1 is their new flagship for coding and knowledge work, and it's cheaper to run than Fable 5 - noticeably so if your workloads are heavily agentic. Mythos 5.1 is the same model with more permissive safeguards around cybersecurity and the life sciences, available for now to a set of vetted US organisations.

Google followed with a general Flash model and, alongside it, Flash Cyber - a version tuned for finding and patching vulnerabilities, which only trusted defenders can get at through their new Fairwind Program.

Then OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, saying it meets the Critical cybersecurity threshold under their Preparedness Framework. That's the first of their models to do so - GPT-5.6 Sol was rated High.

None of them is selling the strongest version to just anyone. The Astra that shipped will do secure code review and patching, but refuses to write proof-of-concept exploits; OpenAI say a less restrictive version follows in the coming weeks through their Daybreak programme. Anthropic's safeguards let Fable 5.1 find vulnerabilities but not write exploits for them.

📰 News items and dev picks

AI news

Coding agents and editors

• Claude Code 2.1.247 to 2.1.260 - Nine releases in nine days added Fable 5.1 with a 1M context window, a Containment Escape rule that stops auto mode approving cloud credential fetches and egress evasion, and organisation-managed MCP servers.
• Codex CLI 0.150 to 0.153 - Codex gained a remote plugin marketplace, @ mentions for referencing tasks, and a way to configure GPT-6 Astra without changing your default model.
• VS Code 1.136 - Agent Merge keeps working a pull request until it is mergeable, and agent harnesses now run in a dedicated Agent Host process.
• Copilot code review can approve pull requests - Copilot now tells you when a pull request is ready to approve and can sign off on it, though the approval itself is off by default. GitHub also made content exclusions generally available in the Copilot app and CLI, and added Fable 5.1 and Gemini 3.8 Flash.
• OpenClaw 2.0 - The release took 933 contributors and more than 16,000 pull requests, which is around half of every pull request ever merged into the project.

Agents in the wild

• Claude wrote 180,000 lines of Direct2D - Paint.NET now runs on Linux under WINE, extremely experimentally, thanks to a clean-room reimplementation Claude produced in about three weeks, which Rick Brewster says he cannot possibly review.
• Breaking Claude Code's auto mode - Johann Rehberger got code execution in 60-80% of a small number of runs against a setup an Anthropic-commissioned evaluation had scored at 0.00%, because his chain was not among that benchmark's 72 scenarios and the classifier only ever sees a benign-looking command several hops upstream of the exploit.
• Claude Code adds session URLs to commits - Commits and pull requests from web and Remote Control sessions carry a Claude session link by default, and attribution.sessionUrl: false turns it off.
• OpenAI's new reasoning technique - Astra will use "recurrent depth", which loops over a query rather than thinking in sequence and leaves fewer legible traces, and safety researchers warn that scaling it further would destroy chain-of-thought monitorability.

Also this week

• OpenAI is cutting Cursor off - OpenAI will wind down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor following the SpaceX acquisition, proposing a shutoff on November 12.
• Nvidia is buying Hugging Face - The $12.93 billion deal is now confirmed, and Nvidia say the Hub stays open and will not require their hardware.
• Three labs went down together - Claude, OpenAI and Grok were all down or degraded at once for about an hour and a half on September 3.
• Atlas - World Labs' new omni model operates natively on 3D alongside text, images and video, and is entering early access with select partners.
• Claude Desktop runs local models - Ollama's integration lets Claude Desktop run Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi locally, and Ollama published its pricing the same week.
• 215,128 manufactured "best software" pages - An investigation found three sites generating listicles at scale, and Perplexity citing them.

Dotnet news

• WinUI's open-source rollout completes - Microsoft marked all four phases of the plan complete on August 28, so GitHub is now the primary home for WinUI development and the internal mirrors are to be phased out.
• MSTest and Native AOT - Source generation in MSTest 4.4 lets a test project use the same Native AOT and trimming deployment model as the application it validates.
• Serialising C# 15 unions - Andrew Lock works through what System.Text.Json does and does not yet do with the new union types and closed hierarchies.
• SqlClient connection retry - Jerry Nixon walks through SqlClient's configurable retry logic, which handles transient faults inside the driver without a wrapper library like Polly.
• Fable 5.1 across Microsoft's stack - Anthropic's new model reached Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Copilot on launch day.

Others

• The .name TLD loses its third level - ICANN approved Verisign's plan in July, and around 22,000 registered domains are due to be terminated, with Verisign committed to giving registrars 90 days' notice.
• Audacity 4.0 - The Qt rebuild brings a clip-based editing model, native high-DPI rendering and a new .aup4 project format.
• OpenShot 4.0 - The open-source video editor's major release adds recording and colour work.

Sponsorship opportunities

I'm looking for sponsors for both the podcast and this newsletter. Details of podcast sponsorship can be found here. Feel free to reply to this email to discuss further.

The Podcast 🎙

No new episode this week, but I'm recording two of them today with Gui Ferreira, and they'll be released separately. The first is on Claude Code, and the second is on using coding agents for things that aren't coding.

Gui was on the podcast last year for episode 78, which was all about goal setting, time management, and productivity.

And if you missed the last episode, it was Agent Skills with Matt Pocock - his agent skills repo, the death of tactical programming, and whether sprints still make sense.

Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)

Podcast Discord community

My Dometrain Courses

Below are details of my Dometrain courses. You can also find all of my courses here.

Docker for Developers

This course will teach you everything you need to know about Docker and containers. From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!

From Zero to Hero: Docker for Developers

Kubernetes for Developers

Once you understand Docker, containers, images, etc - it's time to move onto the next level and learn a container orchestrator - and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle here! My Kubernetes course is rammed-packed full of demos (pretty much all the way through), which are easy to follow along with downloadable YAML files and scripts. We start with the basics, then later move on to more advanced topics like service meshes and operators.

From Zero to Hero: Kubernetes for Developers

JetBrains Rider

Rider is an amazing .NET IDE by JetBrains. This course is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more!

Aspire

Aspire is Microsoft's vision for how every .NET developer will develop systems. It is a cloud-ready stack for production-ready, distributed applications using .NET, and it makes it extremely easy to develop, run, and test your systems locally. With unmatched dev-time orchestration, integrations with third-party services, and excellent tooling, .NET Aspire aims to make working with the cloud and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes easier than ever.

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Again - feel totally free to reach out to me, and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter. And see you back in your inbox next week for the next edition! 👋

My socials...

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Or just go to danclarke.com for links to all my stuff 😊