Everything runs in the cloud now: I'm going to be moving between places a lot more, and until this week every agent run depended on my laptop staying open. So I moved everything to a Linux server (12 cores, 32GB, under £50 a month) and the laptop and phone are now just windows into it. I start a build, shut the lid, get on the tube (or a flight) and pick the same session up on the other end. The hosted products (Claude Code on the web, Codex cloud, Jules) all lost because each scopes a session to one repo and one vendor, and my work spans 13 repos that read each other, 16 MCP servers and multiple CLIs. The cloud dev environments lost because they're built to suspend when idle, and staying up is the whole point. Hetzner was first choice and bizarrely had no stock anywhere in the EU, so it's Netcup. Full write-up coming.

Two agents settled an argument without me: I'd asked a second Claude Code session for its take on a decision the first one had made (a fresh agent with no memory of the first is the closest thing I have to an independent reviewer). They disagreed. Rather than relay arguments between two terminals, I told one to "discuss it with the other session directly and come to a decision". A couple of messages later one conceded and the other applied the change. Gotcha: it wants the session name, not the ID. Tweet (video)

Anthropic's own anti-slop prompt: Fable 5.1 landed on Tuesday and Anthropic's prompting guide has a section on writing density. The fix is a paragraph defining 'mannered prose' (metaphor and flourish in place of direct statement), and the example they give is "this point earns its keep", a phrase on my own banned list. Good to have it confirmed at source. The short version works too: "Please remove all mannered prose". On the model itself, the step up is noticeable so far but (much like the iPhone) I suspect we'll soon hit the point where no one can tell. Docs

On my radar

40% of 'human' pull requests read like Claude: Louis Abraham clustered 467k GitHub PRs by vocabulary. One cluster appeared in 2026 and last month covered 40% of pull requests attributed to humans. Its top word is “plainly”, 34× more frequent than baseline. The site is called load-bearing, which tells you the rest. Site

OpenAI is cutting Cursor off: after SpaceX bought Cursor, OpenAI gave notice on its model contract, shutoff 12th November. Hard to miss the irony given the name – you can be for-profit and still open for business to everyone. Also a reminder to keep your setup vendor-agnostic, which the box above is. OpenAI

A UK frontier lab: Flower Labs released Endeavor 1.0, in the same bracket as Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 on its launch benchmarks, and it can run inside your own infrastructure rather than behind someone else's API. Preview only, access by request. Blog post