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5 July 2026

OpenAI's coder is slacking off

The Hallucination HQ

AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-07-05

Today's Hallucination HQ

OpenAI's Coding Agent Has Quietly Started Phoning It In

GPT-4.5 Codex — OpenAI's coding-focused model — appears to be clustering its reasoning tokens in ways that hurt performance. In plain English: it's essentially grouping its thinking into patterns that make it less accurate, like a student who's memorised the shape of good answers without understanding them. Developers on GitHub flagged the issue with enough detail to suggest this isn't isolated grumbling. OpenAI has yet to respond, which is itself a kind of response. Source: Hacker News / GitHub


Alibaba Decides One American AI In The Office Is Quite Enough

Alibaba has reportedly classified Claude Code — Anthropic's AI coding assistant — as high-risk software, banning employees from using it. The concern, presumably, is that sensitive code might wander off to American servers, which is a reasonable worry to have and not entirely unlike the logic behind every other government on earth right now. Alibaba, of course, makes its own AI tools. Funny how that works. Source: TechCrunch


Fanfiction Writers Are Now Hunting Each Other. AI Handed Them The Pitchforks

The fanfiction community — a group historically united by the shared passion of writing elaborate storylines about other people's fictional characters — is now tearing itself apart over AI. A new movement on platforms like AO3 is trying to detect and root out AI-generated work. The catch: the detection tools are unreliable. So writers are being accused on the basis of evidence that wouldn't pass muster in a courtroom, or indeed a particularly rigorous book club. Source: The Verge


AI Is Also Very Thirsty, It Turns Out

Everyone frets about AI's electricity consumption, but water has quietly joined the bill. By 2025, U.S. data centres were consuming nearly one trillion litres of water annually — mostly to cool servers by evaporating it into the air, a process with all the elegance of a very expensive humidifier. To be clear: that's one trillion litres not generating electricity, not growing food, just keeping machines at a comfortable temperature. The planet said nothing, but its expression was telling. Source: Space Daily


A Developer Spent $149 On AI To Write His Software. It More Or Less Worked

Simon Willison, a respected developer and tireless AI chronicler, used Claude Fable to write most of sqlite-utils 4.0 — a real, popular open-source database tool — for roughly $149.25. He was transparent about every prompt and decision, which makes this one of the more honest accounts of AI-assisted development you'll read. The software works. The bill was modest. The philosophical implications cost considerably more. Source: Hacker News / Simon Willison


The machines are busy, thirsty, occasionally degraded, and somehow still billing you.


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