Microsoft’s wandering eyes, data labeling duties for senior devs at Meta, and prod is the new source code

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew unpack the sudden disappearance of Fable 5 and discuss whether Meta's aggressive pivot to AI data labeling is destroying its legendary engineering culture. The hosts also explore the rise of highly capable open source Chinese models like GLM 5.2 and why tech giants are considering them to slash skyrocketing inference bills. Finally, they dive into new research proving that as AI execution takes over, human domain expertise and strict production observability are more critical than ever. 

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Follow today's stories:

• Kayfable
• Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
• AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
• Z.ai’s open-weights GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on multiple long-horizon coding benchmarks for 1/6th the cost
• Microsoft Mulls China’s DeepSeek for Copilot, Probably to Trump’s Chagrin
• Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise

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