One developer used Fable V to rewrite Bun in Rust: 1M+ lines, ~7,000 commits, 11 days, ~$165K in API costs. It now underpins Claude Code.
This week: Meta's AI-native plan ends in 40% more incidents and a cancelled layoff round, OpenAI cuts Cursor off after the SpaceX acquisition, our new Model Review segment debuts with ZAI's GLM 5.3 Flash, OpenAI's Jalapeño chip posts absurd tokens-per-kilowatt numbers, and the AI bubble clock moves backward for the first time in a month.
Hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, and Rahul Yadav — back from the Galápagos, where everyone talks in geological time.
▸ News: Meta's AI-Native Plan Backfires — Project OT ("organizational transformation") was meant to cut headcount 25% by replacing workers with AI agents. Code changes rose 220% year over year; features reaching users rose only 36%; major technical and security incidents rose 40%, with firefighting time up as much as 70% — and the second round of layoffs quietly died. The supercar analogy applies: the tech wasn't the bottleneck, the organization was.
▸ News: OpenAI Cuts Cursor Off — After SpaceX's ~$60B Cursor acquisition, OpenAI will pull its models by November 12, citing terms-of-service history — and, without quite saying it, distillation. Consolidation begets counter-moves; we ask what Cursor's moat is that OpenRouter doesn't already have.
▸ Model Review (new segment): GLM 5.3 Flash — OpenRouter's free mystery model "Ox Alpha" turns out to be ZAI's GLM 5.3 Flash: above Sonnet 5 at max thinking and Grok 4 on the Artificial Analysis index, at $0.075 per million input tokens, served entirely on Chinese-made chips it helped optimize. It fails the two-acre farm test (agricultural work does not pay $50/hour), passes the nth-order-effects test with agent-liability insurance, and reflexively cites FOIA — draw your own distillation conclusions. Xiaomi-in-2013 vibes.
▸ Hardware Hut: OpenAI's Jalapeño Chip — R&D to tape-out in under nine months. 22,000 tokens per second per kilowatt on a 538B open-weights model versus 427 on NVIDIA's GB200 — a comparison OpenAI keeps in the appendix. The trick: the KV cache never leaves the die, and idle chip sections power-gate off. Gen 2 is already in tape-out, and unreleased GPT Astra has been tuning the chip for 60+ days.
▸ Post Processing: The End of Programming — Paul Dix's essay, anchored by the Bun rewrite. Best-case scenario or the shape of things to come? Dan's hex-payload smart-home port says verification is everything, front-end testing still isn't solved, and even Paul expects organizational inertia to buy "another decade of humans writing code by hand." We land on: refinement is the durable skill.
▸ Two Minutes to Midnight — NVIDIA reports a $96.2B quarter and forecasts 70% growth while margins slide on memory costs. The skeet-sourced stat of the week: NVIDIA has half of Amazon's revenue and twice its market cap. Anthropic hits $65B annualized revenue — roughly $13M per employee — IPO expected this fall. The clock moves backward to 4:15.
⏱ Chapters
00:00 Cold Open — Rahul Returns from the Galápagos
02:42 News: Meta's AI-Native Plan Backfires
08:39 News: OpenAI Cuts Cursor Off
13:07 Model Review: GLM 5.3 Flash (Ox Alpha)
20:47 Hardware Hut: OpenAI's Jalapeño Chip
28:56 Post Processing: The End of Programming
42:48 Two Minutes to Midnight: NVIDIA & Anthropic's $65B
49:57 Outro
🔗 Articles we discussed
News:
• Meta's scrapped AI-native plan — Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/metas-scrapped-plans-to-go-ai-native-included-slashing-teams-by-60-percent/
• OpenAI's decision on Cursor — OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/
Model Review:
• GLM 5.3 Flash announcement — Z.ai: https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash
• The Ox Alpha reveal — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/surprise-z-ai-is-the-ai-lab-behind-the-mysterious-ox-alpha-model/
Hardware Hut:
• Jalapeño first results — OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/
Post Processing:
• The End of Programming — Paul Dix: https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming
Two Minutes to Midnight:
• NVIDIA's quarter — archived coverage: https://archive.ph/qX0JT#selection-1572.0-1572.1
• The revenue-vs-market-cap skeet — Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sungkim.bsky.social/post/3muakuku3gc2j
• Anthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65B — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/anthropics-annualized-revenue-surges-to-65b/
🎙 About ADI Pod
ADI Pod (Artificial Developer Intelligence) is a weekly podcast about AI and software development for working developers. We go through hundreds of links and dozens of newsletters each week so you don't have to. New episodes Fridays.
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• humans@adipod.ai
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