An npm worm is loose, and Opus 4.1 goes dark tomorrow
An active npm supply-chain worm is hunting dev credentials (and Claude configs) — plus a one-way code-review finding, two model deadlines, and Cursor agents in your inbox.
A worm is crawling through npm's most-installed caching libraries, stealing credentials and rifling through Claude configs as it spreads. A controlled study finds the popular Claude-reviews-Codex pairing only pays off in one direction. And two deadlines land: Claude Opus 4.1 leaves the API tomorrow, and GitHub retires six Copilot models on September 1. The daily pulse of AI coding tools — what shipped, what matters, what's next.
• npm worm hunts Claude configs — hundreds of packages hit
• Claude fixes Codex's code; the reverse breaks it
• Opus 4.1 leaves the API tomorrow
• GitHub retires six Copilot models September 1
• Cursor agents can now send your email
• OpenAI publishes Apple's own texts in trade-secrets fight
An active supply-chain attack
An npm worm hunts your Claude config — hundreds of packages hit
Attackers compromised the GitHub account behind keyv and pushed a credential-stealing preinstall script — code that runs automatically the moment you npm install — across the caching family that sits under half the JS ecosystem, including flat-cache and file-entry-cache, ESLint's cache layer at roughly 570M installs a month each. Aikido's writeup counted 868 compromised packages at first publication, then quietly revised it to 434 — “868 was my fat finger,” their researcher posted on Bluesky; the count is still moving — and the payload’s file scanner explicitly hunts .env files, SSH keys, .vscode/tasks.json and .claude/settings.json — your agent config is exfiltration target material now. As of our own registry check at 13:40 UTC, npm had scrubbed the poisoned versions of the three flagship packages; the long tail is the live risk. If you ran an install today, check your lockfile and rotate anything in your environment. Discussion on Hacker News.
Ilyas Makari
Agents reviewing agents: what a controlled test found
Claude fixes Codex's code — Codex reviewing Claude makes it worse
The number circulating is real — a controlled experiment across 116 hard-and-medium LiveCodeBench Python tasks found Claude (Opus 4.7) reviewing Codex (GPT-5.5) lifted pass rates from 71.6% to 89.7%. The finding everyone's skipping is the asymmetry: Codex reviewing Claude dragged 91.4% down to 82.8%, breaking 13 correct solutions to fix 3 — and the second reviewer more than doubled cost and roughly tripled latency. Senior-reviews-junior works; junior-rewriting-senior doesn't. Coverage at LeadDev.
Claude reviewing Codex's code lifted the pass rate from 71.6% to 89.7%
by u/Suspicious_Orchid770 in ClaudeAI
Deadlines that moved
Claude Opus 4.1 goes dark on the API tomorrow
Anthropic deprecated claude-opus-4-1-20250805 back on June 5; the window closes tomorrow, August 5, and the docs are blunt: “Requests to retired models will fail.” The recommended replacement is claude-opus-4-8. One scoping note: the date binds Anthropic-operated platforms — Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud run their own retirement clocks.
GitHub retires six Copilot models Sept 1 — Sonnet 4.6 survives on annual plans
The July 31 changelog names six models gone from all Copilot surfaces on September 1: Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6, and Raptor Mini. The carve-out: Sonnet 4.6 stays for individual subscribers on annual plans only. If your team's scripts or docs pin any of these, that's the gap to close this month — and Enterprise admins may need to enable the replacement models by policy before the cutover.
Allison
Agents reaching into your other tools
Cursor agents can now send your email
Cursor's new Google Workspace plugins (shipped August 3) give agents direct access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets — and the Gmail scope isn't read-only: “draft and send messages, apply labels and manage threads,” per Cursor's own changelog. An agent that can send mail and edit your calendar fails very differently from one that can only edit files — worth reading the permissions screen before installing from the Marketplace.
The fight everyone's watching
OpenAI publishes Apple's own texts to fight its trade-secrets suit
OpenAI's response to Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit is a receipts dump: iMessages showing Apple employees asking the departed engineer to help them locate files after his last day (he eventually replies “this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread”), and an email chain showing Apple's outside counsel emailed the wrong person, then claimed a call that never happened. Not a tooling story — but it's the fight your standup is talking about.
Ones to watch
Early and unverified — these are getting engagement, not endorsement:
Swiftlet — claims an 80B Qwen in 4.3 GB of RAM on a Mac, and a 35B on an iPhone. 239 points on Show HN; headline numbers like these usually belong to the most-quantized build — read the thread first.
Nightcrawler — a local AI pentesting agent that runs on a smartphone. 112 points on Show HN.
Soup — fine-tune an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU; fresh on Show HN this morning.
Also worth your time
“AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog” — top of Hacker News today (371 points): decorative AI art now signals slop to your readers.
More Qwen 3.8 sizes coming — r/LocalLLaMA's top post of the day (1,082 upvotes), the follow-up to yesterday's Qwen3.8-Max lead.
Trigger Copilot automations with comments — small but handy August 3 GitHub changelog.
Back tomorrow. If today's worm bit your lockfile — or your team is talking about a story we missed — hit reply; we read everything.
The New Way is human-curated — a person picks every story. The summaries are written with AI (Claude) and reviewed before we hit send.
