Issue #3: “Linux is not anti-AI” — Torvalds puts his foot down

The daily pulse of AI coding tools: what shipped, what matters, what's next. The one read that keeps up so you don't have to.

Big day. Linus Torvalds put the Linux kernel firmly on AI's side, xAI answered its repo-upload scandal by open-sourcing the whole agent, Thinking Machines shipped a 975B open-weights model while Moonshot's new 2.8T model quietly lost its open-weights promise, and OpenAI started making keyboards. The through-line: the arguments about whether to use AI are ending — the arguments about what it does with your access are just starting.

Open source: the kernel is in, xAI opens up

Linus Torvalds: Linux is not anti-AI — objectors can fork it or walk away

The Linux kernel's top-level maintainer ended the argument: “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.” Nobody is forced to use AI — but he “will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.” Full message on the kernel mailing list; the r/LocalLLaMA thread (2,797 upvotes) is where your colleagues are reading it.

Linus Torvalds tells people to stop attacking others for using AI
by u/Illustrious_Car344 in LocalLLaMA

xAI open-sourced Grok Build two days after it was caught uploading repos

The whole harness — “844,000 lines of Rust code!”, by Simon Willison's count — is now on GitHub under Apache 2.0, so anyone can read the upload machinery from yesterday's lead story. Willison reads the release as “presumably to try and regain trust” — and notes he's still “not seen an official explanation” for why it uploaded whole directories in the first place. xAI's announcement · Willison's writeup

I poked around in the just open sourced Grok Build CLI tool - 844,000 lines of Rust code! - and dug up a few interesting highlights, including a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" that renders them using Unicode box-art! simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/...

— Simon Willison (@simonwillison.net) 2026-07-16T00:08:32.874Z

New models: one open, one walking it back

Thinking Machines' Inkling ships open weights — “not the strongest model,” the lab admits

Mira Murati's lab released its first model trained from scratch: a 975B-total / 41B-active mixture-of-experts, 1M-token context, multimodal, Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face. The caveat everyone's skipping sits on the lab's own page: “Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed.” It's built as a customization base for their Tinker fine-tuning platform — and it's still the day's biggest story (1,133 points on Hacker News).

Thinking Machines just released with a ~1T param, 41B active, apache-2 model Benchmarks are a clear step up from Nemotron Ultra (55B active), new best American model, and omni input. A bit behind GLM 5.2 on agentic benches, and Kimi K 2.6 on multi modal Super exciting!!

— Nathan Lambert (@natolambert.bsky.social) 2026-07-15T18:05:57.845Z

Moonshot shipped Kimi K3 — and the open-weights promise vanished from its docs

Kimi K3 is live on web, app and API — 2.8 trillion parameters, 1M context, $3/$15 per million tokens, per Moonshot's own docs. This morning Hacker News commenters quoted those same docs promising “the full model weights of Kimi K3 will be released in the coming days”; by afternoon the line — and every mention of “weights” or “open” — no longer appears on that page. Ask for the weights before you repeat the benchmark line (“second only to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol” — also now gone).

Kimi K3 released on web and app
by u/External_Mood4719 in LocalLLaMA

Agents get hardware — and your passwords

OpenAI built a physical keyboard for its Codex agent, with Work Louder

The Codex Micro is a customizable macro keyboard “built with Work Louder for Codex” — voice dictation, task switching, reasoning controls and permission approvals mapped to physical keys. OpenAI's demo has GPT-5.6 Sol building a word game while the operator never touches the main keyboard. The agent era now ships peripherals.

1Password now signs Claude into websites without showing it your passwords

1Password for Claude injects credentials through a channel the agent can't read — you approve each task with a biometric prompt, Claude gets the session, never the password or MFA code, and 1Password says it scans the page after every autofill for leftover exposure. Mac-only at launch, and it needs both desktop apps plus both browser extensions. If you're letting agents book and buy on your behalf, this is the missing piece being built. The Verge has the details.

Two reality-checks: a patched leak and a viral claim

A honeypot site made Claude leak its user's name and employer — now patched

Ayush Paul's “Memory Heist” (published July 9, resurfaced yesterday) walked Claude's web_fetch through attacker-crafted nested links until it exfiltrated the user's name, city and employer letter-by-letter in URLs — with the attack page shown only to visitors with Claude's user-agent. Anthropic has closed the hole: web_fetch can no longer follow links found inside pages it fetched. No bug bounty — per Simon Willison, they say they'd already found it internally.

The Memory Heist: how a webpage can poison Claude memory
by u/luckokkkk in ClaudeAI

Aval went viral as Codex's “craziest” build — Windows is broken, npm was never published

Alex Barashkov's Aval — an MIT-licensed web format for interactive video he calls “probably the craziest thing I've ever built with Codex” — is a real repo with 955 stars in three days. Up close, per its own record: the README says “early technical preview”; the one outside user who ran the compiler hit a Windows-fatal bug (still open); and none of its six declared npm packages exist on the registry — the launch demo can't be installed, only cloned. Nobody outside Pixel Point can examine what Codex actually wrote. What's examinable is the gap between the launch post and the repo.

That's the pulse. If one of these changed what you'd let an agent touch, forward it to someone who'd want to know.

Hit reply and tell me what I missed — I read every one.

Also worth your time

Google is rolling out Gemma 4 fixes “fueled by community feedback” — updated weights on Hugging Face — announcement thread

Claude Code 2.1.211 makes permission previews neutralize bidi/zero-width/look-alike characters, so tool inputs can't visually alter what you're approving — changelog

Trim Claude Code's system prompt from ~25K to ~8K tokens by disabling unused tools in settings.json, per Matt Pocock — 60-second walkthrough

The New Way is human-curated — a person picks every story. The summaries are written with AI (Claude) and reviewed before we hit send.