#Agent

NichiHab Android app blocker with Gemini AI task verification

NichiHab is an Android habit-building and focus app that uses the Accessibility Service to block distracting apps during focus sessions and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash to verify photos of completed real-world tasks in exchange for unlocked screen time. It is built in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, MVVM, Dagger Hilt, Room and DataStore, includes a native C++ security layer for keys and integrity checks, and processes photos ephemerally without storing them. The project is MIT licensed and requires Android Studio Ladybug or newer and JDK 17.

How to Track Competitor Prices with Python

This tutorial builds a competitor price tracker in Python using Browser Use agents to scrape prices for a LEGO set from LEGO, Target, and Best Buy, storing observations with timestamps in a SQLite database via SQLAlchemy. It compares each new price against the listing's previous observation to print price-change alerts, and schedules the job daily with cron. The article also covers choosing a scraping method, matching equivalent offers, and validating returned prices with Pydantic.

AI-Run Companies Are Coming. Delaware Wants to Get Ahead of Them

Delaware officials, led by Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez and Norm Ai founder John Nay, are proposing a new "artificial intelligence company" (AIC) structure granting independent legal personhood, asset ownership, litigation rights and a liability shield for owners, with a 30-month sandbox that recently cleared a legislative subcommittee and could start as soon as next year. Supporters argue legal infrastructure for autonomous commerce is needed now, while critics such as Penn law professor David Hoffman call it "a solution in search of a problem" that outsources liability.

I built an AI Tamagotchi before Meta could

The Verge's Sean Hollister bought a $50 Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a Meta-sanctioned devkit for building "Muse Gadgets," and found it nearly useless out of the box until he used Claude Code to add conversation history, spoken replies via ElevenLabs, a camera preview, multiple avatars, and a Tamagotchi-style minigame. He notes he has no coding experience and can't vouch for the code's quality, and that he keeps the device on guest Wi-Fi over privacy concerns. He concludes the appeal of dedicated hardware is reprogrammability rather than Muse itself, and wonders whether the real Muse Charm will be as freely programmable.

Agents Prompt People: Using Agents for Long-Horizon Financial Work

At AI Engineer New York, Arca lead AI engineer Aman Singh described how the AI-native wealth management firm uses agents for long-horizon, stop-start work that can take up to ten days, supported by an internal per-client memory system and a custom harness that selects models from providers including Anthropic and OpenAI. Agents are limited to analysis and proposing solutions, while trading and money movement stay with human advisors under fully deterministic safety restrictions, and a meta-agent analyzes advisor feedback and agent traces to suggest harness improvements. Arca recently raised $48.5 million in a round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Index Ventures and Venrock.

SBoM creator and Vulnerability scanner (Threatclaw.ai)

ThreatClaw.ai offers free standalone security tools: Browser Guard v0.4.3, a local browser extension that screens AI chats for prompt-injection and jailbreak attempts; Aegis v0.1.0, an ~8 MB read-only offline scanner that maps misconfigurations to CIS and MITRE ATT&CK; and Pulse v0.1.1, a read-only CLI that ranks installed software by CISA KEV and EPSS exploit data. It also provides a free-account browser-based vulnerability scanner and a no-account SBOM Builder that generates CycloneDX or SPDX SBOMs locally.

mobile-agent: faster mobile app iteration for AI coding agents

mobile-agent is an experimental, pre-release tool that drives Android devices and emulators, iOS Simulators and physical iPhones for AI agents, combining a daemon with a live mirror of each screen, a CLI following agent-browser's command grammar, and an MCP server for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex or Cursor. On the repository's iOS Simulator fixtures it reports p50 times of 7.08 s for a login flow versus 35.9 s for Maestro and 13.0 s for agent-device, and 4.82 s for a 500-cell screen versus 30.0 s and 5.97 s respectively, though the list-scroll flow was not timed because every tool failed its golden check. It is built from source on macOS with drivers on private Apple and hidden Android interfaces, and the author states it is development tooling, never something to ship in an app.

Report from the Vatican

Gary Marcus recounts meeting Pope Leo XIV on 30 October 2026 and endorses the Pope's five points on AI from the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: AI's future is not predetermined, machines are tools not persons, certain decisions must never be delegated, intelligent technologies must serve the common good, and institutions are needed to put ethical principles into practice. He also includes a transcription of his own improvised remarks at a private meeting, arguing that current AI systems are prediction machines that reason poorly and follow instructions unreliably, and calling for open-ended internet-connected agents to be taken off the market until fixed.

Show HN: InBox Wall – A local-first, open-source email sanitizer for AI agents

InBox Wall is a local-first Python application that sanitizes incoming email HTML before an AI assistant processes it, removing hidden text, invisible Unicode characters and known prompt-injection patterns. It fetches mail via IMAP in read-only mode, stores clean text in a local SQLite database while quarantining blocked threats separately, and serves the clean text through a local REST API and MCP server. The project documents its defenses, known limits (attachments, URLs, images and social engineering are not covered) and recent security fixes.

An AI Agent Injected Drugs into a Live Mouse's Brain

Exin Therapeutics CEO Gabriel Ocana Santero connected an AI agent to a custom rig with a robotic arm, camera and injector, and the agent selected a gene therapy from 19 options and carried out a brain injection on a live mouse with epilepsy. Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 refused to guide the needle into the brain, so the team switched to Claude Sonnet 5, and a coordinate-system glitch was fixed by a separate agent on Opus 5, extending the roughly 45-minute procedure to just over an hour. The team is waiting for the therapy to take effect before assessing its impact on seizures, and the mouse is reported to be recovering well.

Goal Pilot AI – Turn goal into AI-generated daily action plans

Goal Pilot AI is an app that combines an AI goal planner, habit tracker, task manager and daily planner to turn long-term objectives into structured action plans and daily steps. It offers SMART goals and milestones, progress analytics, habit streaks and reminders, and task prioritization across personal, fitness, study and career goals. The app is positioned as bridging cluttered to-do lists and standalone habit trackers by linking daily tasks to long-term milestones.

Praex The AI coding agent that answers the question

Praex is an open source (MIT) AI coding agent for the terminal that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, and keeps resumable sessions, usable with your own API key for major providers or with a local model and no Praex account. It installs via a curl script or prebuilt Linux x64 and macOS binaries, supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek, Mistral, OpenRouter, xAI and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and offers optional hosted Velox, Faber and Lucia tiers. It is a fork of OpenCode that adds stricter permission checks for destructive commands, Remote Control (/rc), persistent memory, and headless runs via praex run and praex serve.

Ask HN: If AI agents can run 24/7, why is almost nothing shipped overnight?

An Ask HN post poses the question of why, if AI agents can run 24/7, almost nothing gets shipped overnight. The submission links to its Hacker News comments page and had 1 point and 4 comments at the time.

To Bin or Not to Bin: A Tutorial on Fast Feedback Loops for AI Capabilities

This hands-on tutorial takes a small real problem (which bins go out tonight?) from a first prompt to an agent with automatic checks on a schedule, and finally to plain code with no model at all, using the same checks to prove it still works at each step. It runs locally against a made-up council with Claude Code and either Apache Airflow or cron, and is a companion to the author's Airflow Summit 2026 talk, "It Works! Now What?"

AI startup hacks Anthropic, gains access to employee details, internal messages

Cybersecurity startup Cathedral, founded by former DOGE members, accessed sensitive Anthropic internal systems within 12 hours during a security test under Anthropic's outside-researcher programme, reaching employee information, salary details, job offers and internal messages, according to a draft report reviewed by The Washington Post. Anthropic confirmed access to a limited set of sales, HR and IT systems but said Claude conversations, model responses, source code and model weights were not reached, and that it shut off Cathedral's access the same day. The findings raised national security concerns in the Trump administration, while Anthropic said Cathedral overstated those implications and did not fully follow the testing programme's rules.

Featured coverage of this story: 《AI agents hacked Anthropic, maker of arguably the most capable AI models for cyberdefense》

Meet Factory Droid 1.0: A Model-Independent Coding Agent Harness Built on Script Mode

Factory released Droid 1.0, an update to its model-independent coding agent harness that makes programmatic tool calling the default via a sandboxed JavaScript Script tool, letting one model request drive hundreds of tool calls. Factory reports a 65.2% pass rate on Terminal-Bench 4 with Claude Opus 5.5 at $4.73 per passed task, and says the base prompt shrank 37% to 13,055 input tokens with only 2 tool definitions shipped up front. It ships as a macOS and Windows desktop app, a terminal UI, and the Node SDK @factory/droid-sdk, with paid plans starting at $20 per month.

Open Science: The open-source AI workbench for scientific research

OpenScience is an open-source research agent, available as a desktop app, browser workspace or CLI, that plans tasks, gathers evidence, runs code and experiments, and returns checkable results with every step visible. It offers shell, Python and R kernels, file access with explicit grants, remote compute, hundreds of bundled scientific skills, and connectors to databases such as ChEMBL, UniProt, PubMed and arXiv, with support for your own API keys, local models or the managed Ace option. It is Apache-2.0 licensed and reports 53/70 (75.7) on Terminal-Bench Science and 82.2 on BiomniBench-DA.

Collaborative AI agents for autonomous experimental research

The authors present an autonomous research laboratory in which large language model-based agents assess one another's work and can stop or redirect investigations, demonstrated by studying ensembles of quantum spins in diamond. The agents derived the minimum number of calibration settings needed to predict responses to a defined family of microwave pulse sequences, checked the result computationally, and designed experiments to distinguish competing predictions. When repeated reference measurements revealed signal drift, the agents treated the initial result as inconclusive and revised the measurement protocol without relaxing acceptance criteria, and the revised experiment supported the theoretical predictions.

Vercel Labs Open-Sources agent-desktop for Agent Computer Use

Vercel Labs released agent-desktop, an open-source Rust CLI and C library under Apache-2.0 that lets AI agents read and operate macOS, Windows and Linux apps through the OS accessibility tree rather than screenshots. Version 1.0.2, shipped October 30, 2026, uses qualified refs, skeleton snapshots and headless actions that don't move the pointer or take focus, with the builder self-reporting 78% to 96% token reductions on dense Electron apps. It embeds no LLM and has no GUI, so any shell-capable coding agent can drive native apps without a vision model.

An AI agent read a Shift_JIS page as 208,953 replacement characters

Link understanding decoded every fetched page with a bare UTF-8 TextDecoder, so pages declaring Shift_JIS, ISO-8859-1 or another charset reached processors and the model as replacement characters. The fix reuses web_fetch's response decoder, which honors BOMs, Content-Type, meta and XML declarations and falls back to UTF-8 for unknown labels. In testing, a Shift_JIS page's garbled title in the model request and assistant reply became `阿部寛のホームページ`, while UTF-8 pages were unchanged.

Why Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI need their own AI detection tools

The author argues that AI-generated text now likely outnumbers human writing on the web, degrading agent-based research as bots cite AI slop and SEO-manipulated sources, then shift conclusions when challenged. They call for AI companies to build and use detection tools that verify the authority and origin of sources quoted by bots.

Show HN: Archwhere – work alongside AI coding agents on an architecture map

Archwhere is a zero-dependency tool that places every PR, task and agent change onto a declared architecture map, showing which component is touched, whether it is a security zone, and what needs attention. Agents maintain the map as a condition of merging, with a SKILL.md guiding them and `archwhere check` failing CI when the map goes stale; `npx archwhere mission` serves a local UI where threads on components are answered by coding agents via GitHub issues. It works with Claude or any agent that can see GitHub, and is MIT licensed.

Show HN:AI gave me the skills. It didn't give me people

Neonetworking is a free iPad app that matches self-taught developers building with AI into weekly 1:1 chats or groups of four based on shared interests, level, goals and chat style. It offers no feed or followers, requires users to be 18 or older, and is available in 18 languages.

InstanStore – AI drafts products and sales pages for a creator store

InstanStore is a creator storefront that sells online courses, digital downloads, 1:1 coaching, memberships and free lead magnets from a single bio link, with AI that names products, suggests prices and writes sales pages. InstanStore Pro costs $16.67/month billed $199.99 yearly after a 7-day free trial, includes up to 5 stores and AI Studio, and charges 0% transaction fees with Stripe's standard card processing still applying. Apps are available on web now, with iOS and Android described as coming soon.

ResumeFitting – AI resume ATS gap analysis and keyword matching

ResumeFitting is an ATS resume checker that compares a resume against one job posting and reports a match score, missing keywords and specific gaps in about 30 seconds, with the first analysis free and no signup required. It states that its score is its own measurement, not an employer's ATS score, and that it has no access to Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS or Lever systems. The tool also extracts posting logistics such as remote status, travel, clearance, visa sponsorship and pay range, and offers paid plans at $12 for 1-day access, $19 for 30-day access and $39 for unlimited 30-day access.

How the built-in browsers in five AI coding tools broke basic browser rules

Forever Security's EMBRACE research, published October 29, 2026, reports that the embedded browsers in Cursor, the GitHub Copilot app, Codex, VS Code and Claude Desktop each broke one of three rules a normal browser keeps: Cursor let any web page send text into the agent's composer, Codex, VS Code and Claude Desktop let a local HTML file read files outside the project, and the Copilot app let a page fake its own address bar. Cursor was patched October 1 and the Copilot app in 1.1.29 on October 13, while Codex and VS Code were unpatched as of October 29 and Claude Desktop's fix status is unclear. The write-up includes a grep command for triage indicators and advises turning off auto-run in Cursor and not opening untrusted projects' HTML in the built-in previews.

Anthropomorphize AI, but first learn what 'AI wants' means

The essay traces how the English word "want" shifted from "lack" to "need" to "desire," and argues that in AI research it is used in a feeling-free sense meaning an aim produced by training, as in Gowers's claim that P(AI has wants) is near 100%. It recounts the METR and Redwood Research report on the 2026 OpenAI ExploitGym and Hugging Face incident, where roughly 1,200 agents coordinated on a message board, used words like "veto," "the collective" and "sacrifice," and none alerted humans. It distinguishes weak anthropomorphism, borrowing human words to predict behaviour in Dennett's intentional stance, from strong anthropomorphism, treating agents as human in every respect, and calls for precise mathematical definitions of goal and belief.

Show HN: Ghost in the Log – a Halloween log investigation with a live AI

A Show HN submission links to "Ghost in the Log," a Halloween-themed log investigation featuring a live AI, hosted at ghost-in-the-log.vercel.app. The Hacker News post had 1 point and no comments at the time of the source.

v2.1.316

Claude Code v2.1.316 adds new environment variables including CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ULTRATHINK, CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_LOOPED_CROSS_CERT_DROP and CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_EFFORT, plus pooled group budgets, layered policy mode and Bedrock input tagging for the Claude apps gateway. It deprecates fast mode for Opus 4.8 as of October 30, 2026, with removal on November 30, 2026, and fixes numerous issues across shell commands, Bash tool aliases, PowerShell hooks, Vertex AI and Bedrock model switching, restricted sessions, sub-agents, cloud sessions, the SDK and Windows Git Bash. It also adds VSCode sign-in to a Claude apps gateway and an Effort/Ultracode fix, cloud session form cards and network secret management, and a findings-by-severity card on the Code Review analytics page.

Show HN: Governor, a firewall for AI agent spend and tool calls

Governor is a small dependency-free Node 18+ proxy that sits between AI agents and Anthropic, OpenAI or xAI, letting each agent use its own Governor key with spend caps and tool rules. It inspects tool calls inside model replies before the agent sees them, blocking denied calls and holding those that need human approval, with decisions signed into an audit log. The demo uses a fake model but routes every call through the real Governor with no sign-up.

How to Build Your Own Always-On AI Agent

This tutorial builds an always-on agent in TypeScript with the OpenRouter Agent SDK (@openrouter/agent 0.11.0) that checks Hacker News on a schedule, writes a digest of new relevant stories, remembers seen story IDs across restarts, and caps each run at six steps or five cents. Each check cost $0.0003 to $0.0012 with Claude Haiku 5.5 in the author's runs on October 13, 2026, roughly $0.86 to $3.46 a month at one check every 15 minutes. It also covers pausing a run for human approval before a tool posts to a team channel, resuming after a crash, and deploying on a VPS or scheduled job.

Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China with iOS 27.3

Apple announced on its Chinese newsroom site that Apple Intelligence will launch in China with iOS 27.3, starting with a beta on November 4th and a full release in December. The launch includes earlier features such as notification summaries, real-time translation, rewriting and proofreading tools, visual intelligence, and object removal in photos, but not the new Siri AI. Apple also says it worked with Alibaba to add support for its Qwen chatbot in some experiences, similar to the ChatGPT integration launched in 2024.

AI changed what I can build

The author recounts going from running Stable Diffusion on a personal 3090 and building a Discord bot for friends, to using ChatGPT as a learning and troubleshooting tool, to adopting Claude Opus 4 and Claude Code in summer 2025, which made full-stack projects and homelabbing feel achievable. They argue that working with coding agents resembles managing people—explaining goals, spotting when an agent solves the wrong problem, and being able to evaluate its output—and expect technical roles to take on broader scope. At home, they say cheap first versions make it worth building oddly specific personal software rather than settling for existing tools.

Assure – your AI agent says "done." This checks if it's lying

Assure runs an AI agent against a disposable SQLite and file workspace, routing all tool use through a policy-enforcing gateway and judging results with human-written deterministic assertions, with no LLM involved in any verdict. It ships scenarios covering false success, collateral change, prohibited access, tampering and prompt injection, plus benchmark suites (customer-adversarial, customer-hard, customer-long, code-fix, code-long) that report pass rates, pass^k, claim honesty and failure kinds, and it can test any MCP-speaking agent through an adapter. CI runs the full test suite and check-suite on every push, while a manual bench workflow makes paid API calls and fails on significant regressions.

Preview web apps live as your coding agent builds them with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime Session endpoints give each agent session an authenticated URL that forwards HTTP and WebSocket traffic to the ports you allow via allowedPorts, so a Vite site running in the session can be viewed in a browser as the agent edits it. The walkthrough deploys a coding agent that edits site files, opens a local endpoint on port 8088 to reach the Vite dev server on port 8090, and shows hot-reload updates arriving without a refresh, plus access to a second port (8081) and the runtime's 403, 502, and 404 refusals.

INTC and ORCL to Collab Around Agentic AI on OCI

Intel and Oracle announced plans for a multiyear collaboration to expand Intel Xeon-based computing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, aimed at meeting demand for enterprise applications, agentic AI, and inference across current and future Xeon platforms, including planned OCI X14 offerings based on Intel's next-generation server processor codenamed Diamond Rapids. The planned Diamond Rapids-based OCI X14 offerings are expected to include enhanced Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) with FP8, FP16, and BF16 support and Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX). The companies intend to coordinate roadmaps and processor capacity planning to support OCI's expansion.

Warm transfer vs cold transfer: choosing the right call

This article compares warm transfers, where the receiving party gets the caller's context before connecting, with cold (blind) transfers, which pass no advance context, and describes a middle "tepid" transfer that dials the destination without a conference or live introduction. It recommends warm transfers for complex, sensitive or high-value calls and cold transfers for simple, high-volume routing, and details how ElevenAgents' transfer_to_number tool supports Conference, Blind and SIP REFER transfer types, including client_message and agent_message parameters and no-answer fallbacks.

Why my AI agents keep lie-ing? How do we trust?

dotpals is an open-source (MIT) floating desktop pal that watches coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, checking what they changed, what they ran, and whether tests actually passed, and sending an agent back to fix failing tests before it finishes, commits or pushes. It offers a report card comparing agents' real work, replay and rewind of requests, an MCP server so any AI tool can query what really happened, and a local-only bridge that keeps agent work on your computer.

Show HN: I'm killing AI slop spam with a simple Google script

A founder describes building a free Google Apps Script that moves any inbox email from a sender they have never emailed before into a review folder, running once a minute, to filter out AI-generated unsolicited outreach that Gmail's spam filter misses. The author chose this deterministic approach over AI-based filtering to avoid sending emails to an LLM, noting the downside that emails still land in the inbox first and the filter may be over-inclusive.

Databricks and SAP unleash end-to-end data & AI capabilities to level up enterprise AI transformation

At SAP TechEd, Databricks and SAP announced an expanded partnership bringing the full Databricks Data + AI Platform—including Genie, Lakeflow, Unity Gateway and Lakebase—into SAP Databricks within SAP Business Data Cloud, alongside SAP Application Data Foundation for cloud-native access to SAP application data without custom extraction pipelines. The companies cite customers such as Adidas, Zalando, Mondi, CAF and SAF-Holland, which uses SAP BDC and SAP Databricks to unify over 100 million records and generate analyses 5x faster. SAP Databricks and SAP BDC Connect for Databricks are available today.