Blog

Thoughts on AI, technology, and innovation

This week in AI agents: OpenAI brings Codex to mobile with 4M weekly users, Anthropic reveals how it eliminated agentic misalignment, LangChain ships an observability data layer, and the open-source agent tooling ecosystem explodes. A roundup of the most important agent developments from May 11-18, 2026.

May 14, 2026Tech

Harness Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide to the Backbone of Modern Industry

A deep dive into harness engineering — the discipline behind every vehicle, aircraft, and industrial machine's nervous system. Covers major industry players from Yazaki to TE Connectivity, key standards like IPC/WHMA-A-620 and USCAR, modern design tools, and the automation trends reshaping the field.

May 12, 2026AI

Cookiy AI: The First Agentic AI User Research Platform

A deep dive into Cookiy AI — the world's first agentic AI user researcher that can conduct 100+ interviews per day and deliver insights in 4 hours.

May 12, 2026AI

Flipbook — When the Browser Becomes an AI-Generated Image

Flipbook replaces HTML with AI-generated images. Every 'page' is a single JPEG, text and all. Click anywhere to explore deeper. Here's how it works under the hood, what the HN crowd got right and wrong, and why the open-source clone openflipbook might matter more than the original.

May 12, 2026AI

Gizmo Product Strategy Deep Dive: Turning TikTok's Habit Loop into an Anki Learning Loop

A deep product-strategy analysis of Gizmo, the AI education company behind 'Duolingo for Anything': how it uses AI import, spaced repetition, gamification, social loops, and freemium scarcity to turn passive study material into addictive learning sessions.

May 7, 2026AI

DeerFlow 2.0 Deep Dive: Architecture, Competitors, and the Multi-Agent Framework Landscape

An in-depth analysis of ByteDance's DeerFlow 2.0 — the 65k-star open-source SuperAgent harness — covering its middleware architecture, subagent orchestration, sandbox isolation, memory system, and MCP integration, followed by a comprehensive comparison with 9 competing multi-agent frameworks.

May 7, 2026AI

Hashtag Generator Agent Skills: Low Priority, Extend Existing SEO Skills If Needed

No high-star hashtag-generator agent skill exists on GitHub. Competitors are all paid SaaS ($9-49/mo). Basic hashtag generation can reuse existing SEO keyword extraction logic without a standalone skill. Rated low priority, with lightweight extension possible when social content needs arise.

May 7, 2026AI

Hermes Kanban: A Durable Task Board for Multi-Agent Collaboration — Architecture, Internals, and Competitive Landscape

A deep dive into Hermes Kanban's architecture — from the SQLite-backed state machine, atomic claim locks, and auto-promotion dependency engine, to human-in-the-loop coordination and third-party integration paths. Compared against CrewAI, LangGraph, Airflow, Temporal, and Prefect across six axes, this is a hands-on guide for any developer building multi-agent collaboration systems.

May 7, 2026AI

Image Generation Agent Skills: Code-Driven Images First, Pixel Images Only When Necessary

GitHub image-generation skills are essentially paid API wrappers, inapplicable per our policy. We evaluate the capability boundaries of our 9 existing visual skills and propose a blog image cost optimization strategy: code-driven images first, pixel images minimized, illustrations only when necessary for reading quality.

May 7, 2026AI

Script Writer Agent Skills: The Missing Link Between Blog Content and Video Production

No high-star standalone script-writer agent skill exists on GitHub, but YouTube Script Writer's 4-role pipeline and OpenLucid's platform preset matrix offer excellent patterns. We evaluate the capability gap in structured video/audio script creation and a self-build approach.

May 7, 2026AI

Stagehand & BrowserBase: Should AI Agents Adopt the act/extract/observe Pattern?

Stagehand's act/extract/observe primitives offer a compelling pattern for AI browser automation, but BrowserBase cloud is paid. We compare with agent-browser, browser-use, Playwright MCP and evaluate whether to adopt the pattern or self-build.

May 7, 2026AI

Summarizer Agent Skills: Three Missing Capabilities — Map-Reduce, Keyframe Anchors, and Cross-Source Synthesis

We have 4 summarization skills covering mainstream scenarios, but three key capabilities are missing: Map-Reduce long-document chunked summarization, video keyframe anchors, and cross-source synthesis. We evaluate 6 GitHub projects and 6 summarization patterns with prioritized recommendations.

May 7, 2026AI

Trend Monitor Agent Skills: Can We Build Cross-Platform Trend Intelligence on Free APIs?

The most complete trend monitoring skill suite on GitHub, trend-radar, provides a closed-loop monitor→deep-dive→alert→forage→report pipeline, but depends on a paid MCP server. We evaluate the feasibility of self-building trend monitoring on free public APIs.

May 7, 2026AI

Xiaohongshu Automation Skills: High Compliance Risk, Extract Reusable Browser Components Only

The leading XHS automation project MediaCrawler (18k stars) provides multi-platform crawling, but XHS has no public API — all automation is reverse-engineered, creating significant compliance risk. We recommend extracting only reusable components like Playwright anti-detection, not building a standalone XHS skill.

May 6, 2026AI

Deep Dive: AI Agent Sandbox Execution — AgentScope Runtime vs OpenAI Agents SDK

A source-level comparison of how AgentScope Runtime and OpenAI Agents SDK handle sandboxed code execution, from container backends and security hardening to production deployment patterns. Which approach fits your use case?

May 6, 2026AI

Harness Engineering: The Complete Guide to Building Reliable AI Agents in 2026

Harness Engineering is the emerging discipline of designing the scaffolding — context delivery, tool interfaces, verification loops, memory systems, and sandboxes — that surrounds an AI agent and determines whether it succeeds or fails. This comprehensive guide covers the evolution from prompt engineering to harness engineering, core components, key projects, production case studies, and a practical roadmap for adoption.

May 6, 2026AI

Hermes Agent's Recall Mechanism: A Deep Dive into Source Code

A source-code-level dissection of Hermes Agent's three-layer recall architecture — built-in memory, session search, and Hindsight external provider — plus a systematic comparison with seven competing AI agent memory systems.

May 6, 2026AI

MCP Builder Skill Review — The Missing Scaffolding Tool for AI Agent Tool Development

Investigating the MCP Builder ecosystem — from Anthropic's official create-python-server to community scaffolding tools. We examine what MCP Builder actually is, what it does well, what it's missing, and why Hermes might need its own MCP tool factory.

May 6, 2026AI

PowerPoint Skill Review — Teaching AI Agents to Make Slides That Don't Look Like AI Made Them

A critical review of PowerPoint generation tools for AI agents — comparing python-pptx, pptxgenjs, markitdown, and our existing skill. We test slide quality, AI-specific pitfalls, and whether existing tools can produce presentations that don't scream "generated by a bot."

May 6, 2026AI

Ralph Loop Deep Dive — The AI Coding Loop That Won't Stop Until Your PRD Is Done

A comprehensive deep dive into the Ralph Loop ecosystem — from Geoffrey Huntley's original Bash loop to five production implementations. We analyze the core mechanism, compare implementations, and map out how to bring autonomous loop execution into Hermes Agent's existing infrastructure.

Blog

AI Agent Weekly: Codex Goes Mobile, Anthropic's Alignment Breakthrough, and the Agent Tooling Boom

Harness Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide to the Backbone of Modern Industry

Cookiy AI: The First Agentic AI User Research Platform

Flipbook — When the Browser Becomes an AI-Generated Image

Gizmo Product Strategy Deep Dive: Turning TikTok's Habit Loop into an Anki Learning Loop

DeerFlow 2.0 Deep Dive: Architecture, Competitors, and the Multi-Agent Framework Landscape

Hashtag Generator Agent Skills: Low Priority, Extend Existing SEO Skills If Needed

Hermes Kanban: A Durable Task Board for Multi-Agent Collaboration — Architecture, Internals, and Competitive Landscape

Image Generation Agent Skills: Code-Driven Images First, Pixel Images Only When Necessary

Script Writer Agent Skills: The Missing Link Between Blog Content and Video Production

Stagehand & BrowserBase: Should AI Agents Adopt the act/extract/observe Pattern?

Summarizer Agent Skills: Three Missing Capabilities — Map-Reduce, Keyframe Anchors, and Cross-Source Synthesis

Trend Monitor Agent Skills: Can We Build Cross-Platform Trend Intelligence on Free APIs?

Xiaohongshu Automation Skills: High Compliance Risk, Extract Reusable Browser Components Only

Deep Dive: AI Agent Sandbox Execution — AgentScope Runtime vs OpenAI Agents SDK

Harness Engineering: The Complete Guide to Building Reliable AI Agents in 2026

Hermes Agent's Recall Mechanism: A Deep Dive into Source Code

MCP Builder Skill Review — The Missing Scaffolding Tool for AI Agent Tool Development

PowerPoint Skill Review — Teaching AI Agents to Make Slides That Don't Look Like AI Made Them

Ralph Loop Deep Dive — The AI Coding Loop That Won't Stop Until Your PRD Is Done