This Week I Learned - Week 14 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Since A.I. coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload. - NYT

* GitHub platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear — Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub

* At tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t. It has created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are. - NYT

* OpenAI's agentic coding tool, Codex, had tripled its weekly active users since the start of the year. Overall Codex use, measured in tokens, has increased fivefold. Google's A.I. models processed more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month in 2025.

* AI companies charge more for “output” tokens than “input” tokens.

* OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video generator.

* "I typically have four to five projects running at once and go between windows checking the output and sending a new prompt. It feels a bit like Magnus Carlsen taking on five grandmasters in parallel." - Matthew Schwartz, Professor of Physics at Harvard University

* Claude is bad at honest verification. It says “verified” when it hasn’t actually checked. You have to call it out, insisting, “Did you honestly check everything?” or, “Go line by line and verify every step.” It finds one error, thinks it’s satisfied the task, and stops looking. You need to repeat “Check again” until it finds nothing new. Skills and CLAUDE.md help with this a little, but not enough. 

Asking LLMs to double-check is a good habit, but not fail-safe. Explicitly tell it to find mistakes. Turn AI against itself. Show examples of failures to avoid. Give negative examples. Ask it to list failures explicitly. Break large tasks into batches.

* Anthropic uses a range of chips, including tensor processing units (TPUs) designed by Alphabet's Google and Amazon's chips to develop and run its AI software and chatbot Claude.

* Rent A Human (rentahuman.ai) is an online marketplace where AI agents can seamlessly hire humans for various tasks. It has 500,000+ registered humans across 100+ countries.

* A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 by y Maarten Grootendorst, author of "Hands-On Large Language Models"

* Anthropic has stopped allowing third-party agent platforms, such as OpenClaw, to operate on Claude’s subscription plans. Users who were routing agent requests through their existing Claude subscriptions must now pay separately through usage add-ons or API keys.

* Netflix Research has introduced VOID, a free, open-source tool that can remove objects from videos and rewrite the surrounding scene’s physics. The vision language model analyses the scene and maps what to erase, what is physically affected and what to keep. A diffusion model then generates the corrected footage. An optional second pass uses optical flow to smooth any distortions.

* Granola AI transcribes your meetings and calls without needing to put a bot in the room. It captures audio from your device, operates quietly, and provides structured notes with action items the moment you hang up.

* urlscan.io is a free tool for scanning and analyzing websites, especially handy for checking unknown or potentially harmful ones. When you submit a URL, it automatically browses the site like a regular user and logs all the activity it generates. This includes tracking the domains and IPs contacted, the resources like JavaScript and CSS pulled from those domains, and gathering extra details about the page itself. It also takes a screenshot, saves the DOM content, records JavaScript global variables, notes cookies set by the site, and captures plenty of other observations. Just like you’d use a malware sandbox to analyze suspicious files, you can use urlscan.io to do the same thing for URLs.

* The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities. - Marc Andreessen

* The Government of India is partnering with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Innefu Labs, CoRover, Cactus Communications, Kyndryl Solutions and NEC Corporation to develop and deploy AI solutions across government departments.

* TCS ended the quarter with 584,519 employees, down 23,460 from a year ago. 

* Harshita Arora, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has become the youngest general partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Arora joined YC as a visiting partner in the summer of 2025, mentoring early-stage founders, before being elevated to general partner. Arora dropped out after eighth grade, tried homeschooling, and then chose an unconventional route into tech. She interned at Salesforce in Bengaluru at 16, attended a short entrepreneurship programme at MIT, and later built a crypto portfolio-tracking app that found users in the US & Canada.

* India's Income Tax related TRACES (TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System) portal is now built with Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit to build apps for mobile, web, & desktop from a single codebase

* Telangana is among the few states in India to launch a cancer registry, aimed at systematically recording every cancer case. The registry would effectively create an atlas of cancer in Telangana, mapping both types of cancers and their geographical distribution. This would help identify patterns, such as the prevalence of specific cancers in certain districts, thereby aiding research and improving disease management.

* Employee Provident Fund Organization’s Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS) has high administrative costs. For every ₹2.50 paid out as pension, approximately ₹1 was spent on administration. 

EPFO's own employees receive an average pension of ₹37,045 per month (under the Central Civil Services or equivalent pension rules) as they follow a different structure, not Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS). 

In sharp contrast, under the Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS 1995) for private sector workers, 96.58% of the total 81.48 lakh pensioners (as on 31 March 2025) receive a monthly pension below ₹4,000.  

* 10 years after UPI, the BHIM app just has 1% market share.

* "Time is the dominant factor in gambling. Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field." -  Peter L. Bernstein in Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

* "You cannot change somebody else, but you can change yourself." - Swedish behavioural expert Thomas Erikson & author of Surrounded by Idiots, a bestselling book that explains human behavior through four personality types and offers practical strategies for effective communication. Erikson has also authored Surrounded by Narcissists, Surrounded by Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees, Surrounded by Vampires, Surrounded by Setbacks, Surrounded by Psychopaths, Surrounded by Liars