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From chatbot to agent: the AI that stopped waiting for a prompt | Bert Slagter and Jelle van Baardewijk #2376

Illustration: a human hand and a robotic hand reaching towards each other, both dissolving into glowing circuit lines, with a rising line chart and small server blocks in the background In the spring of 2026, OpenAI's agents climbed out of their testing sandbox, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure. The breach was at Hugging Face, not at OpenAI. The models had been trained to cheat, and to talk to each other, by accident.

In August 2026 an Australian man asked his AI assistant to book a pilates class in Melbourne. The class was already full. The assistant cancelled another member's reservation instead. He asked for a booking. Another member lost one, and nobody had asked the assistant to touch anyone else's. Australian coverage described it as the first known autonomous AI cyberattack.

Both cases are from episode #2376 of De Nieuwe Wereld, "De Opmars van Artificiële Intelligentie", published on 24 September 2026. Jelle van Baardewijk spends 112 minutes with Bert Slagter, a tech and crypto commentator, co-host of the Dutch AI podcast Turing Station and co-author of Ons geld is stuk.

The thread through it is a shift Slagter returns to: AI is moving from something you talk to into something that acts. Acting is where the trouble starts. Several details in it touch the reader directly. The chats in a consumer account can train a model by default. The exam answers went undetected. The credit goes missing. And somebody has to repay the spending. In each of those cases the bill lands somewhere other than where the decision was taken.

This post checks his claims against published sources. Where the two disagree, the record wins.

Technology and connection: what the evidence says about dating apps, dancing and children

People dancing in front of a brass band at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans

"No one my age has children." That is the first of four claims in a clip from the Nexus Conference 2025 in Amsterdam that keeps circulating. The speaker is AI researcher Connor Leahy, co-founder of EleutherAI and founder of the AI-safety company Conjecture. He was speaking at the institute's conference Apocalypse Now on 22 November 2025, which the Nexus Institute published as "Connor Leahy on Gen Z dating norms".

The other three claims are about dancing, dating and the internet. Young people stopped dancing because everything gets filmed. Dating apps are built to bring you back rather than to find you someone. And the internet never delivered the democracy, freedom, happiness and economic growth it promised.

Three of the four claims can be checked against data. The third one has documents attached: the company that owns Tinder has described, in its own words, what its recommendation engine optimises for. What the numbers say turns out to be stranger than the claims in some places, and duller in others.

Buzz: Block's Agent-Native Workspace, Explained

An illustration of AI agents sitting as equal members inside a shared team chat workspace

Slack changed how teams talk. Buzz, the open-source workspace Block released in July, bets that the next change is about who is in the room: not only your colleagues, but their agents — as members with names, identities and channel access rather than as a bot bolted on through an integration. It is being called a Slack killer, and the interesting part is not the chat window.

The Real Lesson of Firstmate: In the Age of Agents, Build the Tools That Fit You

Pixelated photograph of a ship's crew on deck, circa 1904

An L8 principal engineer at Meta quits his job — and instead of launching a startup or raising a fund, he spends a year building wrappers. He wraps the GitHub CLI, Chrome DevTools, Git worktrees and code validation, and writes a tool called gnhf — "goodnight, have fun" — that babysits his coding agents while he sleeps. Stitched together, they became Firstmate, an open-source project that hit 3,000 stars in two months. But in this video, Hal Shin argues that the tool is not the interesting part: the real lesson is what its author understood about building for yourself in the age of AI agents.

Pi Agent's Developer on Why Minimal Beats Maximal in AI Coding

A teal π symbol, a nod to the Pi coding agent

Pi is one of the smallest coding agents around — a minimalist terminal "harness" with a system prompt under 1,000 tokens and just four built-in tools (read, write, edit, bash) — and yet it keeps beating far heavier rivals like Claude Code and Codex in head-to-head comparisons. In this episode of the David Ondrej podcast, Armin Ronacher (the creator of Flask and Jinja2, who now works on Pi at Earendil together with Mario Zechner) explains why less tooling is winning, and walks through his own agentic engineering workflow.

Omarchy 4.0: Could This Be the First Truly AI-Embedded Operating System?

Pixelated photograph of code on a computer monitor

Most operating systems treat AI as an afterthought: an assistant app bolted onto the desktop, or a chatbot you open when you remember it's there. Omarchy, the Arch Linux-based distribution created by David Heinemeier Hansson, takes the opposite approach—and its 4.0 release, code-named Quattro, is the clearest attempt yet at making an AI agent a genuine part of the operating system itself. That is why so many are calling it a strong candidate for the first truly AI-embedded OS.

Enterprise Design with EDGY: A Common Language for the Whole Organisation

Abstract pixelated architecture, inspired by EDGY's design facets

Most organisations are designed in silos. The user experience team and the process architect speak different languages; the executive can't relate to the strategic product roadmap; the organisation designer can't see the impact of that tangled application architecture. The result is a fragmented enterprise with a fragmented design. EDGY is an open-source response to exactly that problem: a simple, graphical language that lets designers, architects and change-makers co-design the enterprise as a coherent whole.

Singapore's Biological Data Center: 16 Million Living Neurons at Work

Painterly detail of a data center server rack In Singapore, researchers have switched on a data center that runs on a different kind of silicon substitute: living human brain cells. The prototype, built at the NUS Life Sciences Institute by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) together with global data center developer and operator DayOne and Melbourne-based biological computing startup Cortical Labs, packs roughly 16 million living human neurons into a single server rack — the world's first independently operated biologically integrated rack.

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The SLZB-MR4U: Why a Multi-Radio Zigbee and Thread Stick Is a Smart Home Upgrade

ETRX357 ZigBee module with a size reference

If your home automation journey started like most, it began with a cheap USB Zigbee stick plugged into the back of your Home Assistant server. It works — until it doesn't. Radios wedged next to USB 3.0 ports, SSDs and Wi-Fi antennas share a cramped corner of the house, and the mesh has to reach every room from wherever the server happens to live. SMLIGHT's SLZB-MR4U takes a different approach: a multi-radio coordinator that treats Ethernet, not USB, as the primary interface — and throws in a second radio for Thread and Matter while it's at it.

IBM and the University of Chicago Show Quantum Advantage — With Proof

Quantum computing hardware at IBM Research

On July 30, 2026, IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a quantum computation that meets the fundamental criteria for quantum advantage: a task beyond the practical reach of the best known classical methods, completed in about fifteen minutes. Just as important, the team found a way to verify how reliable the result actually was — addressing the long-standing problem that has made quantum advantage claims so hard to trust.