Tech Radar

Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves. All day, every day, they used programs written by others to write programs for others. That observation, from David Crawshaw, has stuck with me because it says something uncomfortable about how we work. We've built an entire ecosystem of tooling, databases, and frameworks where the cost of customizing something to fit your own workflow has always exceeded the benefit. An AI agent that can sync your custom code with upstream releases changes that math. It's not just another code generator. The agent can maintain the tricky part: merging your local changes with a changing codebase, handling rebases, conflicts, and dependency updates. That's the part that makes software customization expensive. And when agents can do that automatically, the cost-benefit equation for closed-source software collapses. Why pay for a black box when you can fork the source, shape it to your e...

As the AI landscape heats up, it's hard not to notice the recent flurry of announcements that seem to drop like clockwork. Just this week, Tokyo's Sakana AI unveiled Fugu, a new model named after the blowfish, and it promises to shake things up in the realm of agent capabilities. I can't help but think about the timing. With so much innovation unfolding, you have to wonder if this launch is a clever play on the escalating excitement or simply a coincidence, as Sakana's spokesperson claims. Fugu isn’t just another model; it’s designed with the ability to orchestrate access to other models via their APIs, making it a potential game changer in how we think about AI agents. The research supporting Fugu was showcased at ICLR this spring, and co-founder Ren Ito has been vocal about its importance, stating that the product stands on its own merits. But does it really? With the hype surrounding AI right now, it’s easy to get swept up. I’m intrigued to see if Fugu can de...