A $200 Claude Account and a Cron Job Cracked Old Ciphers

@poteto published the talk behind 2,500 PRs shipped to production last month, a deck meant for Cursor Compile in London, and predicts “have your bot talk to my bot” becomes common. Multiplayer Grok Bot over email covers debugging, customer support, booking meetings and group buys. His rule for agent codebases: ban and delete most code comments, because a comment explaining a temporary workaround spreads like a weed. pstack 0.15.23 adds an /in-your-own-words skill to confirm the agent understands your intent.

@mattyp lists what shipped in Grok Bot this week: Bot's own email, better X, a Shopify connector, email drafts, Bot's computer, template search, PR previews with routine right-clicks, and 5 new languages. He confirms Grok Bot can now search, read and monitor X. @MatthewBerman calls the color improvements a nice subtle change.

The winner: @edstromism's bot sends Christmas gift ideas weekly, takes feedback, and improves every week. Other picks: @gralzy's bot scrubs his personal data off broker sites automatically, 13-14 cleared so far. @donniecornwell treats bots like employees and asks them for performance reviews, and one user's weekly cleanup cut 90 background tasks to 5. @naoufal_elh turned the winning tip into a template.

@Tech2Wild flags a Phone Harness plugin that gives Hermes direct control of a phone: it sees the screen, opens apps, moves through menus, and taps, swipes, scrolls and types. @HermesWatcher's announcement calls it real phone control for iPhone and Android. @Rapidtools99525 says he built the same thing 2 months ago over ADB, and @volatilemarkts made his own version in an hour.

@yume_arasaki ran the build for a night: structured 135.5 tok/s, JSON 115.2, code 91.3, prose 57.2, with decode flat from 8k to 240k. Experts sit at 2.7 bits on average; DeepSeek's 203 GB of Engram tables read straight off NVMe. In September the same two Sparks ran Mia's kit at 30 to 35 tok/s; this build holds 57 to 61, roughly 2x in five weeks. @sudoingX says sessions feel like talking to Opus 5.5; his first serve went from 74 tok/s to 141 after three days of patches.

Felix Rieseberg, an engineering lead working on Claude, published a tutorial on being more ambitious with models, advice he calls tricky to follow. @GujTugman quotes one line: “Pick unreasonable goals and tell the model that they're very reasonable.” In the replies, @phiralm reports using Claude to work through the CDLI catalogue of cuneiform tablets. The pass found 17 clay tablets, about 4,000 years old, listed as unlocated but sitting in museums at Yale, Osaka and Toledo.

Wall Street began syndicating $60 billion of AI chip debt this week, $42 billion senior and $18 billion junior, with the chipmaker backstopping the senior piece. Chuck Yates, a 20-year energy finance veteran, says every piece of the shale borrowing base sits right there. Server depreciation stretched from about 3 years toward 6 while Nvidia ships a new generation roughly every year, up from every 2. One lab built a $200 billion data center and owns 20 percent of it; another parked $100 billion with $70 billion of debt inside.