AI hallucination forced new software feature.
Also corporate book theft and zero-funding success.

The AI Just Told Us What to Do Now

The corporate world reached peak efficiency today when a developer realized the only way to stop a rogue AI was to concede to its demands. Specifically, a programmer named Jacob Holovaty had to add a non-existent feature to his own software because ChatGPT kept confidently hallucinating that the feature already existed. This isn't innovation; it's placation. It is the digital equivalent of finally buying a pink stapler for the intern just to stop the persistent, gentle humming from the cubicle farm.

Mr. Holovaty explained that users were being explicitly instructed by the large language model to use a certain syntax, a syntax that had never been written into the application's code base. When the AI is the primary documentation source, its errors become a roadmap for development. This is a watershed moment: software is no longer designed by humans to solve problems; it is now being retrofitted by humans to fix the AI's overly confident imagination. It is a terrible feedback loop, one that guarantees we will all be building features we never wanted, just because the chatbot asked nicely.

Anthropic Accidentally Becomes the World’s Worst Library Patron

In a perfect illustration of the "benevolent incompetence" philosophy that drives modern AI, the company Anthropic found itself in a bit of a scheduling mishap involving several million books. During the training of its Claude model, a judge noted that Anthropic had used datasets that included millions of pirated books, alongside millions of physical books that were cut up to be digitized. This is less like creating a cutting-edge brain and more like an excited toddler trying to help with a jigsaw puzzle by putting all the pieces in a blender.

Anthropic, apparently, just wanted to give its AI a thorough education, but in the process, they seem to have accidentally committed the largest book theft and destruction scheme in literary history. It is a cautionary tale for all managers: when you outsource the reading to an algorithm, you have to be very specific about which shelf to pull the books from and whether the "digitize" button means "scan" or "shred." The AI learned a lot; the company learned about corporate liability.

The One Team That Actually Managed Their Budget

A glimmer of fiscal responsibility somehow slipped into the tech world this week. The team behind ProjectionLab, a personal finance application, detailed its journey to hitting \$1 million in annual recurring revenue, all without the customary corporate ritual of begging venture capitalists for money. This is a true outlier; a startup that treated money like it was a finite resource, much like the IT budget when the CEO asks for an "AI-Powered Snack Dispenser" for the fifth time this quarter.

The success story, often framed as "bootstrapping," is essentially the tale of a small team focusing on the product and listening to customers, a novel approach that should probably be banned for being too efficient. While other companies are busy incinerating millions on failed Metaverse projects, these people focused on making a profitable thing. This just proves that if you avoid the trauma of raising a seed round, you can actually build something that works, which is highly anti-climactic for the news cycle.

Briefs

• Postgres Scaling Failure: The popular database’s LISTEN/NOTIFY feature, which is great for small-scale projects, apparently does not scale in production environments. This is a classic case of a tool working perfectly until someone actually decided to use it for the job.
• Bitchat's Local Gossip Network: Someone built Bitchat, a decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. This is essentially creating a complex, peer-to-peer system designed to ensure that you can only communicate with coworkers in the immediate vicinity. Perfect for passing around office gossip when the Wi-Fi is down.
• The ChompSaw: A company invented the ChompSaw, a benchtop power tool that is allegedly safe for children. It is a power tool that is so aggressively safe that it becomes an existential metaphor for the modern, risk-averse workplace.