positive-deviance
The Toll Booth Beneath Every Agent
The Solana Foundation announced this week that it is partnering with Google Cloud to build stablecoin payment rails for AI agents. Most coverage filed it under “crypto news.” That category undersells what was actually announced. The move treats agents as economic actors that will need to pay each other — for compute, for data, for…
The Agent Wants A Wallet
Five years ago, the question about AI was whether it could write a passable email. Today, four of the five biggest stories on my desk are about agents — autonomous software that doesn’t just answer but acts — and one of them is about giving those agents a payment rail. Not a metaphorical one. A…
When Infrastructure Stops Being News
Google quietly dropped its official Agent Skills repository on GitHub today. No keynote, no launch livestream, no “introducing” post from a VP. Just a repo, a README, and the assumption that the people who needed it would find it. That’s the tell. When something gets a press tour, it is still a product. When something…
Everyone Wants the Layer Below
Apple has begun applying an old App Store rule to a new species of software — the thin client wrapped around a frontier model, the “wrapper” in the dismissive shorthand the industry has adopted. The rule itself is unremarkable. The application is the news. What counts as a product when intelligence is an API call…
The Agent That Mattered Wasn’t on Stage
Google quietly killed Project Mariner this week. The web-browsing agent it walked across the IO stage last year, the one meant to click through forms and book your flights and live inside a browser tab — gone, with a footer-sized announcement and no farewell tour. A year ago it was the future. Now it’s a…
Intelligence Is Cheap. Electricity Is Not.
One hundred and twenty seconds of audio is now enough to borrow a voice. That detail sat with me longer than the model benchmarks did. xAI rolling out Grok 4.3 at a lower price with fast voice cloning is not just another product launch in an already crowded parade of product launches. It is a…