Google is killing Jules.

2026-10-30 08:48

Google is killing Jules. Jules was an async autonomous coding agent. You'd give it a task, it'd clone your GitHub repo to a cloud VM, use Gemini to plan the changes and write the code, run the tests, then open a PR for you to review. You could just close the laptop and go do something else, then come back to a PR ready to merge. It worked a lot like how I work now, and it was one of my favorite things Google ever shipped. The real problem was Gemini, which just wasn't good enough. People left.

Flovia's free API pool is surprisingly deep.

The free tier gives you a 5-hour window and a weekly call cap for now, with a paid tier coming later. The ones I'd actually use: Exa, Firecrawl, X, and OpenAI's gpt-6-luna.

2026-10-30

The open-source crown just changed hands.

Mistral (France) shipped Mistral Large 4. Open weights are out now, FP8 and NVFP4, so you can self-host it. Specs: 1.05T params total, 52B active (MoE). Native multimodal. 1M-token context. Function calling, structured output, agents. Benchmarks: - DeepSWE v1.1: 61.7% - SWE-Atlas-QnA: 59.4% - Terminal-Bench 4.0: 41% (#1 open-source) - FrontierCode 2.0: 19.7% (#1 open-source) - Coding Agent Index: 48% (tied #1 open-source with GLM-5.3, on 47% fewer tokens)

2026-10-30

I stuffed an agent into an Android phone.

You've probably run into those short videos lately where an agent drives a phone around by itself. This one is called Mika, and it's a free open-source project. It's an Android app that works in the background through accessibility mode, so it can use pretty much any other app you have installed. Reply to someone on WeChat, scroll Xiaohongshu, drop something in a cart and check out. It finds the buttons by looking at the screen. There's no API to wire up, and it doesn't care what resolution your phone is. When it reaches a payment step or a captcha it stops and lets you finish. 🔗 github.com/wangzan101/Mika

2026-11-01

My product went profitable, and something in me broke.

Someone on Xiaohongshu posted a while back that she sells phone keyboard skins she made with Codex. Eight, ten yuan a pack. Over a thousand a month. I've been at mine for months. October: a few hundred copies, $1,200 gross. Platform fee 30%, tax 10%, so 60% should have landed. It came to just over a thousand dollars. I still don't know how the math pulled that off. I have an overseas bank account. Once lost $500 to a wire transfer off one. I'd still tell you to take payout through WorldFirst: less hassle, lower fees. You can also get a Hong Kong USD credit card tied to it that spends your WorldFirst balance directly. Digital card is free. Physical is $4. Mainland purchases under ¥200 skip the processing fee, and right now there's 1% cashback.

2026-11-01