Last Week in AI: Agent frameworks, skills, and conferences

Hey there,

Last week was a quiet week from the big AI labs while we wait on the Fable situation to de-escalate, but the rest of the world kept shipping:

Vercel Ship was in London with lots of new releases. Vercel launched eve, an open-source agent framework for building, running, and scaling agents. My team has been using eve for months, and migrating existing agents has meant less code, faster performance, and better observability. Vercel Connect also launched in public beta. It makes auth with third-party services simple and secure. Since context is the most important part of building good agents, Connect is a useful tool to add to the toolbelt.
GLM 5.2 was released as an open-source, open-weights (MIT) model that scores really well on the coding benchmarks. In fact, it might be the best front-end model on the market right now, according to data from Arena.ai. Twitter has been loving it.
Cursor hosted Compile and unveiled a few updates: a new frontier model trained from scratch (rumored around 1.5T params), an agent-native Git system called Origin, and Cursor mobile launching soon. Twitter seemed very happy to have a GitHub alternative on the way.

Two updates from me:

1. Another plug for making your own evals. Dwarkesh published The data black hole at the center of AI and its implications are clear: we need lots of data in verifiable domains so hill-climbing can keep making these models better. I assume we've largely run out of data on the public internet. I think of sharing your own evals as a petition signed with your own hard work and token spend to improve the model in this area. And with that: please make these models understand sales.

2. I published Skills Are Software. I built a 130-line Codex skill that turns drew.tech posts and newsletter issues into unpublished X Article drafts. It handles the tedious stuff: copy, media conversion, cover image, native embeds, and the newsletter plug. Skills count as software.

As for next week, the rumor mill suggests we might see Sonnet 5 and Fable after President Trump and Dario made amends at G7. Conferences are in full swing: Figma is hosting its annual conference, and AI Engineer World's Fair SF and Vercel Ship NYC are the following week.

Happy Father's Day 🫡

Drew

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