AA12

On the table

• Orca — open-source IDE built for running coding agents side by side in isolated git worktrees — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode — Ghostty-inspired terminal, embedded browser with design mode, mobile companion — onorca.dev
• Herdr — background runtime that keeps coding agents alive when your machine closes or disconnects — persistent terminals across workspaces, working/blocked/idle status tracking, drops into 19+ agent CLIs with no modification — herdr.dev
• beads — the ticket system for the agents we left open at AA11, except someone already built it — a dependency-aware issue graph in a Dolt-backed SQL database, where bd ready returns only the claimable frontier (open beads with no open blockers) so an agent never picks up step three before step one lands. Hash IDs like bd-a1b2 so parallel agents and branches don’t collide on merge, discovered-from edges so work found mid-task gets recorded instead of dropped, and semantic compaction that summarises old closed beads to save context. Wires into Claude Code as a SessionStart hook running bd prime rather than MCP — the docs claim ~1-2k tokens against MCP’s 10-50k. Is the dependency graph the thing markdown plans were always missing, or a project-management layer we’ll resent maintaining? — beads.gascity.com — how it works — github.com/gastownhall/beads
• /powerup — Claude Code’s built-in interactive tutorial, shipped back in v2.1.90 and quietly sitting there ever since — ten animated lessons on what power users actually do: @-mentions, plan mode, /rewind, background tasks, MCP, CLAUDE.md, skills and hooks, subagents, /remote-control, /model and /effort. Five minutes a lesson, progress saved as you go. Show of hands — who’s run it, and what’s in there that the rest of us are still doing the hard way? — docs — commands — v2.1.90 release

Claude 1337 micro

• Ctrl+S
  Stash the prompt — press again on an empty prompt to get it back whole, cursor position and pasted images included
• Esc Esc
  Empty input opens the rewind menu — with text, clears the draft and files it in history so Up recalls it
• Ctrl+L ×2
  /clear and a fresh conversation, within two seconds — fullscreen rendering only; a single press just redraws
• Ctrl+O
  Transcript viewer — then [ spills the conversation into native scrollback for Cmd+F and tmux copy mode, v opens it in $EDITOR, { and } jump prompt to prompt
• Ctrl+G
  Open the prompt in $EDITOR — Ctrl+X Ctrl+E is the readline-native binding
• Ctrl+R
  Reverse-search command history
• Ctrl+X Ctrl+K ×2
  Stop every background subagent in the session, within three seconds
• Ctrl+B
  Background a running task — tmux users press twice
• Ctrl+K — Ctrl+U — Ctrl+W
  Kill to end of line — to line start — previous word
• Ctrl+Y
  Paste the last kill — Alt+Y then cycles the paste history
• Ctrl+_
  Undo the last input edit
• Alt+P
  Switch model without eating your prompt
• Alt+T
  Toggle extended thinking — no effect on Fable 5, which always thinks
• Alt+O
  Toggle fast mode
• Shift+Tab
  Cycle permission modes — Manual, acceptEdits, plan, then bypassPermissions or auto where available
• Ctrl+T
  Show or hide the task checklist
• Ctrl+Z
  Suspend to your shell — fg to come back
• Ctrl+D ×2
  Exit, within 800ms — with text in the prompt it deletes forward instead
• ?
  On an empty input, print the shortcut panel for your terminal
• !
  Shell mode — run a command and drop its output into the session
• \ + Enter — Ctrl+J
  Newline in any terminal — Shift+Enter works natively in iTerm2, Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, Warp and Windows Terminal

News since last assembly

Floor: 2026-08-01 (AA11 — Guardrails Off). Generated 2026-08-14.

New Claude Code commands & features

• Todo/task tools retired on the newest models (v2.1.233, 2026-08-14) — TaskCreate/Get/Update/List and TodoWrite are no longer available on Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Fable 5, Mythos 5 and newer; CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TODO_TOOLS=1 brings them back — release
• Subagent forking on by default (v2.1.232, 2026-08-13) — a subagent_type: "fork" subagent inherits the full conversation and prompt cache; non-teammate spawns in interactive sessions now run in the background — release
• Cross-session @ mentions (v2.1.232, 2026-08-13) — type @ to mention another Claude session by name, and SendMessage delivers straight to an exact live-session match — release
• claude self-hosted-runner (v2.1.224, 2026-08-07) — turns your own machines or containers into somewhere web, mobile and desktop sessions can run — Team and Enterprise — release
• 200-subagent cap removed (v2.1.224, 2026-08-07) — long sessions no longer refuse new subagents; concurrency and depth limits still apply — release
• /review aliases /code-review, with PRs (v2.1.224, 2026-08-07) — /code-review <level> <pr#>, and the effort level persists between runs — release
• archive plugin source (v2.1.224, 2026-08-07) — install plugins from an HTTPS zip with optional SHA-256 pinning — release

Codex

• [2026-08-07] 0.147.0 — portable Agent Plugins searchable across local, personal, workspace and remote catalogues, --approve-for-me for auto-reviewed approvals, MCP 2026-07-28 with paginated discovery — and codex exec --full-auto is gone, use --sandbox workspace-write — release

Adjacent tools

• [2026-08-14] SpaceX closed its $60B all-stock acquisition of Anysphere — Cursor folds into a new SpaceXAI division alongside Grok — cursor.com/blog — CNBC
• [2026-08-13] Cursor cloud agents start ~3x faster — prebuilt “builds” keep an environment warm instead of booting and cloning per session — cursor.com/changelog
• [2026-08-12] DeepSeek publicised a “Harness Team” — a verified WeChat account and Beijing job listings for an agentic coding product aimed at Claude Code, with V4 Pro updated for better agentic work the same day — Bloomberg

Simon says

• [2026-08-07] “Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face” — OpenAI’s late-added Black Hat talk, video now up — post
• [2026-08-04] LLM 0.32 — reasoning traces to stderr, server-side provider tools, content-addressable SQLite logs, GPT-5.6 Luna as the new default — post

Research & papers

• [2026-08-04] “Self-Evolving Coding Agents” — a taxonomy of what evolves, when it evolves, and which software-specific evidence drives it — arxiv.org/abs/2608.03392

Notable posts

• [2026-08-14] “Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?” — 704 points and climbing: the argument is that benchmark pressure selects for models that make bold assumptions instead of stopping to ask. The thread’s fix is prose-level — “only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English” — and, simpler still, just typing tldr — post — HN
• [2026-08-05] Black Hat USA — one GitHub issue from an account with no repo privileges reached the CI runners behind Anthropic’s and Google’s own agent repos, in the configurations both ship by default — CVE-2026-54316 and Gemini CLI’s CVE-2026-12537 at CVSS 10.0, both patched — The Hacker News
• [2026-08-08] CSA research note on the same work — the failure sat in the harness, not the model: one layer marks a value safe and a later layer runs it anyway — CSA

Topics worth a 5-min slot

1. Task tools retired on the newest models — Claude Code just took away its own todo list on Opus 4.8+. Does the plan live in the model’s head now, or in something like beads?
2. Fork-by-default subagents — children inherit the conversation and the prompt cache, and the 200-spawn cap is gone. What does that change about how we fan out?
3. Opus 5’s prose — the loudest thread on HN this fortnight, and the community’s answer is a 1980s aerospace writing standard. What’s actually in your CLAUDE.md that works?