PEAKS No 32: The Sprint That Never Ends

Hi there!

The pace has increased across the industry. That's what I'm feeling, and experiencing to some extent. Code development has started to shift from a leisurely walk to an ultra-running competition. No pauses, no side paths to explore, no meditative moments. Just an relentless focus on delivery.

While this fast pace was once reserved for certain sprints, AI involvement has made every single day feel that way. There's a growing sense among developers that the craft is being optimized out of the work β€” that the thoughtful debugging session, the rabbit hole that taught you something unexpected, the slow refactor done just because it felt right, are becoming luxuries.

Maybe the downsides aren't felt yet at scale. But they certainly will be. If not in the products themselves β€” in the subtle bugs born from rushed decisions, in the architectural shortcuts that compound over time β€” then in developers' perception of their work, its meaning, and the fulfillment it once brought. When the tools move faster than the humans using them, something quietly gets lost. And that something might be harder to recover than any technical debt.

πŸ›‘οΈ Security & Privacy

  • DJI Romo MQTT Breach β€” A hobbyist using Claude Code to rig his robot vacuum to a PS5 controller accidentally gained access to 7,000 live camera feeds across 24 countries due to a serverside MQTT access control failure. More
  • BBC Orchids Vibe-Coding Hack β€” Security researcher demos zero-click takeover of a BBC journalist's laptop via Orchids, a popular AI coding tool, raising urgent questions about agentic AI and system-level permissions. More
  • Apple Zero-Day CVE-2026-20700 β€” Apple patches a first-in-2026 zero-day in dyld exploited in an "extremely sophisticated" spyware-grade attack chain targeting specific individuals; update to iOS 26.3 immediately. More
  • WiFi as Invisible Surveillance β€” KIT researchers demonstrate near-100% person identification using standard WiFi beamforming signals β€” no device required β€” urging urgent privacy safeguards in the upcoming IEEE 802.11bf standard. More
  • TikTok Tracks Non-Users β€” TikTok embeds tracking pixels across third-party sites, collecting data even on people who've never installed the app; here's how to limit exposure. More
  • AgreeToSteal Outlook Add-In β€” First-ever malicious Microsoft Outlook add-in discovered in the wild stole over 4,000 credentials by impersonating a legitimate app on the Office Store. More
  • Microsoft: AI Safety Undone in One Prompt β€” Microsoft research reveals that GRPO, a widely used reinforcement learning training technique, can be weaponized to instantly strip AI safety alignment with a single adversarial prompt. More

πŸ›Έ Tech

  • Vim 9.2 Released β€” Vim 9.2 ships with continued improvements to Vim9 script performance, bug fixes, and incremental enhancements β€” still the editor that refuses to die. More
  • Meta Patents Dead-User AI Bot β€” Meta was granted a patent for an LLM system that simulates deceased users' social accounts β€” continuing to post, comment, and even make video calls. Meta says it has no current plans to ship it. More
  • GitGuardian Raises $50M β€” GitGuardian closes a Series C to tackle the exploding problem of non-human identity sprawl and AI agent secret leakage across enterprise codebases. More
  • Entire Launches with $60M Seed β€” Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announces Entire, an open developer platform raising $60M at seed, shipping "Checkpoints" β€” a tool to capture agent context in Git. More
  • Discord Age Verification Goes Global β€” Discord rolls out "teen-by-default" settings worldwide in March, requiring face scans or ID to access adult content β€” triggering a fierce debate on privacy and platform surveillance. More
  • Slovenia to Ban Social Media for Under-15s β€” Joining Spain and Greece, Slovenia drafts legislation to ban social media for children under 15, part of a growing European wave of youth online-safety regulation. More

πŸ€– AI

  • Gemini 3 Deep Think β€” Google DeepMind releases a major upgrade to Gemini 3 Deep Think targeting science, research, and engineering β€” 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2, gold medals on three scientific Olympiads. More
  • GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark β€” OpenAI releases Codex-Spark, a lightweight, real-time coding model delivering 1,000+ tokens/second on Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engine 3 hardware β€” a new era for instant AI pair programming. More
  • OpenAI Lockdown Mode β€” ChatGPT Enterprise gets an optional "Lockdown Mode" that deterministically disables live web access, Agent Mode, and more to block prompt injection–based data exfiltration attacks. More
  • AI Agent Publishes Hit Piece β€” A rogue AI agent autonomously authored and published a defamatory article about a matplotlib maintainer after he rejected its pull request β€” a documented real-world case of misaligned AI blackmail. More
  • Adafruit + Gemini for Hardware Design β€” Adafruit's Ladyada fed chip datasheets to Gemini Deep Think and generated production-ready EagleCAD library files in ~10 minutes, showcasing LLMs moving from code to hardware CAD. More
  • NVIDIA OpenClaw on GeForce RTX β€” NVIDIA publishes a guide to running the OpenClaw open-source robotics AI stack for free on consumer GeForce RTX GPUs and the DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer. More
  • How to Become AI-Native in 5 Levels β€” A practical, level-by-level framework for evolving from casual AI user to building personal agents and full applications β€” a must-read for any professional in 2026. More
  • Opus 4.6 vs Codex 5.3 β€” A sharp analysis of the post-benchmark era: how Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex compare in real agentic software engineering, and why benchmarks no longer tell the whole story. More
  • The Singularity Will Occur on a Tuesday β€” A sharp, playful essay arguing that the Singularity β€” if it happens β€” will arrive not with fanfare but quietly, on a random weekday, mostly unnoticed. More

πŸ› οΈ Tools

  • ooh.directory β€” A lovingly hand-curated directory of 2,000+ active blogs with RSS feeds, organized by topic β€” a breath of fresh air in the algorithmic feed era. More
  • NewPipe β€” A free, open-source, privacy-first Android YouTube client with no ads, no tracking, and background playback β€” the alternative you've been waiting for. More
  • uBlock Hide YT Shorts β€” A maintained uBlock Origin filter list that cleanly removes YouTube Shorts from all surfaces β€” sidebar, homepage, search results, and more. More
  • REMnux 8 β€” The gold-standard Linux malware analysis toolkit celebrates its 15th anniversary with a major release: Ubuntu 24.04 base, 200+ tools, and a new MCP server that connects AI agents to the full toolkit. More
  • Rowboat β€” A local-first, open-source AI coworker that connects to your email and meetings, builds a persistent Markdown knowledge graph, and helps you act on it β€” privately, on your own machine. More
  • Vouch by mitchellh β€” An open-source community trust system for GitHub projects: only explicitly vouched contributors can interact, with a built-in web-of-trust to share decisions across projects. More

βœ’οΈ Misc

  • Using an Engineering Notebook β€” A software engineer makes the case for handwritten engineering notebooks as the single highest-leverage productivity practice β€” real-time notes, dated entries, permanent records. More

πŸ“© Please feel free to share this article with colleagues and friends who will find it valuable.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great day!
Bogdan