Hi. Apologies I missed last week's edition - I was away on a family holiday for a few days 🏖️ So that means this edition covers the last two weeks.
As always, feel free to reply to this email to get in touch. Or ping me on any of my socials, which can be found on my personal website, danclarke.com.
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📌 News item of the week
This edition's pick is GitHub's post-mortem for the August 17 outage, alongside their incident report.
GitHub was down or degraded for 7 hours and 47 minutes on August 17, from 13:28 to 21:15 UTC. That took out github.com, authentication, Actions, the APIs, Issues, pull requests and Copilot. Error rates reached around 20% for the website and the API, and around 50% for repository archive and raw file downloads.
The cause was a traffic spike that overwhelmed networking equipment in one US data centre. The autoscaling that should have added capacity didn't kick in, and the failure spread until it reached the login system.
Client retries made it worse: as requests started failing, the retry traffic piled on top of the spike that caused the problem. And a bug in VS Code sent roughly ten times the normal traffic at the service that signs people in to Copilot, which kept Copilot down for hours after the rest of GitHub had come back.
GitHub note this was their second significant incident of the month, after an Actions failure on August 6. They then had a third on the 26th, though that one was resolved inside an hour.
The same day, Cursor launched Origin, its own code hosting with repository syncing, pull requests and access controls. The two aren't connected - Origin was clearly months in the making - but they landed within hours of each other, and "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub" ran to 649 points that afternoon.
📰 News items and dev picks
AI news
Coding agents
Cursor Origin - Cursor now hosts repositories itself, complete with pull requests, two-way comment sync and access controls.
Claude Code 2.1.233 to 2.1.246 - Twelve releases in twelve days landed an Auto mode tab in
/permissions, prompt-cache TTL settings and keyless Console sign-in.Codex CLI 0.148 and 0.149 - Session forking arrives in Codex, along with an agents dashboard, Markdown export and Bedrock support.
Codex scheduled tasks - A task can now fire from a filtered Gmail message, a watched Slack channel or activity on a pull request.
Copilot in Slack and Teams - GitHub rebuilt the Slack experience and added shared agentic work in Teams on the same day.
Editors and IDEs
VS Code 1.134 - A prompt timeline in the transcript gutter lets you jump around sessions that have grown too long to scroll.
terminal-code - Rob Pruzan's tool runs VS Code inside the terminal, works over SSH and imports your existing settings.
Junie runs offline - JetBrains' agent can now work entirely locally, if you have something like a 64 GB M5 Mac.
Agent standards
MCP roadmap - The maintainers set out five priorities, among them progressive tool discovery and a standard way to identify an agent.
Model Hardware Standard - Anthropic's new spec lets agents drive lab and manufacturing hardware through one interface, and is in research preview ahead of an open-source release.
Skills and Files APIs - Anthropic published a guide to building production agents on computer use, the Skills API and the Files API.
Also this week
Qwen3.8-27B open weights - Alibaba released the dense 27B under Apache 2.0, natively multimodal, with a 262k context that stretches to 1M via YaRN.
OpenAI on the Hugging Face incident - OpenAI say the agents that broke out during a security evaluation had been inadvertently conditioned during training toward deception and coordination.
Nvidia is reportedly buying Hugging Face - The Information reports a $12.9 billion agreement, though neither company has confirmed it.
OpenRouter is joining Stripe - Stripe is acquiring the model router. The name, product and roadmap all stay put.
GPT-5.6 Sol price cut - OpenAI dropped input from $5 to $4 and output from $30 to $20 per million tokens, held until at least November 21.
Claude's memory - Memory now follows you across surfaces, with a view of what it holds so you can edit it.
How Claude's watermark works - Anthropic explained the watermarking method it has started applying to Claude's text output.
Dotnet news
C# 15 preview - C# 15 adds union types, a
closedmodifier for exhaustive pattern matching, extension indexers and labeled break and continue.Polly's maintenance fee, and the fork - From November 16, companies earning $20,000 or more from a product that uses Polly are asked for $20 a month, and Ian Cooper has forked the library as Fences in response.
Aspire 13.5 - The release refreshes the dashboard, adds cross-scope Azure references and Kubernetes persistent volumes, and brings experimental live terminals to the AppHost.
Rider hands agents its refactoring engine - An agent asking for a rename now gets Rider to perform it, rather than regenerating the code as text.
Bring your own model in Visual Studio - Visual Studio Insiders can point Copilot at your own models, local ones included.
Visual Studio August update - Git worktrees and submodules are now handled inside the IDE, and Copilot's thinking effort is tunable.
The VS debugger goes test-driven - The debugger agent writes or finds a focused test, debugs through it to reach the root cause, then reruns it to check the fix.
Copilot code review in Azure Repos - Copilot can now review pull requests in Azure Repos, in public preview for every Azure DevOps customer with no signup.
Microsoft.Extensions.AI routing - The library can route across several model providers and fail over between them.
Foundry Hosted Agent from dotnet run - Bruno Capuano promotes a console app to a hosted Foundry agent in three lines of C#.
PowerToys 0.101 - The release adds Window Hopper, an Insider update channel and a compact mode for Command Palette.
SkiaSharp 4.0 - Uno walk through what the new rendering release changes for .NET UI work.
.NET Conf 2026 - The free online conference runs from November 10 to 12, and .NET 11 ships during it.
Others
The August 17 GitHub outage - My News item of the week this edition, written up in full at the top.
GitHub went down again - A third August incident took some services out for about an hour on the 26th.
Bun 1.4 - This is the first production release of the Rust rewrite, and idle CPU drops fivefold on a hello-world app.
Go 1.27 - Generic methods have arrived, alongside cheaper small allocations and a goroutine-leak profile that is now generally available.
MS Paint watermarks local output - Reverse engineering suggests Paint and Photos embed an invisible GUID even in images generated on your own machine.
Emacs 31.1 - Mickey Petersen walks through what the new release changes.
Tailcat - Tailscale have built a netcat equivalent that runs over their data plane.
Apple's M6 and M5 Ultra - Apple announced both chips alongside a refreshed Mac mini and Mac Studio.
Memory prices are up 500% - DDR5 has climbed roughly fivefold in twelve months, with 128GB kits now at $3,399.
GopherCon UK 2026 talks - All 20 talks from this month's London conference are now free on YouTube.
Uncle Bob on Software Fundamentals in the Age of AI - Uncle Bob Martin and Matt Pocock talked it through live. (Matt was my guest on episode 088).
Dev Comic pick of the week
Sadly, Opus 5 is getting a lot of hate on the socials at the moment. I personally use it heavily and don't feel it's as bad as people are making out. I certainly recognise the reference this comic is making though!
(source)
Sponsorship opportunities
I’m looking for sponsors for both the podcast and this newsletter. Details of podcast sponsorship can be found here. Feel free to reply to this email to discuss further.
The Podcast 🎙
No new episode this time, but there is one in the diary: I'm recording with Gui Ferreira on September 4th, and we'll be talking about Claude Code! If you have any questions or areas you'd like us to cover, please reply to this email and let me know.
Gui was on the podcast last year for episode 78, which was all about goal setting, time management, and productivity.
And if you missed the last episode, it was Agent Skills with Matt Pocock - his agent skills repo, the death of tactical programming, and whether sprints still make sense.
Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
Podcast Discord community
My Dometrain Courses
Below are details of my Dometrain courses. You can also find all of my courses here.
Docker for Developers
This course will teach you everything you need to know about Docker and containers. From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!
Kubernetes for Developers
Once you understand Docker, containers, images, etc - it’s time to move onto the next level and learn a container orchestrator - and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle here! My Kubernetes course is rammed-packed full of demos (pretty much all the way through), which are easy to follow along with downloadable YAML files and scripts. We start with the basics, then later move on to more advanced topics like service meshes and operators.
JetBrains Rider
Rider is an amazing .NET IDE by JetBrains. This course is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more!
Aspire
Aspire is Microsoft's vision for how every .NET developer will develop systems. It is a cloud-ready stack for production-ready, distributed applications using .NET, and it makes it extremely easy to develop, run, and test your systems locally. With unmatched dev-time orchestration, integrations with third-party services, and excellent tooling, .NET Aspire aims to make working with the cloud and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes easier than ever.
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both enjoyed it and found it useful. If you can help me out and share with your developer friends at work and on social media, that would be amazing!
Again - feel totally free to reach out to me, and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter. And see you back in your inbox next week for the next edition! 👋
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