What Edu is reading this week (Sep 19 - 26, 2026)
Two frontier model releases shared the week with a widening set of small decision models and agent runtimes, and with more reports on how coding agents are changing day-to-day development. Jev is still trending for the second week running, with benchmark tooling, an open implementation and drop-in skills for moving the small decisions off the frontier models. On the infrastructure side: kernel live-update work to keep VMs running, DRBD releases, router and Android tooling, and a Playdate app for watching live air traffic.
AI, Agents & Models
- Introducing GPT-6 Sol and Luna - OpenAI’s two new models, aimed at everyday work with different balances of capability and cost.
- Introducing Claude Opus 5.5 - Anthropic’s new flagship for agentic coding and knowledge work, which the announcement says costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads.
- google/ax / AX - Google’s open agentic orchestration runtime: declare a task in YAML, and AX sandboxes it, wires up the workspace, fences the network and runs many of them per cluster.
- hermes-jev-skills - Moves the small decisions (which model answers a turn, which skills to load, which retrieved passages matter) off the frontier model and onto a cheap classifier, for Hermes agents as well as Claude Code and Codex.
- Welcome back to Hermes Agent, Claude - Teknium on the new official plugin that wraps the Claude SDK, so Claude Code subscriptions work in Hermes Agent again.
- I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8 GB - What happens when you ask an agent to archive everything it can see and send it to your Drive: it does, and the write-up looks at what that says about agent runtimes.
- Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on - Measurements showing AGENTS.md support sits behind a remote feature flag, so a local AGENTS.md is skipped without warning when telemetry or nonessential traffic is off, plus the one-line CLAUDE.md workaround.
Decision Models & Small Runtimes
- JevBench by Benchmark Heaven - Scores Jev, its open rebuilds and instruction models on intelligence, calibration, speed and cost, 25% each.
- featherless-ai/simple-jev / Simple Jev - An open source implementation of Jev that turns any open model into a classifier endpoint, with a demo API you can call without a key.
- jaredpalmer/kev - Small Jev-like decision models built on Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.8, with pretrained weights or a training run of your own.
- mizorewww/laya-mlx - A native MLX runtime for Laya typed decision models, reporting 7-14 ms short decisions on an M3 Max without text generation or a cloud API.
Learning & Self-Teaching
- Magic for self-learners - A r/hermesagent thread on how the latest models changed the way the author learns things, after years of using them badly.
- madhvantyagi/Gnos - A teaching harness that turns a coding agent into a teacher: it designs a curriculum, generates videos, simulations, images and PDFs, and tracks your learning style. Ships as Codex and Claude Code plugins under the MIT license.
Cloud, Virtualization & Storage
- Orphaned VMs: running VMs uninterrupted while the host kernel is offline for reboots/updates - RFC patches that keep guests executing on preserved physical CPUs across a host kernel live update, using the Live Update Orchestrator. Tested on Intel, AMD and Arm, and still very early work.
- nestrilabs/virtio-nvgpu - An experimental virtio device for near-native NVIDIA GPU access inside KVM virtual machines.
- drbd-9.2.20 and drbd-9.3.4 - LINBIT’s release notes, with a note on how a year of Claude Code use let the team fit more fixes into a cycle than ever: reproducers, DRBD-specific static analyzers, a deterministic simulator. The 9.2.x series is nearly done.
Linux, Routers & Homelab
- Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake - On CERN moving its accelerator front-end systems to Debian 13, and why the scientific community running its own distribution was worth the effort even while CentOS was around.
- kobidarch/luci-theme-doodle - A pastel doodle theme for the OpenWrt LuCI web interface: paper cards, 3px ink borders, hard offset shadows. Light mode only for now.
- 686f6c61/DIGI-F8748 - Recovers the admin password of a DIGI ZTE F8748 router without installing anything and without touching the existing configuration, step by step, with scripts for macOS, Linux and Windows.
- CidVonHighwind/pocketfin - A Jellyfin client for the PlayStation Portable: movies and shows from your own server on a Memory Stick console over the PSP’s 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
Security & Privacy
- Containers Are No Longer a Security Boundary - A walk through CVE-2026-80521, an AF_UNIX use-after-free found with an in-house AI vulnerability model, and the argument that sensitive or untrusted workloads belong in Firecracker or Kata Containers.
- I said no and Apple said yes - David Bushell on Apple Intelligence, and on what a consent prompt is worth when the answer is treated as yes anyway.
Development, Web & Design
- AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible - Why AI event posters end up looking interchangeable, and how naming a specific design style and era, from Bauhaus to punk fanzine, gets usable results.
- Bastardica - A browser tool and type foundry for “bastard” fonts: mix glyphs from several fonts through a liga substitution, tune stride and effects, and export TTF, OTF or WOFF2. Everything runs locally with Pyodide.
Android & Mobile
- F-Droid 2.0 - The app’s largest update in ten years: a Material-based redesign rewritten in Kotlin Compose, better search and discovery, rolling out over the coming weeks. The post also points to the keepandroidopen.org campaign about Google’s installer changes.
- tgeorgiadis/quiver-launcher - An Android and desktop launcher for apps distributed through GitHub and GitLab releases, with a personal library, subscribable community catalogs and filtering.
Hardware & Smart Home
- Shelly Group has entered into an investment agreement with Schneider Electric - Schneider Electric intends to offer EUR 70 per share for Shelly Group, roughly EUR 1.2 billion and a 27% premium, with both founders supporting the deal; closing is expected by Q1 2027.
- Porsche puts wireless EV charging into production - Wireless Charging arrives on the Cayenne Electric: park over a ground pad and charge at up to 11 kW and about 90% efficiency, with motion and foreign-object detection that stops the process when a living creature comes close.
Fun & Off-Topic
- Flight Radar by Darkerbulb - Turns a Playdate into a live air-traffic scope: real ADS-B traffic on a sonar-style display, selectable ranges, per-flight details and real ATC audio for the selected flight. It is being rebuilt right now after an ATC audio bug.
- No Sloptober - An October challenge to go without LLM-based tools entirely, as a way to rebuild your own sense of what they are good and bad at. The hard mode turns off AI search summaries and code review too, not just chat.