Overview
Today’s thread ties together a simple idea, agents are leaving the lab and getting on with jobs we care about. We see AI filing council requests and triaging to-do lists, Grok climbing the charts while its voice model posts lab wins, and Starlink turning in-flight wi-fi into something you can rely on. Alongside that, creators share bite-sized craft lessons in VFX and UE5, a markets-first newspaper goes live, and developers get fresh teaching material for functional effects.
The big picture
A “Karen Bot” for potholes, built in a day
Pieter Levels used Claude Code and ChatGPT to spin up a small web app that files infrastructure complaints to Lisbon’s city council. It adds maps and photos, then drafts formal Portuguese emails that get results - he says a pothole near him was fixed in three days. Replies point to the city’s official “Na Minha Rua LX” app, yet the point stands, AI lowers the bar for civic action when a quick email still wins.
Weft, a personal board where agents do your tasks
Phillip Jones unveiled Weft, a self-hosted Trello-style board where agents pick up tasks with access to Gmail, Docs, GitHub, or any MCP server. Built on Cloudflare’s stack - Workers, Durable Objects, Workflows - and using isolated sandboxes with Claude Code, it keeps a human in the loop by requiring approvals for state changes. It is pragmatic, tight scope, and useful right now.
Grok’s momentum - charts and voice
Elon Musk celebrated Grok hitting #1 in Ireland’s App Store, reflecting a wider push into mobile AI. It follows earlier runs at the top in the US and UK, helped by real-time X integration and the product’s tone, which has driven downloads into eight figures.
Separately, a community post highlighted Grok Voice Agent API topping BigBench Audio with a 92.3% score. It runs across Grok apps and inside millions of Teslas, with pricing at $0.05 per minute. The video shows bar charts edging out rivals on speech reasoning tasks.
Starlink takes off at 35,000 feet
Qatar Airways announced a string of firsts in in-flight connectivity, including the first 787-8 with Starlink, completion of the A350 rollout, and free gate-to-gate wi-fi up to 500 Mbps. The airline says more than 11 million passengers have used the service since October 2024. This is a fast, global install across widebodies in under nine months.
Markets write the headlines
Polymarket Times launches as a newspaper that takes real-time prediction odds and turns them into front-page stories. Styled like a Victorian broadsheet and minted daily on Ethereum, it lists markets such as 68% odds on Zelenskyy leaving office by 2026 and 46% on Netanyahu being removed. The crowd asked for agent flows like automatic wallet drops and open-sourcing.
VFX in 26 seconds - recreating ZZZ’s Hollow Fissure
VFX artist @_mikuruwu posted a tight After Effects walkthrough that rebuilds Zenless Zone Zero’s ethereal rift using particle layers, fractal noise for texture, and glow tuning. It is short, clear, and shows how indie creators can hit game-quality looks without 3D.
UE5 experiments, eerie and playful
Designer and professor @zuga shared a 2025 montage of Unreal Engine 5 experiments - surreal cityscapes, giant silhouettes, crabs and octopuses moving in a shadow-theatre style. It is not a finished game reel, more a moodboard of ideas and motion studies.
Effect gets a fresh teaching hub
Kit Langton launched new chapters for Effect, a Scala library for functional effects. The site frames effects as lazy blueprints that need a runtime to execute, with short interactive pieces on errors, resources, and concurrency. Clean design, purposeful pacing.
Why it matters
The practical agent pattern is landing. Levels’s “Karen Bot” shows that a thin app plus a model can move a council to fix a pothole, which is what people care about. Weft brings the same idea to daily chores with guardrails - OAuth, sandboxes, and approvals - which is the shape safety will often take in consumer tools.
Grok’s rise on the charts and its voice benchmark point to a tight loop between distribution and capability. If the phone app grows while the voice stack stays competitive on reasoning and cost, we should expect more voice-first experiences in cars and wearables, not just on headsets.
Starlink at scale changes expectations for travel. If passengers can stream, work, and join calls from gate to gate at high speed, the default will shift away from offline flight planning to always-on tools, which affects everything from remote work norms to in-flight entertainment deals.
Polymarket Times is a small but telling experiment. If headlines follow prices, readers get probabilistic context by default, and editors become curators of market moves. That raises old questions in a new form, who sets the markets, how are they manipulated, and how do we audit sources.
On the craft side, the VFX and UE5 posts show creators teaching in snacks rather than lectures, which spreads technique fast. The Effect chapters fit the same trend for developers, short, focused lessons that make harder ideas feel approachable without dumbing them down.
