Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash release leads today’s list, with a cyber variant and a new restricted cyber-defense program alongside it. Cursor now lets cloud agents run on infrastructure you manage, and GitHub published a meaty post on where Copilot’s harness wastes tokens and what they did about it. On the writing side, Simon Willison digs into Anthropic’s latest Claude system prompt changes and relays how Paint.NET shipped a Claude-written Direct2D reimplementation.
From the labs
- Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber — Google DeepMind (+ Fairwind Program, Simon Willison)
- Run cloud agents on machines you manage — Cursor
- How we make AI coding more cost efficient without sacrificing task quality — GitHub
Worth your time
- Claude’s new system prompt really doesn’t want to reproduce song lyrics — Simon Willison
- Quoting Rick Brewster — Simon Willison (Paint.NET’s Claude-written Direct2D rewrite)