Welcome back! Claude wrote so much code that Anthropic had to replace git, the tool GitHub runs on. Google now lets you put apps you vibe code on your own Android phone. Gemini 4 Argon finally reached the Gemini app. And a mystery model called Claude Fable 5.5 showed up on Microsoft's cloud.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Anthropic: Why did Claude force Anthropic to ditch git?
Google: Why Android phones are a lot more interesting now?
Gemini: Are you finally trying the new hyped-up model?
Claude: Where did Fable 5.5 pop up?
Claude wrote so much code that Anthropic dumped git
In May, Anthropic merged about 2,500 code changes a day. By September it was merging more than 30,000 a day, and it says Claude's coding caused the jump.
Git, the standard tool developers use to track code changes and the one GitHub is built on, couldn't keep up. So Anthropic replaced it for its own code.
Seven people built the replacement, called Scion, in five months. They also built their own code review tool.
Anthropic's automated tests grab a copy of its code about 25 million times a day.
At the peak, it ran several hundred copies of its git servers to keep up with the load.
Scion runs on 200x less computing power, and code downloads take seconds instead of minutes.
Every engineer on the team now rates Claude a better coder than themselves. A lot of their job became telling Claude no.
One of the top replies on X came from someone whose single pull request has been stuck since March. It fixes a typo.
Anthropic isn't releasing Scion yet. It expects other companies to hit the same wall within a year and wants to help GitHub and GitLab bring the best parts to git.
Build an AI agent and win big
Our Open Agent Hackathon runs online from October 22 to 27, for teams of one to five. Build an agent that does real work for a real person, then let the judges try to break it.
Up to $20,000 in prizes, including an NVIDIA DGX Spark for the best use of Nemotron.
Free to enter and open to anyone 16 or older, anywhere.
Mentors and workshops to help you build, plus sponsor tech from NVIDIA.
More than 3,000 builders have signed up. Registration closes October 22 and winners are announced November 6.
Know someone who should be mentoring instead of competing? Send them to become a mentor.
Google lets you vibe code apps for your own phone
You can now describe an app to Gemini in Google AI Studio and run it on your own Android phone through Google Play. It works with your regular Google account, so there's no developer account to sign up for.
The apps sit in a private personal library on your devices, hidden from Play Store search.
Until now, putting your own app on Android meant publishing it to a store with some 3 billion users, so a lot of people built web apps instead.
It's rolling out now for adults in the US and select markets.
In the coming months you'll be able to share an app with friends and family.
To go public, you'll switch to a developer account and pass the same safety review every developer gets.
Apple spent the spring blocking updates from vibe-coding apps like Replit and pulled one called Anything from the App Store twice.
What would you build first?
You're Running Three Databases. You Only Need One.
Events in one database, embeddings in another, analytics in a third. That's three systems and the pipelines between them, for one app. TimescaleDB does all three in Postgres: hypertables, pgvector, continuous aggregates. One system, no pipeline, no drift.
Gemini 4 Argon is finally in your Gemini app
For the last two weeks, Gemini 4 Argon was mostly for cyber defenders and a few early customers. It’s one of the best models out there. Now Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search.
Pro costs $20 a month in the US. Google says Argon answers more directly and skips the clichés.
A new tasks switch lets Gemini keep working across your Google apps while you're away from your computer.
Gemini now connects to 40+ apps like Instacart and OpenTable, so it can order groceries or book a table.
Sundar Pichai showed Argon turning a raw Pixel design file into a 3D animation with lighting and sound, checking its own renders 1,000 times along the way.
Only Ultra subscribers get Argon in Antigravity, Google's coding app, and some Pro users on X are already asking why.
Developers get an intro price until Nov 30, and then it doubles.
Bettors on Polymarket give Google a 72% chance of having the top AI model at the end of October.
Claude Fable 5.5 just showed up on Microsoft's cloud
A model called Claude Fable 5.5 appeared in Microsoft Azure's model listings on Tuesday, labeled as generally available.
Anthropic hasn't announced it, and Microsoft hasn't confirmed it. That label alone doesn't prove anyone can use it yet.
The entry sits in Azure's East US 2 region with a retirement date of Dec 5, 2027.
LiteLLM, a tool developers use to switch between AI models, already added it to its model list.
Its description looks copied from Fable 5.1, which came out Sept 1.
When Fable 5 launched in June, it hit Azure, Amazon and Google's clouds at the same time.
Microsoft's public docs still stop at Fable 5.1.
Yesterday we told you bettors gave the next Fable a 62% chance of landing within two weeks. Let's see if they cash in.
Tool of the Day: Toby
Toby runs a realistic mock job interview with you on a Zoom-style video call. Paste in a job description and it researches the company before playing the hiring manager. The debrief scores every answer and rewrites it using only what you said. Your first 5 minutes are free.
Try this yourself:
Go to usetoby.ai and click Start a mock interview.
Paste the job description for the role you're going for.
Pick the round, then choose Real mode or Coach mode for a note and a retry after each answer.
Who it's for: anyone with an interview coming up who'd rather fumble in practice.
Everything else you shouldn't miss
An off-the-shelf OpenAI model helped hack Google Chrome: an engineer at security startup Xbow spent $40,000 on GPT-5.6 to chain three unpatched Chrome bugs and won Google's top $250,000 bounty.
About 400 scientists want a global watchdog for AI that can hack: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio signed the letter, which asks for frontier models to be kept offline and for a registry of security incidents.
Moderna's co-founder wants AI agents regulated before a disaster: Noubar Afeyan compared waiting to the thalidomide tragedy, when a drug reached patients before it was properly tested.
Palantir's CTO says AI researchers took up smoking: Shyam Sankar says it shows how sure they are that AI will cure cancer, though he didn't name a single one.
Nvidia is buying a stake in Doctolib, France's doctor-booking app: it's one of four French startups Nvidia is backing, and Doctolib says having Nvidia on board will help it build AI tools.
Nvidia's GPU-sharing software is now free and open source: the full Run:ai platform, which helps companies split GPUs between AI jobs, is now on GitHub for anyone to use.
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