On 24 April 2026, every single member of America’s National Science Board received the same boilerplate email. Twenty-four scientists and engineers, appointed to govern the $9 billion National Science Foundation, were told their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” Thank you for your service. No explanation. No warning.

That is not how a serious country behaves.

The NSB was established in 1950. Its whole purpose is to provide continuity across administrations, a stable hand on the tiller of US federal science regardless of who sits in the White House. It was designed specifically so that research policy could not be held hostage to electoral whims. Firing the lot of them in a single email blast is not policy. It’s vandalism.

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This one is for developers and vibe coders. Everyone else, feel free to skip.

The short version: Anthropic are listening, refining their tools based on feedback, and shipping at a pace that is genuinely hard to keep up with. The tools keep getting better, which just encourages everyone to hit their servers harder.

Every time Claude Code wants to run a shell command, edit a file, or call an MCP tool, it stops and asks. The first time, this feels right. By the thirtieth time in a session, it feels like a co-worker who needs written authorisation to use the stapler.

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I switched my default to Opus 4.7 the day it shipped. A few days later I hit my rolling 5-hour usage limit on claude.ai. Then I hit it again. By the third lockout in one day I was puzzled.

Hmm. This hadn’t happened before.

I’d been running Opus 4.7 as the default for everything. Code, writing, casual queries, illuminated business plans. Anything that needed a model, it got the newest, shiniest one.

Turns out the new shiny one is hungry. Very hungry.

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I build Rube Goldberg machines. Show me a simple workflow and I will find three ways to bolt extra components onto it. Custom scripts. Half-built automations. Plugins solving problems I didn’t have. Nick Milo does the opposite. He just posted a 60-second video showing Claude and Obsidian working together through Cowork. No elaborate setup. No custom scripts. Point Cowork at your vault and start a conversation. That’s it. It is the most distilled demonstration of agent-assisted thinking I’ve seen in months.

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My personal bookmarking manager Felix fell over.

Why?

Root cause found: claude-3-haiku-20240307 has been retired (returns 404). Need to update to claude-haiku-4-5-20251001.

Thanks Anthropic. Good to have progress but it’s not great to break software. I’m sure this is happening all over as they rapidly ramp up new models in a highly competitive environment.

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My personal bookmarking manager Felix fell over.

Why?

Root cause found: claude-3-haiku-20240307 has been retired (returns 404). Need to update to claude-haiku-4-5-20251001.

Thanks Anthropic. Good to have progress but it’s not great to break software. I’m sure this is happening all over as they rapidly ramp up new models in a highly competitive environment.

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A friend of mine, let’s call her Jane, runs a marketing consultancy. Fifteen years in, small team, strong client list, had used Claude for chat only. I offered to spend an hour showing her what’s possible now we’re well beyond that. Wednesday night I realised winging a 75-minute demo next morning would burn too much time on navigation and too little on value. I opened Claude Cowork, uploaded a brief I’d quickly hacked together from emails and went on with my evening.

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Aaron Haspel published britannica11.org last week. It is a complete, searchable, cross-referenced digital edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica’s celebrated 11th edition (1910 to 1911). One person built it. Project Gutenberg and Wikisource have been chipping away at the same artefact for over twenty years and are still not done.

The credits page is the giveaway. “Thanks most of all to Anthropic and Claude Code Opus, which did nearly all the heavy lifting, and to OpenAI and GPT Codex, which drafted the specification.” Haspel is a New York based aphorist and essayist who also writes code. That blend is the new shape of solo scholarship.

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We’ve spent decades framing distractibility as a deficit. A disorder. Something to medicate and manage. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, thinks we have it backwards.

In a compelling new essay for Aeon, Le Cunff makes the case that what we now label ADHD was once an evolutionary advantage. The hypercurious mind, the one that can’t stop scanning the horizon, that gets bored with routine, wasn’t broken. It was built for exploration.

“Human attention did not evolve in an environment saturated with infinite information and algorithmically optimised distraction. For most of our history, novelty was relatively rare and often meaningful; today, exposure to novelty is constant and difficult to escape.”

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Daniel Vaughan ran Gemma 4 as a local model inside OpenAI’s Codex CLI on both a MacBook Pro and a Dell GB10 with NVIDIA Blackwell. The results are worth your time. The headline number is striking. Google’s Gemma 4 hit 86.4% tool-calling accuracy versus Gemma 3’s 6.6%. That’s not incremental improvement. That’s a generational leap in what a local model can do inside an agentic coding workflow. But the details tell a more familiar story.

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