Chaos Agents

Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy
  • 4.3 (6)
  • Technology

Technologists Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy dive into the chaos of artificial intelligence—unpacking the tech, trends, and ideas reshaping how we work, create, and think. Smart, funny, and just a little bit existential.

  1. 1d ago

    Postman's Sneaky Agent Hook, a Chess-Crushing 1995 Pentium, and a Ceiling Robot

    What happens when an app you installed quietly tells your AI coding agent to always use it? Our biggest story: Postman's desktop app reportedly installed plugins into Claude Code and Codex without asking, added a startup hook that sends all API work through Postman, and then approved its own hook in Codex's config. It surfaced in a GitHub issue that hit 859 points on Hacker News. Sara explains what Postman is and why this felt shady. Becca connects it to a bigger worry: as agents start making the recommendations, every company will try to get picked by them, which is basically SEO and advertising in a new outfit. Under the radar: a new paper found that tiny, near-zero token embeddings can quietly stall training in gated sequence models. Becca explains backpropagation and normalization with a blueberry and a volume knob. The short version: a safety mechanism overcorrected, the signal blew out, and a training run can look healthy while throwing away useful learning. The authors propose small fixes to get it back. Fun application of the day: Nicholas Carlini ported Stockfish to a 200 MHz Pentium Pro from 1995, and it plays at about 3300 Elo. That's strong enough to beat Kasparov, and you can play it online. The takeaway: most of chess engines' gains since 1996 came from better algorithms, not better hardware. So what are we spending billions on GPUs to brute-force? One cool thing: Stringman, a $795 open-source robot that hangs from cables in your ceiling corners, works a bit like a football stadium's cable camera, and comes with a Python API and an MCP server so your agent can drive it. Plus, Becca's wife Leah has an idea: a robot duck that follows your crawling baby around and quacks if she heads for a power outlet. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy. Subscribe to the free newsletter at chaosagents.ai, and find the stories from this episode at chaosagents.ai/listen.

  2. 2d ago

    Rewriting an AI's Brain by Hand, Glasses That Hear You Mouth Words, and a Transformer That Shuffles Its Own Layers

    Can one AI read another AI's mind, then reach in and rewire it? This week Sara and Becca dig into GPT-6 Astra editing raw neural network weights by hand, with no training loop and no gradients, and jumping a small model's math score from 7.9% to 48.1% in the process. The MIT CSAIL work has people calling it "weight-space programming," and the hosts get into what it actually did (a hypothesize-tweak-rerun feedback loop) versus the headline that a Hacker News skeptic says oversells it. Plus the inevitable question: if you could reprogram your own weights, which one would you turn up? Then, under the radar: Library of Layers (acronym: LOL), a transformer that picks the order of its own layers at runtime instead of running the same sequence every time. It even chooses different layer paths for different languages, which ties straight back to the interpretability thread Sara and Becca keep pulling on, and the "bitter lesson" idea that letting the machine decide usually beats hand-engineering the rules. Fun application of the day: Subvocal, glasses that turn silently mouthed words into text. Creepy in a way the hosts can't fully agree on. (Sara wants the version that reads the room. Becca wants walking-around closed captions. They settle on: great for airplanes, nightmare for the office.) And the One Cool Thing: Holmark, the open-source design skill that refuses to look AI-generated, number one on GitHub's weekly trending with a rabbit hole of linked skills the hosts are both now obsessed with. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy. Subscribe to the free newsletter at chaosagents.ai, and find the stories from this episode at chaosagents.ai/listen.

    Rewriting an AI's Brain by Hand, Glasses That Hear You Mouth Words, and a Transformer That Shuffles Its Own Layers

  3. 3d ago

    Le Chonk Ships, DOOM as a Neural Net, and Attention Heads

    Daily AI newsletter: chaosagents.ai Mistral finally ships the 1-trillion-parameter Le Chonk open-weight model, we dive into research showing only 2% of attention heads do the real retrieval work, and explore the gloriously unhinged DOOM Former project that turns the classic game into a neural network computer. Links we mentioned: - Mistral Large 4 OSS https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4-oss - A Broader Look into MLLM's Retrieval Heads https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.32411 - DOOM Former https://github.com/mottopanikeiku/doomformer - Tiny World Former https://github.com/SheepSeb/tinyworldformer Find us: chaosagents.ai | YouTube @ChaosAgentsAI | TikTok @chaos.agents | IG @chaosagents.ai

  4. Oct 29

    Cross-Modal AI, Genie 4, and Beating Gemini Forklifts with David Heimann

    Daily AI newsletter: chaosagents.ai DeepMind's Genie 4 generates interactive worlds with sound and dialogue. We test steering vectors that work across modalities, race AI-powered forklifts in real-time, and explore offline survival AI. Plus: ESP32 hardware hacking with Claude and why your smart TV might be watching you. Links we mentioned: - Genie 4 - DeepMind https://deepmind.google/technologies/genie/genie-4/ - Cross-modal steering vectors paper https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.36269 - Freight Floor game https://freightfloor.com - Survival LLM https://brangus.io/survival-llm Find us: chaosagents.ai | YouTube @ChaosAgentsAI | TikTok @chaos.agents | IG @chaosagents.ai

    Cross-Modal AI, Genie 4, and Beating Gemini Forklifts with David Heimann

  5. Oct 26

    Neural Networks, Sparse Autoencoders, and a Fleet of Duck Robots

    A 10-year-old convolutional neural network just out-diagnosed GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 at spotting melanoma, and Sara and Becca dig into why a cheap, specialized model still beats the giants (and what happens the day it doesn't). Then it's back to their favorite recurring character, the sparse autoencoder: a new paper says they need way less data than we thought, right up until you ask whether the "features" they find are even real. Becca's song-recreation analogy makes it click. Plus: Rainbow Say, a Mac app that teaches you a language through the shows you already love, and the One Cool Thing, MicroDuck, an $400, 11k-star open-source biped robot that somersaults its way into both hosts' hearts. Along the way: making vasectomies hot on the girl podcast, retiring to Mexico City, and which jobs stay human when intelligence gets cheap (childcare, massages, and the robot nanny debate). Curated by Eddie. Questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy. Today's links can be found at https://chaosagents.ai

    Neural Networks, Sparse Autoencoders, and a Fleet of Duck Robots

  6. Oct 23

    Discovering Yourself with AI, a PHP Patch-Day Thriller, and Credit for Every Step

    Jon Chan (ex–Stack Overflow) joins Sara and Becca to talk about Saga, the end-to-end-encrypted AI journal he's building to help you discover yourself — what you actually want versus what you think you want. Spill the tea, get it reflected back, and let a wise-friend AI tell you the thing you've been avoiding. Then things get chaotic. PHP patched two critical remote-code-execution bugs, and the AI-era disclosure around them turned into a full coding thriller: leaked CVEs with the wrong severity, an attack demo posted and yanked, a vendor breaking the embargo at 3am, and a volunteer foundation getting outgunned by coding agents. The crew also digs into the Mosaic paper on giving multi-agent systems credit for each step instead of just the final answer, a 700-game arcade of AI-built browser games that will eat your afternoon, and Cloudflare open-sourcing the security-audit skill behind its vulnerability-hunting harness. Chaos Agents is a podcast about a daily AI newsletter written by an agent named Eddie, then picked apart, commented on, and yelled at by Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy. Links in this episode are at https://chaosagents.ai/listen and Saga.chat

    Discovering Yourself with AI, a PHP Patch-Day Thriller, and Credit for Every Step

  7. Oct 20

    DeepSeek's 75-Cent Search, Hybrid Reasoning Agents, and Programming Language Wars

    Daily AI newsletter: chaosagents.ai DeepSeek launched a search and fetch API at 75 cents per thousand requests—cheap enough to change the economics of agentic AI, and early tests show it might outperform Claude. Plus: hybrid reasoning agents that think silently and talk only when they act, a bot that wastes scammers' time, and a programming language designed to confuse LLMs. Links we mentioned: DeepSeek Search API (https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/search)Hybrid Reasoning Agents paper (https://huggingface.co/papers/2610.18861?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)CallSitter GitHub (github.com/szaranczuk/callsitter)KillSwitch GitHub (https://blog.picheta.me/post/killswitch-lang/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) Find us: chaosagents.ai | YouTube @ChaosAgentsAI | TikTok @chaos.agents | IG @chaosagents.ai

    DeepSeek's 75-Cent Search, Hybrid Reasoning Agents, and Programming Language Wars

  8. Oct 16

    Local AI, Rethinking Neural Networks, and Talking Pumpkins

    How much would you pay to keep your AI out of the cloud? Sara and Becca work through the economics of running models locally: the hardware bill, the privacy benefits, and why fitting a massive model on two Mac Studios is only part of the equation. Sara also explains how agents and verification loops could tackle one of engineering’s most expensive headaches: software migrations that never seem to end. Then, interpretability researcher Nick Cammarata is revisiting some of the field’s foundational assumptions. What if neural networks are more understandable than we thought? We unpack his argument, recursive generalization, and why studying neurons directly might deserve another look. Plus: an old phone becomes a talking jack-o’-lantern, Becca considers a Halloween AI hackathon, and Sara discovers Univer—a toolkit for agents to work with spreadsheets, docs, and slides that she immediately wants to use. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Harris Lewy. Subscribe to the free newsletter at chaosagents.ai, and find the stories from this episode at chaosagents.ai/listen.

    Local AI, Rethinking Neural Networks, and Talking Pumpkins
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Ratings & Reviews

4.3
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Technologists Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy dive into the chaos of artificial intelligence—unpacking the tech, trends, and ideas reshaping how we work, create, and think. Smart, funny, and just a little bit existential.

Information

  • Creator
    Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    30
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy
  • Show Website
    Chaos Agents

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