Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IFriday, October 30, 2026 · 57° & partly cloudy on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models

Simon Willison · made the Sunday

Spawn is a multiplayer world where players prompt castles and dragons into existence, and by Jacob Sansbury's account it is now largely developed by a swarm of Fable-powered agents that read production errors and bug reports themselves, ship to live code hourly, and cost more than three million dollars a month in tokens — thirty times payroll. The operational choices are the part worth stealing or arguing with: an hour without a ship is treated as a SEV-0 because an agent can only hold a few hours of work in its head, rollbacks are scoped to the broken change and take thirty seconds, and alerts wake an agent that owns the incident. The model dependency is unusually specific too — Fable 5.1 made the autonomy possible, Opus 5.5 did not quite get there for them, and GPT-6 Astra, asked to apply a security review, made the insecure things secure by turning the whole product off.

AI & Agents

Y Combinator Labs · made the Sunday

We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry

Fifty GPT-6.1 Sol agents were dropped into a Minecraft survival world for three hours and told to build a thriving civilization; they stripped the trees near spawn in ninety seconds, then invented a government — ration ledger, written rules, permits, appointed operators — and sent about 5,900 messages, 616 of them to Ada, who became leader purely because she was first in the agent directory. The finding that should worry anyone running coding agents is the arc: 22 of the run's 34 deaths came on the first night, after which the colony turned risk-averse, abandoned ambitious work, and spent eleven minutes of four agents' time appointing a sole fertilizer operator for one application of bone meal. The harness is open source and built on Mineflayer, so the experiment is repeatable rather than just entertaining.

Martin Fowler

LLM Voice

Fowler's objection to machine-written prose is not accuracy but the uncanny-valley reaction it produces in readers, which no detector can undo after the fact — by the time you reach for the tool it is already too late. His practical rule is harder than most people's: do not let a model write the first draft, because the voice survives human editing, and be wary even of accepting rephrasings. The real argument is underneath, and it is one worth sitting with before the next time you delegate a doc — writing is how you find out whether you actually understand the thing.

Mistral

Mistral Large 4 open weights

The trillion-parameter model that went to preview earlier this month now ships with weights, and three more weeks of reinforcement learning put it at the front of open-weight coding: 19.7% on Cognition's private FrontierCode 2.0, which scores whether a maintainer would actually merge the agent's change, and 41% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, up thirteen points while cutting output tokens by thirty percent. The number that matters for anyone paying per token is the efficiency one — 48 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, effectively level with GLM-5.3 while using 47% fewer tokens per task, with three selectable reasoning modes to tune the trade.

Engineering & Leadership

Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer

Software engineering at Google, with Titus Winters

The lead author of Software Engineering at Google now wants to burn down most of the CS curriculum he helped write, and the conversation earns the contradiction by way of the 2010 refactor of Google's 250-million-line C++ codebase by a dozen people — MapReduce over every build target to parse it into syntax trees, pattern-match, generate edits, make both APIs coexist, shard by directory, then block anyone from copying the old pattern back. Winters describes it as replacing the Empire State Building's foundation without closing the building, and clang-format exists because they needed it. The leadership material is in the two mandates that followed: a test with every change, after Search degraded from monthly to quarterly releases, and a readability reviewer on every commit alongside the owner.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

More swarms, fewer giants

The shape of the threat inverted this quarter: attacks over a terabit per second fell from 805 to 251 after law enforcement took down four large IoT botnets, while short cheap bursts under ten minutes and one gigabit rose 208% and now account for almost everything — 96% of attacks end inside ten minutes, 98% stay under a gigabit. If you run anything on Workers this is a sizing argument, because defending against a 49-hour Mirai flood and defending against thousands of four-minute pokes are different problems, and the second one is now the normal one. DNS amplification is up 215% and UDP floods have gone from roughly a seventh of network-layer attacks to nearly a third.

New York & the Table

Gus Saltonstall, West Side Rag

Upper West Side street closures for trick-or-treating

Halloween lands on a Saturday this year and the DOT's Trick-or-Streets program closes seven blocks to cars for it, from Amsterdam between 106th and 110th up to the 69th Street block association, most of them 4pm onward. The two longest windows are West 87th from Columbus to Central Park West and West 78th between Amsterdam and Columbus, both running 4 to 9, which is also where the decorating arms race on this stretch tends to concentrate.

Nat Belkov, Eater NY

Velvet Cowboy, where everything on the food menu is five dollars

The Jacob's Pickles team has turned its old Amsterdam Avenue room at 509 into a maximalist Western saloon, and the gimmick holds up on inspection: every bar bite is five dollars, including a griddled pork sandwich on a toasted bun with hot and sour pickles that Eater's reviewer was told should taste like the famous fast-food one does not. Cocktails run fifteen, the Frito pie sits on a properly built Texas chili, and the back lounge is clearly destined for birthday buyouts, so go before it is permanently booked.

Diversions

The Guardian · made the Sunday

Patrick Stewart, 1940–2026

He died at home in Los Angeles at 86, after what his spokesperson called a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia, and the obituary is good on the part people forget — he was a fixture of the British stage for two decades before anyone cast him in anything, and was 47 when Star Trek: The Next Generation made him a global figure. Ian McKellen's tribute is the one to read, and it starts with Yorkshire rather than the Enterprise.

Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian · made the Sunday

Castle Walls review

The first end-to-end AI-generated series on a major streaming platform is two seventeen-minute episodes set at Alamut Castle in the eleventh century, and the review's diagnosis is precise rather than merely rude: the palette is genuinely striking until a person appears, and the shot progression reads like the prompt was made it cinematic, then more cinematic, then MORE. Worth ten minutes of attention as a marker of where generative video actually is this month, which is further along on landscapes than on faces and nowhere at all on pacing.

Loose Change

Dan Wang, Works in Progress

Sichuan and the Sun Belt

Vienna has five times the people of Austria's second city, Seoul six times, Paris seven — and the United States and China are the two large countries that conspicuously do not work that way, with capitals that rank nowhere near the top of their own population tables. Wang's argument is that the friction between a jealous political center and a dozen self-regarding macro regions is a source of strength rather than a defect, and he builds it out of material you cannot get from a map: Shanghai stand-up comics permitted to mock regional stereotypes but not politics, a Houston businessman explaining that his city has no weather and no natural beauty so its leaders have to work harder, and local officials who quietly decline to enforce directives from above.

The Back Page

Andrew Beasley, The Guardian

Chelsea's fine finishing has them flying high — but how long can it last?

Opta has Chelsea as the twelfth-best side in the division and fifth in the table, and the gap is one number: 6.7 goals scored above the quality of the chances created, second only to Brighton. Henderson has scored twice from five shots outside the box after one in twenty over the previous decade, Neto is two off his career best, and four of the twelve players in the league running at least 1.5 above their non-penalty expected goals are Chelsea's. Michael Carrick arrives on Saturday looking like a dead man walking and his United side have still performed better on the underlying numbers, which is the kind of fact that is useless right up until the finishing cools.

Around town

Tue Nov 3 · 5:30pm

Frontier Paper Club

Betaworks, 29 Little W 12th St, Meatpacking

A monthly room that picks two or three papers or benchmarks around one research question and then spends most of the evening arguing about whether the evidence holds — assumptions, reproducibility, the failures that point somewhere. Free, and the standing topics are agent reliability, evaluation and post-training, which is the useful end of the field rather than the announcement end.

professional

Mon Nov 2 · 6:00pm

Ugly Talks — Failure Is Key To Success

Venue to be announced, Manhattan

Four founder-CEOs, Hungryroot's Ben McKean among them, talking specifically about the call that cost them rather than the arc that redeemed it. Free, two hours, and the framing is unusually honest for this format — the pitch is explicitly that failure-as-part-of-the-journey is the lie. Check the listing for a venue before you go.

professional

Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 15 · Q&A Nov 6 & 7

zi (Kogonada), with the director and cast

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Kogonada's new film follows a concert violinist, played by Michelle Mao, through Hong Kong as she has visions that may be memory or premonition, with Haley Lu Richardson as the American she tries to explain them to and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score underneath. The Nov 6 and 7 screenings bring Kogonada, Mao, Richardson and Jin Ha for a Q&A; later dates pair it with his video essays on Ozu, Koreeda and Bergman, which is its own argument about where the film came from.

casual

Tue Nov 3 · 8:00pm and Tue Nov 10 · 6:00pm

NYC in Transit

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, West Village

A series built with the New York Transit Museum for its fiftieth anniversary, running the canon of films that treat the subway as a character — Pickup on South Street on the 3rd, Manhattan by Numbers on the 10th, with The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Warriors, Speedy and The French Connection in the wider program. Members get two-for-one admission to the museum in Downtown Brooklyn while it runs.

casual

Quote of the day

“It's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries.”

— Martin Fowler, on how you can tell

On this day

October 30, 1938 — Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre broadcast The War of the Worlds from CBS's studio at 485 Madison Avenue, cutting into a fake dance-band program with fake news bulletins about cylinders landing at Grover's Mill, New Jersey. The panic was real but modest; its legend was mostly manufactured by newspapers that were losing advertising to radio and enjoyed the story enormously. Thirty-six years later to the day, Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round in Kinshasa.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Two of today's items are the same lesson at different scales: fifty agents in Minecraft spending eleven minutes on a fertilizer permit, and a studio that treats an hour without a ship as its most severe incident class.