Five Things Tech: GitHub, Algae Robot Swarms, Mythos, Apple, Robot Wolves
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Howdy and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
AI agents are breaking GitHub, algae robots swarm like locusts, and Japan has run out of robot wolves. This is a normal week in tech now. We also look at how Claude cracked open Apple's most hardened security in five days, and ask whether Apple's decision to sit out the great CapEx arms race is genius or a slow-motion mistake. Spoiler: they have done this before. The pace at which these stories are arriving is insane. Every edition of Five Things Tech we sit down to curate and find that the world has moved again, in directions that would have seemed implausible a year ago. The gap between science fiction and the morning news is basically gone. Buckle up.
Enjoy Five Things Tech!
Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami
Chacon believes GitHub’s current reliability issues stem from the current tsunami of agentic work.
This is “ironic” because GitHub was built to scale Git, he said. “But an influx of agents is pushing the service to the brink.”
The problem lies not with Git itself, but with everyone using one service, Chacon argued. Last year, GitHub had about 180 million users working across 630 million repositories – with 121 million created in 2025 alone, according to the company’s most recent annual Octoverse report.
It really is not that ironic that a decentralized versioning mechanism gets centralized and then becomes a bottleneck itself. GitHub is a great resource, hopefully it will be able to transcend into the future. We are also using it daily now for our software projects, which are of course powered by agentic coding. But even more importantly: gazillions of open source software repositories can be found on GitHub, which makes it such a valuable platform.
New Algae Robots Swarm Like Locusts at the Flick of a Switch
Microbots that deliver drugs, perform surgery, or act as environmental sentinels are no longer science fiction. Swarms of these robots have especially captured the imagination of roboticists. Tweaking a swarm’s shape and size can allow it to tunnel into small spaces and do work that would thwart any single sophisticated robot.
This kind of stuff is mindblowing, don’t you think? How do people even get the idea to research this?
Apple’s Security Has Been Tough to Crack. Mythos Helped Find a Way In.
Earlier this year, Anthropic’s AI found over 100 high-severity vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser over a two-week period. That is how many the rest of the world typically finds in two months.
Last September, Apple said it leveraged its hardware and operating system expertise into a technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), which it described as “the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade.”
With Claude, building the code that exploited the two MacOS bugs took five days, Calif says.
So impressive. Both what Apple has done and how the team used Claude to find vulnerabilities.
Apple’s Binary Bet
It’s just such a wild break from their peer group. And it keeps getting more wild. It seems like the most binary bet imaginable. Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.
Obviously, there will be some nuance there. Apple’s bet relies on a few factors, including that someone else is spending this CapEx on which Apple can rely. This is the “hybrid” approach to such spend that Tim Cook and others at Apple keep referring to. They’re basically saying that while they’ll do some of their AI work in-house, on their own servers, for the most part, they’ll partner with the others to rely upon their capacity. Most famously, Apple is now doing this with Google.
I think Apple is doing just what they did with the iPod and the iPhone - they let everybody spend gazillion to figure out how to make money with a certain technology and then they release the product people actually want and desire so much that they’ll spend a premium price on it.
Japan runs out of robot wolves in fight against bears
Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors. Its speakers are programmed with over 50 audio clips including human voices and sirens audible over half a mile away. These aren’t assembly line products, however. Each Monster Wolf is custom made, and Ohta simply can’t keep up with the current demand.
What a time to be alive.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico