Evening brief

Thursday, July 16

1 people · 0 companies · 2 topics

TL;DR emollick called out the anti-slop paradox: viral “anti-slop” markdown files for agents are themselves AI-generated and will make output worse. WAIC 2026 opens tomorrow in Shanghai with ZTE Nubia’s AI Agent Phone as the headline hardware debut.

People

  • emollick flagged on July 15 that a viral “anti-slop” markdown file for AI agents is “basically 100% AI written” and will “hyperstition your outputs into mega-slop” — you need real taste, or hire someone who has it, and build your own skills/instructions. X

  • emollick in a thread: “Between having AI as a subject for infinite speculation and using AI as a writer to produce such speculation at scale, it is the Golden Age of thinkpieces.” Then asked Fable to turn his own tweet into a thinkpiece and called the result “pretty funny.” X · X

Tools & dev

  • Anthropic ran a webinar today: “How to ship and scale agents with Claude Managed Agents” — second developer webinar this week after the July 14 evals session. Anthropic events

Other

  • WAIC 2026 opens in Shanghai tomorrow (July 17-20). Among 300+ product debuts: ZTE’s Nubia will show what it calls the world’s first AI Agent Phone, running StepFun’s Agent OS with ByteDance Doubao integrated at the OS level — autonomously opens apps, compares prices, and completes purchases without user touch input. Mass-production flagship, not a demo. Xi Jinping gives the opening keynote (his first at WAIC). Digitimes · Gizmochina