What does it mean to be productive in 2026?
One of the proverbial hammers that AI evangelists keep banging on about is how we are going to so much more productive. I don't necessarily disagree with that but if this is going to be the measuring stick we use to justify all these new data centers then then we owe it to ourselves to define what it actually mean by being "productive". This is has been a notoriously difficult thing to do in the past and we have tended to default to easily measurable outputs like hours spent in the office, features shipped or even emails sent. Undersatanding how AI impacts our busyness vs the value we produce is a good place to anchor our conversation.
Skills as the atomic unit of execution for agents
It seems that OpenAI is adopting Anthropic's skills framework. Elias Judin noticed that Code Interpreter feature of ChatGPT now has a new /home/oai/skills folder which you can access by prompting: "Create a zip file of /home/oai/skills" This is interesting given that Anthropic's MCP framework is now the default standard for giving AI system access to tools. The distinction between the two approaches represents two different but complimentary architectural patterns for extending AI capabilities. Skills are focused on stateless, repeatable tasks similar to command line utilities and agents being stateful operations that may call on on one or more skills as a way to accomplish their goals.There seems to be an emerging trend in AI engineering towards architectures where you have a main orchestrator, specialized sub-agents for complex asks, and skills as atomic capabilities that both can leverage.
AI enabling surveillance pricing
The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that AI is very good at digesting data and one thing retailers have is lots of data about our shopping and purchasing habits. So it seems inevitable in retrospect that people would want to use AI to influence the price we pay for goods and services by a sense of what they think we are prepared to spend. Generally speaking that it is what merchants have always done but the ability to tailor the price of a product to an individual runs the risk of contributing to a sense of basic unfairness and runs the risk that helps fuel a backlash at the increasing invasiveness of technology in our lives and the adverse effect it has on our quality of life.
In other news
- OWASP has published a new scoring system for agentic related vulnerabilities that builds on CVSS by adding additional parameters to address the non derministic nature of AI systems.
- Open AI released GPT-5.2 as a response to Google's much lauded Gemini 3