Qwen's 2.4T flagship goes open-weights next week — and DeepSeek codes at 3 cents a test

Alibaba shipped Qwen3.8-Max — a 2.4-trillion-parameter coding flagship whose weights go public next week, a first for its Max class — while DeepSeek's updated V4-Flash posted Gemini-3.6-Flash-level scores at three cents a test: the price of frontier-class coding keeps collapsing. Meanwhile the weekend's biggest dev conversation was an essay asking people to stop pasting Claude's answers into Slack, a 'multiplayer' agent harness cleared 8,600 GitHub stars in five days, and Cursor removed dollar costs from its usage page on purpose. Plus: GitHub's Gemini deadline landed, and a hobbyist handed Claude an entire kernel. The daily pulse of AI coding tools — what shipped, what matters, what's next.

Frontier-class coding models keep getting cheaper

Alibaba ships Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T coding model — open weights next week

Qwen's own pitch is 'a new bar for coding and cowork,' priced at $2 in / $6 out per million tokens — and for the first time for a Max-class flagship, the weights (the model itself, downloadable to run on your own hardware) go public next week, with the small Qwen3.8-27B going open alongside it. One honest caveat from Qwen's own benchmark table: it still trails Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on several coding rows — the news is the price and the openness, not a new crown.

Qwen3.8-27B announced alongside Qwen3.8-Max
by u/TKGaming_11 in LocalLLaMA

Link: Qwen's announcement

DeepSeek's updated V4-Flash matches Gemini 3.6 Flash — at 3 cents a test

Artificial Analysis scores the 0731 update at 50 on its Intelligence Index — a 10-point jump that puts it level with Gemini 3.6 Flash — and Reuters, citing the same firm, puts its average benchmark cost at 3 cents a test, versus 86 cents for Kimi K3 and $1.86 for GPT-5.6 Sol; the weights are on Hugging Face under MIT. The open-weights crown is still Kimi K3's (57 on the same index) — and the weekend's wildest K3 story is WASTE, from the SQLite author's company, which runs the full 2.78-trillion-parameter model on a 64 GB MacBook at about half a token a second by streaming expert weights off the SSD: the maintainer's own numbers, experts re-quantized to 3-bit, and nobody who didn't build it has run it yet.

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Read: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123386

Link: Artificial Analysis' writeup

Working with agents: relaying output, sharing sessions

'Don't be a meat proxy': HN's top essay says stop relaying Claude's answers

The argument, in the author's words: 'I can talk to Claude myself… I don't need a meat proxy in between' — prompt AI all you want, but 'read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words.' It cleared 1,000 points and 440-plus comments on Hacker News today — if your team's Slack has an AI-paste habit, this is the link that will circulate.

Don’t be a meat proxy

Link: the essay

qm lets a whole team steer shared coding agents — 8,600 stars in five days

Most agent setups are one developer, one session; qm's pitch is 'multiplayer' — several people watching and steering the same agents at once. It launched Wednesday and sat at 8,615 GitHub stars plus a 668-point HN thread as of Monday evening — a launch pitched at the team, not the individual developer, as the unit of work.

GitHub - yc-software/qm: Multiplayer agent harness for work

Multiplayer agent harness for work. Contribute to yc-software/qm development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubyc-software

Link: the repo

What moved in your billing pages and model menus

Cursor removed dollar costs from its usage page and CSV — 'deliberate design'

Cursor staff confirmed it in the forum: self-serve plans (Teams included) now see tokens only — 'The Spend metric and Cost column were removed, and the Usage CSV no longer contains dollar costs' — and there is no toggle back: 'This is deliberate design.' GitHub, the same week, retired its Copilot Billing Preview app (today) in favor of more dollar detail in native billing settings — two vendors moving in opposite directions on whether you get to see what a request cost.

Usage Page $$ to Token Amount? WHAT?

I just noticed Cursor Usage window switched from $$ to Token amount. I use this Usage window closely to keep tabs on my daily/active spending, not from the spending overall page. Today, the $$ amount is replaced by token amount which is completely useless. Any way to revert back to $$ amount as I can’t seem to find this in settings or elsewhere. Is it just me, or does Cursor feel like it’s more buggy than before, ie. auto select sub agents despite having the default subagent setup.

Cursor - Community ForumBingojr

Link: the forum thread

GitHub cut Gemini 2.5 Pro and 3 Flash from Copilot on Thursday

The deprecation announced July 2 landed on schedule across every Copilot surface — chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, completions — with GitHub pointing at Gemini 3.1 Pro (Preview) and Gemini 3.6 Flash as replacements (not the 3.5 Flash the original announcement named). If a workflow, eval harness, or org model policy pointed at either retired model, it broke Thursday; Copilot Enterprise admins may need to enable the alternatives under their model policy.

Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash deprecated - GitHub Changelog

As of today, July 31, 2026, we have deprecated the following models across all GitHub Copilot experiences (including Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions). Model…

The GitHub BlogAllison

Link: GitHub's changelog

From the builders

Fable-os gives Claude the kernel — in its demo it writes a sound driver

It's a real C kernel where the only interface is an agent with full kernel privileges — no shell, raw syscalls as its tools — and the launch demo has it noticing it lacks audio, finding the (emulated) sound card, and writing itself a driver. The usual launch-post caveat applies (nobody who didn't build it has run it, and the thread's top technical objection calls it 'an agent harness that uses sudo for everything') — but the 211-comment thread's most-upvoted line is the real artifact: 'Yes, I did in fact delete your load bearing kernel environment, and you're right to push back on that.'

I built a real self-evolving operating system: Fable-os
by u/robi0t in ClaudeAI

Link: the repo

That's Monday. If this kept you ahead of the group chat, forward it to the teammate who always hears it a day late — and if we missed something or got something wrong, reply and say so; corrections make the next issue.

Also worth your time

• Karpathy's viral 'Pelican' post (588 points of HN discussion)

• Simon Willison on the new stateless MCP spec — plus two new tools built on it

• JFrog: a critical CVE was issued for a hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

• WSJ: how OpenAI fell behind Anthropic by prioritizing chatbots over coding tools (WSJ, paywalled)

The New Way is written with AI. It gathers the day's stories, checks them against their sources and drafts every summary. A person decides what runs and reviews every issue before we hit send.