AI Daily Dev — Week 29

Terry Tao Ports His 27-Year-Old Java Applets With AI Coding Agents

Fields medalist migrated ~two dozen Java 1.0 math visualizations from 1999 to modern JavaScript over a few days.
One minor bug in the AI-generated code; agents surfaced two bugs in Tao's original code he had missed.
Also finished an abandoned 27-year-old 'Inkscape but in Minkowski space' special-relativity applet in a couple hours of vibe coding.
Tao names Claude Code among the tools and published an edited transcript of the session.
Top of the Hacker News front page for most of Sunday, July 12.

community terrytao.wordpress.com

Proof PDF posted July 10 on OpenAI's CDN with sole author credit assigned to the model.
Sol Ultra ran 64 parallel subagents and produced the argument in under an hour.
Conjecture (Szekeres 1973, Seymour 1979): every bridgeless graph has cycles covering each edge exactly twice.
Method reduces to cubic graphs, invokes the 8-flow theorem, and applies a linear-algebra edge labeling.
Mathematical community has not yet validated the proof; HN thread already skeptical about the attribution.

research news.ycombinator.com

Filed July 10 in N.D. California; complaint calls the scheme 'at every level' up through OpenAI's chief hardware officer.
Apple says 400+ former Apple employees now work at OpenAI.
Names Tang Tan (ex-Apple VP, now OpenAI hardware chief) for coaching interviewees to bring physical Apple parts to interviews.
Names ex-Apple senior EE Chang Liu for keeping a work laptop and downloading confidential design documents.
OpenAI's response: 'We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets.'

industry techcrunch.com

Ploy migrated its marketing-site-building agent from Claude Opus 4.8 to GPT-5.6 — first Opus dethroning in four months.
2.2× faster to finished pages, 27% lower cost, and roughly half the output tokens.
Matched page: Opus wrote a 17,957-char globals.css with 174 CSS variables vs GPT-5.6's 2,508 chars and 45 variables.
Gotcha: GPT-5.6 sends all 25 top-level tool parameters every call, inventing offsets that made 52–64% of file reads return empty.

tools ploy.ai

Framework by Mads Lorentzen that evaluates postings, tailors CVs, writes cover letters, and preps interviews — all in Claude Code.
19.5k stars and 5.6k forks in a few weeks; author landed an AI engineer role using his own /scrape, /apply, /interview loop.
Drafter-reviewer agent pattern treats each application as an adversarial document rather than a form-fill.
Hit #1 on GitHub trending July 7 and still adding ~4k stars this past week.

open-source github.com

Fed chair Warsh announced the Productivity and Jobs task force July 9; Andreessen co-leads with Stanford economist Chuck Jones and Microsoft's Asha Sharma.
Mandate: measure how AI reshapes labor and productivity, then feed findings into FOMC monetary-policy deliberations.
Conflict-of-interest scrutiny: a16z manages ~$90B with ~$3.4B in AI-specific investments raised six months ago.
First time the Fed has stood up a dedicated general-purpose-technology panel of this kind.

industry washingtonpost.com