Launches & Tools
Gemini 3.5 is here. If you skipped the 3.x family, this is the version to test.
Google shipped Gemini 3.5. The Gemini 3 family started with Flash Lite as the only GA option, which made serious benchmarking awkward. With 3.5 out, the family is finally in a state where running real evals against your workload makes more sense than waiting another rev.
Obscura is the Playwright replacement scrapers have been asking for
Obscura is a headless browser engine in Rust. Drop-in Puppeteer and Playwright API, real V8, full Chrome DevTools Protocol support, and meaningfully better perf benchmarks. If you have production scraping or agent automation, you've felt the Playwright tax. This is the first credible alternative we've seen.
Reads
Karpathy is now at Anthropic
Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. Worth tracking as one more data point on where the OpenAI diaspora is landing and what Anthropic's research bench looks like going into the next year.
The OpenAI v. Musk verdict has landed
The NYT live blog covers the verdict in the Altman-Musk trial. The corporate governance precedent matters more than the personality drama for anyone treating foundation model providers as vendors.
From the Workbench
Eraser.io looks like a real option for AI-generated architecture diagrams
We saw a sharp architecture diagram built with Eraser.io come up on a call this week and gave it a try on a phase 1 architecture doc for a client. The result was pretty impressive. Workflow was one shot, telling it the diagram was too compressed and overlapping, and a much cleaner second pass. Worth a try if you've been waiting for an AI diagramming tool that doesn't produce spaghetti.
The four Claude Code context tools that should come before /clear
A Reddit summary of the context tools Anthropic shipped between /clear and /compact made the rounds this week. The framing that landed: /clear is an admission you waited too long. /btw handles a side question you won't reuse, /rewind lets you summarize from or up to a specific point in a long session, and /compact with explicit instructions works when you already know what the next step needs.
One adjacent approach worth mentioning: make the primary focus of your work a durable artifact, like a step-by-step plan file where each step is a commit with description, tests, and pseudocode. That way /clear at any point doesn't cost you anything.
About Fractional AI: We build custom AI software for companies working on hard problems. We're practitioners first, and this newsletter is informed by what we're actually using, breaking, and shipping every week. More at fractional.ai.