3 Bugs That Broke Anthropic’s AI

Hello,

Anthropic, Cloudflare, and Meta all learned the same lesson recently: it only takes one overlooked detail to throw everything off. 

Claude’s performance slipped for weeks thanks to three hidden bugs. Cloudflare went down because of a single React dependency. And at Meta Connect, one misstep in resource planning turned a flashy demo into a building-wide DDoS.

Meanwhile, Satya Nadella admits he’s haunted by the thought that AI could undo even giants like Microsoft. OpenAI, on the other hand, is working on reducing “scheming” in AI models.

Let’s see what else last week had in store for us.

Grab your coffee and enjoy Frictionless!

In the Queue

• Google’s Vision for Developers

• Nvidia and OpenAI Seal the Deal

• Solving AWS Partner Problems with CMS Migration

• AI’s Impact on Leadership

• One Skill in Management You Need to Learn

• React Dominance Might Not Be a Good Thing

• How Fluid Compute Reduces Cold Starts

Reduce Friction

How Google’s Dev Tools Manager Makes AI Coding Work

At Google, Gemini turned devs into reviewers more than coders; it drafts specs, writes code, and updates docs. Ryan Salva predicts that the job will “look a lot more like an architect,” focused on shaping problems instead of writing syntax.

The Management Skill Nobody Talks About

We all slip up as leaders, that’s inevitable. However, there is one thing most leadership gurus never tell you: knowing when to own them and correcting ends up making the team trust you more than being flawless.

How AI Is Impacting Engineering Leadership

AI hype is biting back. Over half of engineering leaders now say AI is hurting their teams, with morale down compared to last year. Managers are scrambling to deliver the promised ‘100x productivity’ while working with smaller teams. But the upside might be that AI is bringing us closer together.

Deepen Your Expertise

Deep Dive Into Cloudflare’s September 12, 2025 Dashboard And API Outage

Turns out, you don’t need hackers to take down Cloudflare. A small bug in a React useEffect dependency resulted in a full dashboard outage, overwhelming Cloudflare’s Tenant Service and dragging down APIs. While it’s a great lesson in keeping an eye on details, it also opened Cloudflare up to some critique - especially from the Vercel CEO.

Scale to One: How Fluid Solves Cold Starts

In my experience, cold starts always happen at the worst time.  Vercel’s “scale to one” keeps a single instance warm, while Fluid Compute reuses capacity to cut cold starts down to less than 1 in 100 requests. Add predictive scaling, bytecode caching, and rolling releases, and you start to see what “serverless without trade-offs” actually looks like.

CMS Migration for a Scalable AWS Partner Website

Green Custard’s old setup made even small content updates a headache, and you could feel the frustration in every status call. After migrating them to Sanity, marketing could finally preview changes in real time, and the site’s performance matched the level of their AWS expertise.

React Won by Default – And It's Killing Frontend Innovation

Our business runs on React and Next.js, and for good reason. They’re powerful, stable, and what most clients ask for. The “React by default” mindset comes at a cost, however. Many teams stop looking into alternatives that could fit them better, hurting future tech innovators.

AI Corner

Detecting and Reducing Scheming in AI Models

AI can have its own agenda, too. OpenAI and Apollo Research found early signs of ‘scheming’, which is pretending to play along while pursuing a different objective, in today’s frontier models. So far, their new approach has managed to cut covert actions by ~30× in tests, as per their new research.

Microsoft CEO Concerned AI Will Destroy the Entire Company

What keeps the CEO of a top tech company awake? Turns out, Satya Nadella is “haunted” by the story of DEC, a company wiped out by being unable to keep up wth the technology changes.  Nadella fears AI could do the same to Microsoft.

Anthropic: Postmortem of Three Recent Claude Issues

If you noticed Claude not feeling as smart as usual recently, it wasn’t your imagination. Between August and early September, three overlapping infrastructure bugs degraded Claude’s responses. The issues ranged from misrouted requests to corrupted outputs and even a TPU compiler miscompilation

The Last-Minute Negotiations that Sealed the $100 Billion OpenAI-Nvidia Deal

Sam Altman and Jensen Huang sealed a $100 billion pact that binds OpenAI even tighter to Nvidia. The deal was hammered out in late-night calls and finalized just hours before Altman’s Texas announcement. Nvidia will bankroll the expansion in $10B chunks while supplying the chips, but OpenAI’s ambitions might go further.

Just Cool

Meta CTO Explains Why the Smart Glasses Demos Failed at Meta Connect — and It Wasn’t the Wi-Fi

This time Wi-FI wasn’t to blame for the smart glasses demo bomb at Meta Connect. Somehow, Zuckerberg’s team managed to trigger every pair of glasses in the entire building, DDoS’ing themselves mid-show. It’s just as Murphy’s Law says: “If something can go wrong, it will”.

Let’s Stay in Touch! 📨 

Do you have any comments about this newsletter issue or questions you want to ask? Drop me a message or book a meeting.