Mailchimp's 40% AI Speed Boost & New OpenAI Models

This was a big week for AI launches.

OpenAI just released two open-source models you can run on your laptop, Anthropic launched Opus 4.1, and DeepMind dropped Genie 3, which lets you generate full interactive environments from a single prompt. But the bigger debate is happening elsewhere: Cloudflare called out Perplexity for ignoring crawl rules… and ended up being the one on trial.

And in case you're wondering how engaged your team feels right now... only 32% of employees in the U.S. say they’re actually into their work. “Most (51%) are actively keeping an eye out for job openings.”

Ready? Then grab your coffee and enjoy Frictionless!

In the Queue

• Mailchimp Increased Speed by 40%, but at What Cost?

• How Anthropic Team Uses Claude Code

• Why You Should Upgrade to Tailwind v4

• Swedish Prime Minister in Hot Water for ChatGPT Use

Reduce Friction

Anemic Employee Engagement Points to Leadership Challenges

Only 32% of U.S. employees feel engaged at work, and 51% are looking for new jobs. Weak culture and lack of investment are costing companies up to $2T in lost productivity, so how can we eliminate them?

Developers, Reinvented

“Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career”. Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s CEO, laid out some harsh words for modern devs in his newest blog post. Still, he leaves us with encouragement to keep growing and stay optimistic about the future.

Cross-Pollination As an Advantage for Organizations

Innovation can’t happen in isolation. Building enough trust across departments and encouraging knowledge-sharing is what can push devs towards a breakthrough.

Failure Modes for Engineering Team Leads

Some habits can turn you into a bottleneck even if you don't intend to. Here are five behaviors disrupting your workflows and easy ways to address them.

Deepen Your Expertise

How Anthropic Teams Use Claude Code

How does Anthropic use Claude Code internally? Turns out it’s not just engineers. Marketers and lawyers are building tools, too, as Claude blurs the line between technical and non-technical work.

Guide to Using Tailwind CSS v4.0

If you’re not on Tailwind v4 yet, you’re missing out on 100× faster rebuilds and a zero-config setup. Check this guide and learn what you can get out from v4 and how to easily upgrade your current stack.

Vibe Coding: When Everyone’s a Developer, Who Secures the Code?

As AI tools turn prompts into production code, security teams face a new reality: more developers, more speed… and more risk. Here are the real threats behind “vibe coding” and what needs to change to keep software secure.

Self-Hosting AI Models After Claude's Usage Limits

After burning through $6,000+ on Claude and testing everything from opencode to Crush CLI on custom H200 racks, Peter Steinberger shares whether self-hosting AI models is a good idea.

AI Corner

Some People Are Defending Perplexity After Cloudflare ‘Named and Shamed’ It

Cloudflare called out Perplexity for bypassing crawl blocks, and got backlash instead. Tech leaders and everyday users argue that Perplexity is acting on behalf of real people, but not everybody agrees.

Mailchimp’s 40% Speed Gain Came with Governance Price

Mailchimp sped up development by 40%. It wasn't free, however. AI coding tools helped turn prototypes around in hours instead of days, but also made one thing clear: speed means nothing if humans aren’t steering the ship.

Genie 3: A New Frontier for World Models

Genie 3, DeepMind’s newest world model, can generate fully interactive 720p environments in real time. A single prompt is enough to create words with physics, memory, and events.

OpenAI: Introducing gpt-oss

Open AI dropped their first open-weight language models since GPT-2. gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b can be run locally, even on laptops with 16GB RAM. Most impressively, the 120b model rivals GPT-4 mini on core benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.1

Claude Opus 4.1 arrives with stronger coding, better reasoning, and improved accuracy in complex tasks. It's available to paid users and on Claude Code on API, Bedrock, and GitHub Copilot.

Just Cool

'We Didn't Vote for ChatGPT': Swedish Prime Minister Admits He Uses AI Chatbots for 'Second Opinions'

I don't normally talk politics, but Sweden’s Prime Minister gave ChatGPT a seat in his cabinet. After revealing he uses AI for “second opinions” on political decisions, Ulf Kristersson faced backlash over national security risks.

Let’s Stay in Touch! 📨 

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