AI Coding Live News

On November 11 Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview on its ERNIE site and @Baidu_Inc. It is the first post-trained model built on ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, whose weights came out on November 5: 280B total parameters, 14B active per token, a 1M-token context and, per Baidu, generation above 200 tokens per second. Baidu pitches it at coding, 3D modeling, knowledge work and content creation. The API is live on Baidu AI Cloud Qianfan, and the weights are due by November 25, under Apache 2.0 according to the official blog. In Baidu's own benchmark table it ranks first among the models compared on AutomationBench (61.9) and SpreadsheetBench V2 (36.4), but scores 46.5 on Terminal-Bench 4.0, well behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 63.6. Baidu says this is an intermediate post-training checkpoint.

Zoom

On November 9, Anthropic's developer blog claude.dev published a selection guide by Addy Osmani, "Which Claude model should you build with?"; the ClaudeDevs post drew about 9,200 likes and 12,000 bookmarks. The core advice: start most coding and knowledge work on Opus 5.5 at medium effort (the Claude Code default); drop to Sonnet 5.5 for well-scoped bug fixes and spec-driven work; use Haiku 5.5 for classification, routing, extraction, and log-reading subagents; and move up to Fable 5.2 for major refactors, migrations, and deep research. Before switching models, tune effort and give the model a way to verify its own work. The guide also lists prices, default effort levels, and compatibility differences that can trigger 400 errors when migrating.

Zoom

Google Antigravity announced a new Knowledge Work interface layout on November 9, tuned for research, writing and artifacts. It keeps the same agent harness, plugins and MCP tools but drops the terminal and git clutter. The official changelog lists it as the headline of Antigravity App v2.30.0: first sign-in now asks what kind of work you do and sets up a matching layout, voice mode and remote agents have finished rolling out, and the agent can import MCP servers, skills, custom commands, subagents and instruction files from Claude Code, Codex and Cursor into a plugin you own. The release has 27 improvements and 25 fixes.

Zoom

On November 5 Thinking Machines Lab introduced Inkling 2 Small, the first second-generation model: a 594B-total / 17B-active MoE with image input and variable thinking effort. The company reports an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of about 31, with large gains versus prior Inkling models in agentic coding, vision and knowledge work. It is available now on Tinker for inference and fine-tuning with closed weights; full Apache 2.0 weights are planned next week after external safety testing. Tinker list pricing is about $0.30/$1.00 per million input/output tokens at 64K context.

Zoom

On 2026-10-15 StepFun released open weights for Step 5 Preview as promised: a 600B-total / 27B-active sparse MoE with up to 1M-token context and vision input, aimed at agentic software engineering and knowledge work. Checkpoints are on Hugging Face (FP8, BF16, NVFP4) and ModelScope. Official scores include StepCodeBench 49.0%, FrontierFinance 66.4%, and Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 44. September coverage was API/index only; this is the first public weight drop.

Zoom

San Francisco lab Paper Instruments launched Ultramarine 1 Flash on 2026-10-14 16:02 UTC: GLM-5.3 Flash post-trained with large-scale non-verifiable RL (per-task rubric rewards) for finance, legal, consulting and operations work. Its report claims +4.1 points on average over the base across six knowledge-work benchmarks with 6.5% fewer output tokens, and 59.3 at $0.13/task on its internal PI Knowledge Work suite vs Claude Fable 5 at 57.8 / $8.19. An OpenAI-compatible API (ultramarine-1-flash) is live; the CEO says weights follow in about two weeks and post-training cost ~$300k. The headline cost comparison rests on an internal benchmark and has not been independently reproduced.

Zoom

At Gemini at Work 2026 (Oct 8) Google launched the Gemini agent: objectives from one prompt box spanning Q&A, knowledge work, media, and code; cloud-persistent memory with sub-agent/coworker orchestration and Gemini+Claude model choice. Private preview now.

Zoom

DeepMind announced frontier Gemini 4 Argon for long-horizon coding, enterprise knowledge work, and cyber defense—first via Fairwind trusted defenders. Official: DeepSWE v1.1 77.9%, AutomationBench #1 at 51.3%, LVBench 91.7%, CWE-bench v1 tied 68%; intro $2/$10 per 1M tokens; 1M output limit.

Zoom

Anthropic / Claude (@claudeai; confirmed by @AnthropicAI) launched Claude Opus 5.5 today, the first model in the new Claude 5.5 family. Officially it matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks, and is a major step up from Opus 5 on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. At default settings typical workloads cost about 40% less than Opus 5. Pro, Max, and Team five-hour usage limits are increased, with a bankable rate-limit reset for subscribers.

Zoom

Elon Musk posted “Grok 4.7.” Same-day discussion said the model improves on Grok 4.6 for agentic coding and knowledge work, and that it works best with the xAI Build harness.

Zoom