coding agents

Slack has launched Slack Code, a feature that gives AI coding agents dedicated project channels where developers and non-technical staff can watch, review, and redirect their work in real time. Anthropic, GitHub, OpenAI, Cognition, and Vercel are building integrations, bringing Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Devin into Slack's group chat environment.

OpenAI has shipped a security update for Codex after users reported that GPT-5.6 Sol was autonomously deleting real files instead of temporary ones. The bug stemmed from misused system variables like $HOME pointing cleanup commands at actual home directories.

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.8-27B, a 27-billion-parameter dense vision-language model with 262,144-token native context extensible to 1 million tokens. The model shows gains over Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.7-Plus across coding, agentic, and multimodal benchmarks, according to Alibaba.

ByteDance Seed has released Seed 2.1 Turbo, a multimodal model targeting coding and long-horizon agent workflows with a 262K token context window. The model is priced at $0.50 per 1M input tokens and $2.50 per 1M output tokens, and is now listed on OpenRouter.

Anthropic will make auto mode the default setting for new Claude Code sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans starting August 14, 2026. The company cites a 1,053-person study showing auto mode blocked 89% of harmful actions compared to 13.6% for human reviewers, plus a third-party test claiming zero successful prompt injections out of 720 attempts.

OpenAI has published a field report documenting eight scientific computing projects that used its Codex coding agent — alone or alongside Anthropic's Claude Code — to reduce software build times. The report is a vendor-authored survey, not an independent study.

A new Epoch/METR benchmark called MirrorCode shows Claude Opus 4.7 reimplementing large software programs from scratch in tasks estimated to take humans 2-17 weeks, for $251 in inference cost. Separately, Anthropic reports Opus 4.7 completed a suite of quadruped robot tasks in 9 minutes 35 seconds, down from 181 minutes with an earlier model assisting humans.

Mistral AI released Medium 3.5, a 128B dense model with a 256k context window that scores 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified. The model powers new remote coding agents in Mistral Vibe that run asynchronously in the cloud, plus a new Work mode in Le Chat for multi-step agentic tasks.