Ever watched an AI agent churn away on your code and wondered if it's actually making progress? We all have. This week, our team at Augment Code tackled the black-box problem head-on.

Game-changing pricing shifts that'll impact your next project, GitHub's ambitious new natural language builder, and the first honest environmental study on what our AI conversations really cost.

Transforming black‑box AI workflows into structured, measurable tasks

A detailed blog post from Augment Code describing Tasklist, a system that represents each agent step as a typed task object — enabling users to plan, monitor, and control multi‑step AI workflows in real time rather than relying on plain‑text prompts and markdown checklists.

Learn how a structured data model and opinionated state machine design can prevent agents from drifting, provide visibility into each task’s progress, and produce measurable analytics for long‑horizon AI automation workflows.

Consider treating agent work as a series of first‑class tasks with strict lifecycle transitions (todo → in_progress → done) to keep AI agents honest, debuggable, and accountable — much like state machines in traditional software engineering.

"The Tasklist forces agents to show their plan upfront – no more black‑box execution where you wait hours to see what went wrong."

Adopting Tasklist’s structured approach requires more initial setup and adherence to its state machine – it trades simplicity for reliability and demands a learning curve to master the task lifecycle model.

Google released the stable version of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, their fastest and lowest-cost model at $0.10 input per 1M tokens and $0.40 output per 1M tokens. The model features native reasoning capabilities that can be toggled on for demanding use cases while maintaining optimal speed for high-throughput tasks like classification and translation.

GitHub's most ambitious AI-driven development platform enables users to build full-stack applications from natural language descriptions. Powered by Claude Sonnet 4, Spark transforms simple English instructions into complete applications with frontend, backend, deployment, and GitHub integration—all without setup or configuration.

Google confirms partnership with OpenAI for cloud infrastructure, adding to OpenAI's existing deals with Microsoft and Oracle. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the collaboration during Q2 earnings, where Google Cloud hit $13.6 billion revenue. The irony: Google now provides GPUs and TPUs to power ChatGPT, the very AI threatening Google Search's dominance. Classic frenemies situation in the AI wars.

Stack Overflow launched stackoverflow.ai in beta, designed to streamline developer workflows by providing faster answers while maintaining community connections. The platform also introduced improved Coding Challenges based on learnings from initial implementations

Mistral AI released the first comprehensive lifecycle analysis of an AI model, revealing that training Mistral Large 2 generated 20.4 ktCO₂e emissions, consumed 281,000 m³ of water, and depleted 660 kg of antimony-equivalent resources. Each 400-token Le Chat response costs 1.14 gCO₂e and 45 mL of water. The study, conducted with Carbone 4 and France's ADEME, aims to establish environmental reporting standards for AI—because apparently nobody was tracking how much the planet pays for our chatbot conversations.

India's National Quantum Mission is now accepting applications from quantum startups through four specialized hubs focusing on computing, communication, sensing, and materials. The program offers grants up to $3.5 million to selected startups, with QpiAI already securing $32 million in Series A funding co-led by the government. The mission aims to develop quantum computers with 50-1,000 qubits within eight years while positioning India as a leader in quantum technology.

Another week of separating AI signal from noise. If we saved you from a demo that would've crashed prod, we've done our job.

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✍️ Who's behind this? The Augment Code team—we build AI agents that ship real code. Started this newsletter because we're tired of the BS too.

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