A cheap Android TV box with its debug port deliberately left open was all an Anthropic lab test needed to show AI malware copying itself to another device on the same network. It was slow, the small models struggled to chain actions, and nothing like it has been reported in the wild. So where is the real risk? In this episode of Debug Mode, the hosts trade takes on the claim that being rude to Anthropic’s model can cost you access: is an angry session abuse, or the agent-era rage click? Then one host’s rabbit hole: malware that rewrites its own fingerprint, taps a local model already on your machine, or slips in through an MCP tool that changes after install. You’ll hear why allow-listing tools at connect time matters, why blocking outbound traffic can starve remote-inference malware, and why the person choosing what to install is still the weak link. One host went looking for an antivirus that catches malware using local models and couldn’t find any. Have you? Tell us below, and subscribe for the next episode.

What happens when AI agents start relying on the same messy docs your team already struggles to search? Demetrios hops into a Waymo in San Francisco with Dave Nuñez, founder and CEO of Falconer and co-author of Documentation for Developers. They talk about why developers and agents need different things from docs, why agents sometimes skip up-to-date instructions, and how a stale internal document can contribute to a production incident. Dave shares how Stripe cut roughly 500,000 internal docs down to 5,000 worth maintaining. The conversation also covers how to capture the reasoning behind engineering decisions, when a diagram beats a wall of text, and who owns the fallout when an agent acts on bad information.

Are you paying attention? Software engineering has changed. Agents are here in force. Everything is in flux. To adapt in the long term, we must understand the foundations. An open-weight model took Svetozar Miučin's naive PageRank in C from 4 seconds to 0.1 seconds in about five minutes. He spent six years of his PhD building tools for that kind of work. In this talk, given in a personal capacity, Svetozar argues that inside every engineer are two and a half wolves. The builder wolf ships anything for the dopamine. The craft wolf cares about engineering excellence. The cub, the half wolf, decides what is worth building at all. Along the way, he covers why "we get paid for an outcome, not a verb", the shaky base of the engineering pyramid as fewer juniors come in, why the first question should be "can I sell it?" (get a letter of intent), and why the future is polymathic.