Oct 02, 2026

Your Coding Agent Is 6 Months Out of Date — Jakub Hojsan, Exa

Jakub Hojsan, a forward deployed engineer at Exa, explains how search built for coding and code-review agents closes the gap left by model knowledge cutoffs. He covers why agents need explicit rules for when to search, how query-dependent highlights cut a 100,000-character page to about 500 characters without added latency, and how Exa compares with native web search on transparency, cost, and model-provider independence, with a preview of Exa Agent.

Oct 02, 2026

Which GPU Clouds Are Actually Good? | ClusterMAX 3.0

A discussion of SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX 3.0 ranking of managed GPU cloud providers, covering the evaluation criteria, the security problems found across neoclouds, the scarcity of compute as inference providers turn profitable, the strategic position of frontier labs that now resell compute, Nvidia's acquisitions of Poolside and Hugging Face, the separation between buyer-focused rankings and investment research, and the spread of heterogeneous silicon from Huawei and others.

Oct 02, 2026

Why Building an AI Agent Is Easier Than Deploying One

Vladimir Keil, co-founder and CEO of Lio, joins Seema Amble and Elena Burger to explain why AI-native startups can beat incumbent software vendors even when those vendors own the customer, the data, and the system of record. The discussion covers the work that happens outside systems of record in enterprise procurement, Lio's multi-agent architecture spanning retrieval through principal agents, how buyers learn to trust agents with consequential negotiations, and what happens when suppliers and buyers both run agents.

Oct 02, 2026

Building AI Agents for Everyone

Gumloop co-founders Max Brodeur-Urbas and Rahul Behal discuss how a visual workflow builder evolved into an enterprise agent platform, what they learned from more than 1,100 customer calls, how a power user at Instacart opened the door to enterprise sales, and why the people who understand a task should be the ones automating it. The conversation covers enterprise requirements, pricing transparency, model neutrality, and the IT-led buying dynamics that shape adoption.

Oct 02, 2026

What If We Stopped Using GPUs? | YC Paper Club

A session on alternative compute covering the argument for abandoning backpropagation in favor of zero-order optimization and sharded training, optical computing that performs diffusion-style image generation with propagating light, the state of neuromorphic computing in 2026, and how cultured human neurons learned to play Doom through reinforcement learning.

Oct 02, 2026

MCP Doesn't Suck. Your Agent Does. — Jan Čurn, Apify

Jan Čurn, founder and CEO of Apify, argues that the backlash against MCP targets the wrong layer. Context bloat and token burn come from naive agent harnesses, not the protocol. He reviews the industry's three main fixes (sub-agents, progressive tool discovery and Code Mode), explains why agents work well with CLIs, proposes MCP for remote access and CLIs for local use, and demos mcpc, Apify's open-source universal MCP CLI client, alongside early Connector Evals results.