A2 The Daily Archit Wednesday, October 21, 2026

AI & Agents · Open Source · Startups & Business

AI & Agents

Image via Simon Willison

Simon Willison's Battle Drones is an RTS that syncs multiplayer over sound

Built across 321 commits since July with coding agents doing nearly all the TypeScript, the browser game has fog of war, a 3D port and LLM-versus-LLM battles. Two phones in microphone range sync state through an audio modem the agent built. That required a deterministic simulation with custom sin and cos.

Simon Willison
Image via TechCrunch

Managers say AI makes their staff's work harder to judge

In a Nielsen survey of 1,700 senior managers for Monday.com, more than half said AI made employees' work harder to evaluate, and nearly half spend more time reviewing it. 58% expect to oversee more agents than people within a year, and 46% fear losing control of what those agents do.

TechCrunch

Open Source

Image via GitHub

Omnara is a self-hostable alternative to the labs' managed agent platforms

Apache-licensed Omnara runs durable agents on any model, from OpenAI and Anthropic to Ollama. Agents can run on your own machines or on sandboxes, and every step is saved so they can resume after a crash. It has per-tool approval rules, cron triggers, MCP support, and history in your own Postgres.

GitHub
Image via GitHub

mitmproxy adds an --emudhra flag that signs with the leaked CA key

The interception proxy now bundles a compromised eMudhra intermediate key, so it can mint certificates that unpatched clients will trust. It shows that the attack needs no special skill. If your trust store or language runtime has not dropped the eight eMudhra intermediates yet, assume anyone on the path can impersonate any site.

GitHub

Startups & Business

Image via TechCrunch

Automattic starts staggered layoffs after its board upheaval

WordPress.com's parent has cut staff in communications, VIP and product, and insiders expect more cuts over several months to lift fourth-quarter revenue before a debt renegotiation in June. This follows a failed September attempt to oust Matt Mullenweg, a complete board turnover and the departure of three senior executives.

TechCrunch
Image via TechCrunch

Mach9 raises $34M after swapping inspection robots for AI CAD software

First Round and Bessemer co-led the Series A for Mach9, which turns survey data into first-draft civil engineering plans using its own centimetre-accurate models. Its founder concluded that "hardware wasn't the bottleneck". Nearly 100 beta customers have run it on 2,500 projects.

TechCrunch