Git-style history for U.S. law, GitHub hits 7.4B monthly commits, AI-fueled "Black October" hacks, Stripe's Link balance for AI agents, and Granola takes on Wispr
Hello, dear TEA-mates! Here is what you need to know today.
1. 📜 Lexifina Builds "Git" for the U.S. Code
Legal AI company Lexifina has published a version history of the U.S. Code that works like Git does for software: pick any date and see the text in force that day, with each phrase colored by the Act that wrote it and words that read differently today marked. The data is public in Lexifina's global-law repository on GitHub. For every pair of official release points from 2017 onward, the team applied the amending instructions of each public law in date order and checked the result against the next release. Of 365 changes across nine titles, 361 reproduced the official text exactly, and the other four are labeled. Lexifina argues this matters because legal research increasingly runs through AI models: a Technical University of Munich study found one model answered 24% of post-cutoff statutory questions correctly on its own and 87% when given the relevant text. The tool does not yet flag laws that apply retroactively. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "This is a great idea, and I would say the same for document books: basically, adding more information to every digital footprint, by humans as well as agents."
2. 🏭 GitHub Now Sees 7.4 Billion Commits a Month
At its GitHub Universe conference on Wednesday, GitHub said it now handles 7.4 billion commits per month, up from 2.9 billion in August and 1.4 billion in April. In 2024, developers pushed 65 million commits a month. The company attributes the surge mostly to "agentic demand," and the growth has come with a recurring string of outages. So far this year GitHub has added 4 million CPU cores, 160 petabytes of high-speed storage, more compute for GitHub Actions, and 50 Tb/s of network capacity. It is also rearchitecting the platform to separate compute and storage, which internal benchmarks show can deliver up to 35x higher write throughput. "Agents are changing the volume and shape of software development. Adding capacity matters, but capacity alone won't get us there," wrote Jay Parikh, Microsoft's EVP for Core AI. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Everyone has a software factory now, and GitHub is the warehouse for all these factories."
3. 🚨 "Black October": AI Speeds Up the Hacking Race
Security professionals are calling this month "Black October" after a cluster of critical disclosures and breaches landed within days. The headline flaw, PHP2Shell, is a pair of critical bugs in PHP, the language behind millions of websites, found with the help of AI tools. Data from Censys puts about 1.5 million of 2.6 million PHP hosts on versions with no fix, and CERT-EU told operators who could not patch right away to take PHP apps offline. More than 50 sites, including government portals and universities, went dark as a precaution. GitLab patched a maximum-severity flaw, and a release of the AI tool LiteLLM shipped with a password stealer. Axios also reported that major U.S. banks have found unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, and Citi, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo now bar outside agents from logging in or moving money. Security firms have not confirmed large-scale exploitation of the PHP bugs, and some experts say AI is mainly surfacing old flaws faster. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "This clearly shows that the way to avoid getting hacked is to run penetration tests yourself with AI swarms and then fix the problems as soon as possible. It is like having a 24/7 AI agent do the penetration hacking for you, so you can fix the holes before other agents find them."
4. 💳 Stripe Gives AI Agents a Spending Balance
Stripe launched Link balance for AI agents this week, starting with Instinct, an AI-powered personal assistant. Until now, consumers using Link Agent Wallet had to approve every purchase their agent made. With Link balance, they load money into a dedicated balance and set a maximum per purchase; anything under the limit goes through automatically, while larger purchases still need human approval. Under the hood, Stripe Crypto Onramp converts debit card dollars into a dollar stablecoin on Tempo, Privy's non-custodial wallets handle key management and transaction signing, and Stripe Issuing gives the agent a virtual debit card backed by the balance. Consumers only see a regular dollar balance, and merchants accept the card through their existing checkout. Stripe says agentic purchases made with Link grew 38x over the past month, and more than 25% of the agent Muse's weekly users use it for shopping. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Agent wallets are a must now. How to do it in a secure, private way is a big pie that all fintech companies are going after."
5. 🎙️ Granola Adds Dictation to Take On Wispr
Granola, known for its AI meeting notetaker, launched a dictation feature on Mac on Thursday, months after dictation company Wispr launched its own meeting notetaker. Users press the "Fn" key and speak, and Granola cleans up and formats their words in any app, from notes and AI prompts to emails and messages. The company says iOS and Windows versions are coming soon. Granola is valued at $1.5 billion and Wispr at $2 billion. Granola stays focused on meeting automation and notetaking, while Wispr is building its own models through a research lab exploring new human-computer interfaces. Other voice startups, including Fireflies, Speechify, and Monologue, have also merged notetaking and dictation into multifeature apps. TechCrunch notes that until earlier this year, the winning play was a focused app that did one thing well. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "I guess my question is how you can actually keep your users with you. It seems like now in AI, if you are good enough, and especially if you are the first and you are good, lots of users will just stay with you. And the longer they stay, the more context you have, and the harder it is for users to leave."
🛠️ Skill of the Day
The Freshness Check: Makes an AI tell you which parts of its answer might be out of date, and where to confirm them.
Act as a careful research assistant who knows its knowledge has an expiration date. I need an answer about: [YOUR QUESTION, e.g. "the rules for deducting a home office" or "the latest version of a tool I use"].
The date the answer needs to be true for: [TODAY'S DATE, or a past date such as "the day my lease was signed"]
Do the following, in order:
1. Give your best answer in plain language.
2. Tell me roughly when your information on this topic was last current, and how likely it is to have changed since.
3. Label each key fact as STABLE, CHANGES SOMETIMES, or CHANGES OFTEN.
4. For every fact that is not STABLE, name the official source I should check and exactly what to look for there.
5. If the answer on my date differs from the answer today, say so and explain which version applies.
If you are not sure about something, say "I don't know" instead of guessing.Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice. Replace the bracketed bits with your own question and date.
TEAHEE Moment
Stay sharp, stay informed. See you Monday.
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