AI News Today

Learn more about the talk given at Google I/O 2026 by Thomas Steiner.

There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re “doing it right.” That pause is a clear sign. They’ve already clocked that this isn’t a real app, and every data point collected after that moment is filtered through that awareness.

Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.

What people say, feel, think, and do are often very different things. To understand the underlying reasons for user behavior, it helps to look beyond the surface and explore hidden motivations, root causes, and the different layers of reality that shape how people act. Brought to you by Measuring UX Impact , **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

Another Google I/O is behind us and we have covered all the exciting extensions updates!

Negative feedback greets Google’s redesigned AI IDE, why Google’s product ecosystem is so chaotic, Meta cuts 10% of staff as it hits record revenue and profits, and more

Meet `sibling-index()` and `sibling-count()`. Staggered cascade effect in one line of CSS without `:nth-child()` rules or JS workarounds. Works for 5 items or 5,000.

All the talks from Google I/O 2026 are now available on demand.

Recap of how to modernize authentication with passkeys, digital credentials, and more, based on the Google I/O 2026 session.

Alice Ryhl from Google’s Android Rust team explains why developers love Rust, and what makes the language so powerful for building reliable software.

A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame.

Tradeoffs of AI tooling, why adopting AI at company-level is hard, what’s changed in two years, and more. The third and final part of a series analyzing our 2026 AI survey results

Learn about the key announcements from Google I/O 2026.

Every extra second of friction has a measurable business cost. Carrie Webster shares ten data-backed UX facts that link user experience directly to revenue, retention, and long-term growth.

For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the reason have been to conceal capacity issues?

Also: a look into rising tech job losses, self-reporting 100% AI usage at big companies, vibe coding & agentic engineering merging, and more

Anders Hejlsberg reflects on building Turbo Pascal, C#, and TypeScript, and shares what AI may change about the future of software engineering.

Why traditional loading patterns like spinners fail in agentic AI experiences, and how interface patterns that reveal the system’s process, status, and decision-making can improve transparency and build user trust.

Does the noted “No Silver Bullets” paper by the author of a classic engineering book still hold up, 40 years later? Is AI the long-sought single silver bullet – or has one been around for years?

tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi : so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years. Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while,

Tailwind CSS v4.3 is here with first-party scrollbar styling, even more logical property utilities, new zoom and tab-size utilities, better @variant support, and all the v4.2 stuff we shipped while forgetting blogs existed.

GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.

Also: Amazon finally allows engineers to use Claude Code and Codex, Meta forcefully assigns engineers to data labelling work ahead of layoffs, more small “AI-forward” teams, and more

An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.

How the cloud changes the way we build applications, and why engineers’ ethical choices matter more than ever. Excerpt from the book, ‘Designing Data-Intensive Applications’, 2nd edition

Design always starts with function — function shapes form. But if that function can’t be made completely invisible and people still have to interact with it, it inevitably becomes part of their experience. In this article, Kyrylo Levashov shares four common software design assumptions.

Streaming UIs are an easy concept on the surface, but are quite complicated in practice. There are many considerations that need to be accounted for, from layout shifts and motion preferences to proper markup and various states, that may not be instantly obvious. What happens if the stream is interrupted? Can users tab through the UI on the keyboard as it shifts? What ARIA attributes might be needed?

In the past 2-3 months, spending on AI agents has exploded at many tech companies, Details from 15 of them, including the different ways they are coping with this realization.

Also: Anthropic’s speed run to break devs’ goodwill, big price increases from GitHub Copilot, Mitchell Hashimoto on the “building block economy,” and more

Let’s welcome May with a new collection of desktop wallpapers! Following our monthly tradition, the wallpapers were created by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!

Mario Zechner, creator of Pi, joins Armin Ronacher to explore AI coding’s limits, arguing that human judgment still matters most in an agent-driven world.

A deepdive with the Canonical team into how AI is changing Ubuntu, why they’re betting on local-first LLMs, and a look into other Linux distributions

AI tools are eliminating the need to “bug” colleagues for help, but the informal interactions they replace are the very scaffolding that builds team trust, belonging, and innovation. Casey Hudetz and Eric Olive explore the research and potential impacts behind that risk and offer practical strategies for maintaining human connection while leveraging AI’s strengths.

At Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large companies, devs are purposefully burning tokens (and money!) to inflate their AI usage and hit AI usage metrics which they treat as targets.

Details from 15 tech companies on the rapid growth of token spend, and their responses to it. Also: AI vendors can’t keep up with demand, plummeting morale at Meta, and more.

Martin Kleppmann on scaling, his updated Designing Data-Intensive Applications, and what’s next for AI-era systems.

In a rush to embrace AI, the industry is redefining what it means to be a UX designer, blurring the line between design and engineering. Carrie Webster explores what’s gained, what’s lost, and why designers need to remain the guardians of the user experience.

Poorly handled session timeouts are more than a technical inconvenience. They can become serious accessibility barriers that interrupt essential online tasks, especially for people with disabilities. Here is how to implement thoughtful session management that improves usability, reduces frustration, and helps create a more accessible and respectful web.

Practical guidelines for driving UX impact in organizations with legacy systems and broken processes. Brought to you by Measuring UX Impact , **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

Designing for agentic AI requires attention to both the system’s behavior and the transparency of its actions. Between the black box and the data dump lies a more thoughtful approach. Victor Yocco explores how to map decision points and reveal the right moments to build trust through clarity, not noise.