In this issue: Pangram is having a moment in Germany, and not the good kind for politicians and journalists. Martin Schori on why his AI book isn’t a custom GPT. Plus: a new vanity metric, and a crank-powered chatbot.
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
Take a 28-question quiz to find out where you land on AI. Thirty archetypes, each with a patron saint ranging from Emily Bender to Ray Kurzweil. I got “The Optimist” instead of “The Journalist”, which feels about right.
Waiting for the next Claude or GPT drop? OutYet.ai tracks upcoming model releases.
Interface, context, harness, model, governance, and emergence: You cannot do good AI product work without understanding what happens below the chat box. (Emily Campbell)
David Caswell argues legacy newsrooms will not fundamentally transform for AI but will instead optimize existing workflows until they hit a wall built from old assumptions about articles and human-in-the-loop processes. Long interview, worth it. (Mirko Lorenz, Babylon)
AI models’ values are more secular and more liberal than those of almost any human population on Earth – unless they’re made in China, in which case they’ll nudge you to reconcile with your meddling in-laws for the sake of family harmony. The Economist ran 25 frontier models through the World Values Survey.
Luddites
The Rebellion against the Empire of AI. Named after a British labor movement from 1811-1816 that—with style and swagger—disrupted textile factories. Not opposed to machines per se, they wanted a say in how technology was used to preserve their livelihood, their craft, their community. (The government eventually suppressed the Luddites, requiring 14,000 troops.) The Luddites...
Europe 2031: Speculative fiction about what Silicon Valley sees coming and Europe doesn’t. The story runs from DeepSeek to a 2031 where Europe has largely lost the ability to chart its own course.
In a world of algorithms, email: Journalists are building real media businesses around newsletters. Some are pulling in seven figures. The article profiles Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day), the Pantsuit Politics podcast duo, and a California expat who went from “what’s Substack?” to full-time creator in 12 months. (Scott Nover, Washington Post)
The public isn’t impressed: If you ask people what AI in news will do for them, the answer is mostly “make it worse.” High assumed use, low expected benefit. News media rank below search engines and social media on public AI optimism. One reason: journalists are unusually good at publicizing their own AI screw-ups. (Rasmus Kleis Nielsen)
A library of 42 copy-paste agent loop prompts for Cursor, Codex, and Claude Code. An agent loop is a task with a built-in check: do work, verify result, continue or stop. Some prompts are useful (“fresh-clone loop,” “devil’s advocate loop”), some are wishful thinking (“100% test coverage loop”), most land in between.
Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei thinks AI made him a better writer and editor and wants to tell us. He’s not showing us his (boring?) prompts, but flexes about a conversation loop that teaches Claude his style.
Google’s answer to AI agents fumbling around for context: put markdown files in a folder. The Open Knowledge Format is a simple spec for giving AI systems internal knowledge. (Sam McVeety, Google Cloud Blog)
The agentic divide is here: Well-resourced firms plug AI agents into their entire stack and scale infinitely. Everyone else gets high-friction, low-trust tools that can barely fill out a form. India’s government-led citizen agent programs are trying to close the gap. (Rina Chandran, Rest of World)
A new open standard wants to track how AI agents use publisher content – not just the request, but whether it influenced the response, got cited, reached the user, and drove engagement. The SPUR Coalition’s Content Telemetry spec is now open for public comment.
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:

