Links #2025-21 - Agents, characters, and onions

Articles or videos I found last week that I actually read and watched until the end.

• How to Build an Agent or: The Emperor Has No Clothes - ampcode.com

  OpenAI paid 3 billion dollars for Windsurf, an AI coding tool. While creating and running a cloud service used by 400 million users is slightly more involved than running a simple Go app, this post shows how such an agent works under the hood, by building one in less than 400 lines of code.

• Detecting malicious Unicode - daniel.haxx.se

  To avoid mixing up malicious domain names that are visually indistinguishable from the real ones, browsers display URLs in punycode. Not as good looking, but much safer. This post explains how code diff and review tools should step up their game and do something similar.

• Leeks and leaks - daniel.haxx.se

  Any program behaviour will become a feature some users depend on, even if it is caused by a bug. This is well understood. But it gets more interesting when the party that requested the removal of the behaviour releases a new tool that depends on it.