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SpaceX made history this week as its Starship spacecraft was caught in midair by giant mechanical arms at the Texas launch tower, completing a twenty-two-hour journey back from space. It's the first time a vehicle of this scale has been retrieved that way, and it marks a genuine step toward the reusable heavy-lift future SpaceX has been building toward for years.
On the software side, OpenAI is deprecating plan mode in its Codex tool, a quiet but telling move. It fits a broader pattern we're seeing across AI development tools — simplicity winning out over complexity. Speaking of which, there's a real conversation building in developer circles about whether dedicated memory layers for AI agents are actually necessary. Claude's approach of storing context in plain markdown files and searching them with basic text tools is prompting some honest questions about whether elaborate vector databases solve problems that most teams don't actually have.
And stepping outside the server room for a moment — new research out of Wired finds that hundreds of cactus species could lose the majority of their habitats by the end of this century as droughts intensify. Even the hardiest plants on Earth, it turns out, have limits.
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