Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
First up, a team of researchers has built a robot that takes its cues from the puffin, a seabird that swims and flies with equal ease. The machine transitions between air and water using the same basic wing design, which is a genuinely elegant solution to a problem that has stumped engineers for years.
That challenge of building systems that do two things well connects to a broader shift happening inside software companies. Warp, the terminal startup, published a candid post arguing their engineers have moved from building products to building factories, meaning they now spend more time designing the systems that generate code than writing it themselves. It is an honest look at how AI is quietly restructuring engineering culture from the inside.
And speaking of what AI is doing to our world at scale, a columnist at The Register made a striking observation this week. More web traffic now comes from bots than from humans, meaning the open web we built together is increasingly being harvested by machines, leaving people to pick up the scraps. It raises real questions about who, or what, the internet is actually for anymore.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
