When Google announced it had engineered AirDrop compatibility for its Pixel 10 phones late last year, the pessimists among us figured it would be a matter of days before Apple shut it down. But not only is it still working, Google has expanded the capability to the Pixel 9 series (minus the budget-oriented Pixel 9A).

As with Pixel 10 phones, owners of (almost all) Pixel 9 phones will be able to send and receive files a little more easily with Apple devices. Files sent from a Pixel to an iPhone, Mac, or iPad will appear as AirDrop transfers. On the Android side, files are handled through Quick Share. The receiving Apple device needs to be di …

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Imagine turning the key or pressing the start button of your car—and nothing happens. Not because the battery is dead or the engine is broken but because a server no longer answers. For a growing number of cars, that scenario isn’t hypothetical.

As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car.

Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today’s interconnected, software-defined vehicles. Smartphone apps can now handle tasks like unlocking doors, flashing headlights, and preconditioning cabins—and some models won’t unlock at all unless a phone running the manufacturer’s app is within range.

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Comments

It's processes and incentives that determine what happens, not any individual heroics.

I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.

[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.

— Tom Dale

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Introducing the Codex app

OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.

The app is built with Electron and Node.js. Automations track their state in a SQLite database - here's what that looks like if you explore it with uvx datasette ~/.codex/sqlite/codex-dev.db:

Here’s an interactive copy of that database in Datasette Lite.

The announcement gives us a hint at some usage numbers for Codex overall - the holiday spike is notable:

Since the launch of GPT‑5.2-Codex in mid-December, overall Codex usage has doubled, and in the past month, more than a million developers have used Codex.

Automations are currently restricted in that they can only run when your laptop is powered on. OpenAI promise that cloud-based automations are coming soon, which will resolve this limitation.

They chose Electron so they could target other operating systems in the future, with Windows “coming very soon”. OpenAI’s Alexander Empiricos noted on the Hacker News thread that:

it's taking us some time to get really solid sandboxing working on Windows, where there are fewer OS-level primitives for it.

Like Claude Code, Codex is really a general agent harness disguised as a tool for programmers. OpenAI acknowledge that here:

Codex is built on a simple premise: everything is controlled by code. The better an agent is at reasoning about and producing code, the more capable it becomes across all forms of technical and knowledge work.

Claude Code had to rebrand to Cowork to better cover the general knowledge work case. OpenAI can probably get away with keeping the Codex name for both.

OpenAI have made Codex available to free and Go plans for "a limited time", during which they are also doubling the rate limits for paying users.

Tags: sandboxing, sqlite, ai, datasette, electron, openai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, coding-agents, codex-cli

Updated with the full text of Apple’s statement below.

According to a statement from Apple to CNBC, the company has officially selected Google as the technology partner for its foundation models. News that this deal was in the works had previously been reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman as far back as March of 2024.

The full implications of this deal aren’t yet known, but it’s likely to affect both Siri as well as other Apple Intelligence features, several of which were first announced in 2024 but have yet to actually ship. Gurman has also previously reported that those delayed Apple Intelligence features are likely to make their debut in iOS 26.4 this spring.

It’s unclear exactly where in the timeframe we are. Given that 26.3 is already in beta, and 26.4 is expected in a few months, it’s possible that work has long since started on this, even if it’s only being officially announced now.¹ Even with the leg-up provided by Google’s models, it seems unlikely the company could simply roll in that tech for a feature due out in short order.

It had previously been thought that Google’s Gemini would be offered as an option via Siri, in the same way that ChatGPT has been available for some time. That was tacitly confirmed by Apple software chief Craig Federighi who said at the company’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, “we may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future.” But that deal never materialized—perhaps in part because the two companies were discussing this more substantive deal?

Either way, Google’s models are clearly a step up from Apple’s own endeavors thus far. The two companies also have a longstanding relationship over search in Safari, which makes this perhaps an unsurprising continuation of that. But as to whether it can help Apple dig itself out of the AI hole in which it’s found itself, well, we’ll find out soon enough.

Apple provided Six Colors with the full statement:

Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.