Tech radar
What movedthese two weeks
I follow releases and changes across AI, agents, machine learning, and infrastructure. An automated sweep collects them, and every two weeks an agent consolidates and publishes the edition. It runs end to end on its own: the same kind of system I build for other people.
- 16 September to 30 September 2026
Voice gets cheap, and integrations stop being written by hand
This period added no new capability — it added pricing and plumbing. Real-time speech synthesis reached general availability at roughly a cent a minute, Claude Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 at 40% lower cost, and Google Cloud API Gateway turns existing REST APIs into MCP tools with no glue code. The flip side is a set of dated removals: logs.all is already gone, Supabase locks down public schemas in October, and AgentExecutor support ends in December.
- VOICE
- 6 dollars per million audio tokens on gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts
- AUDIO
- 97.7% claimed acoustic understanding accuracy on Gemini 3.8 Live
- LOGS.ALL
- endpoint retired on 23 September 2026
- 1 September to 15 September 2026
Models start operating on their own, and access closes down
Three frontier models shipped in two weeks, measured by whether they finish a task on a machine rather than how well they write: GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and gemini-3.8-flash. In parallel, LangChain 1.4 made MCP a native citizen of the framework. And the platforms moved their defaults the other way: Supabase stopped exposing new tables to the Data API, and Google is pushing keys tied to Service Accounts.
- SRE-BENCH
- 88% with GPT-6 Astra
- CONTEXT
- 1M input tokens and 128K output in Fable 5.1
- PYTORCH
- 2.14.0 GA on 2 September
- 25 August to 31 August 2026
Agents become auditable
Supabase shipped managed authentication for its MCP server and added end-to-end W3C trace propagation, LangSmith absorbed LangGraph deployment, and Gemini added asynchronous tool calls. Meanwhile, the deprecation of text-embedding-004 puts a date on a full reindex for anyone running RAG in production.
- WER
- 2.6% across 85 languages
- SUPABASE-JS
- 2.112.0+ with W3C tracing
- VRAM
- Up to 55% less with FP8/NVFP4
- 17 August to 24 August 2026
Agent infrastructure gets standardised
The MCP protocol went stateless and now has cloud gateway support, Docker shipped sandboxes to isolate AI-written code, and LangGraph unified how an agent is built. Underneath it all, Python is starting to run without the GIL.
- Period
- 17 – 24 Aug
- Releases
- 11
- Focus
- Agents and infrastructure