Tuesday, March 25, 2026

Sora is dead. OpenAI's video generation tool posted its goodbye yesterday, and the HN thread has almost a thousand points. Meanwhile, the builders keep building: a Show HN using Gemini-powered sub-second video search hit 400 points, Simon Willison wrote up Claude Code's new auto mode which uses a safety layer that reviews each action, and Google dropped both TurboQuant to help fit bigger AI models on cheaper hardware and Lyria 3 for music generation via the Gemini API. Good day for people who like to try things.

Things People Built

Show HN: SentrySearch — sub-second video search using Gemini's native video embeddings

Gemini can now understand video directly — not just screenshots or captions — and this tool lets you search footage by describing what you're looking for. Point it at video footage, type a query in plain English, and it finds the right moment. ssrajadh built this as a Show HN. 400 points on HN, which for a Show HN is a lot. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Show HN: ProofShot — give AI coding agents eyes to verify the UI they build

Solves a real problem: coding agents generate UI code but can't see the result. ProofShot takes a screenshot after each change and feeds it back to the agent so it can catch its own visual bugs. Simple idea, useful if you're doing any agent-driven frontend work. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Show HN: AI Roundtable — let 200 models debate your question

From Opper AI. You submit a question and it gets routed to ~200 models, which then respond and debate each other. Feels like a fun way to see where models actually diverge on a topic. Probably more useful for comparison shopping models than for getting a definitive answer. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Building a coding agent in Swift from scratch

A Claude Code-style coding agent written entirely in Swift. If you're in the Apple dev world and want to understand how coding agents work under the hood, this is a clean example you can learn from. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Ensu: privacy-focused AI app that runs on your device

Ente, the privacy-focused photo storage company, built a local AI app called Ensu. Everything runs on your device — nothing is sent to the cloud. Ente has a solid track record with privacy-first design, so this is a credible entry in the keep-your-data-local space. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Tools & Platforms

Auto mode for Claude Code

Simon Willison wrote up the new auto mode in Claude Code, which is Anthropic's answer to running the agent without stopping to ask permission every few seconds. Instead of blindly approving everything, a separate AI that checks each action for safety reviews it before it runs. You get the speed of fully-automatic mode with a safety net. Whether that safety net is good enough is an open question, but it's a better design than a simple on/off switch.
Simon Willison

FastMCP

A framework for building MCP (a standard for connecting AI tools to your apps) servers quickly. If you've been wanting to wire up your own tools to Claude or other compatible clients but found the boilerplate annoying, this is aimed at you. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Cloudflare: running AI agent code safely, 100x faster

Cloudflare announced dynamic Workers for running AI agent code safely. The pitch: spin up an isolated environment for each agent action in single-digit milliseconds instead of seconds. Relevant if you're building anything where an agent needs to run untrusted code. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Industry News

Goodbye to Sora

Sora, OpenAI's video generation tool, is shutting down. 967 points on HN. No detailed explanation yet beyond the tweet. The video generation space has gotten crowded since Sora launched, and it never quite found its footing as a product. HN discussion.
Hacker News

Google Lyria 3: music generation via the Gemini API

Lyria 3 is now available in paid preview through the Gemini API and for testing in Google AI Studio. There's also a Lyria 3 Pro tier for longer tracks. If you've been wanting to programmatically generate music, this is the easiest on-ramp right now.
Google AI Blog

ChatGPT gets shopping features via Agentic Commerce Protocol

OpenAI is adding product discovery and side-by-side comparisons to ChatGPT, powered by something they're calling the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Merchants can integrate directly. This is OpenAI's play at search-and-buy, which puts it more directly in Google Shopping territory.
OpenAI Blog

Research & Reading

So where are all the AI apps?

From Answer.AI (Jeremy Howard's lab). Asks why we don't see more standalone AI apps despite the capabilities being there. 426 points on HN. The framing is constructive rather than cynical — it's more "here are the gaps" than "AI is a bubble." HN discussion.
Hacker News

Also

Today’s Sources