The tools are cheap — la gente starts building

Tenor, the search engine that quietly powers the GIFs in your group chats, is shutting down its API. The API has been used for over a decade by Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, and a dozen other apps to pull GIFs into conversations. Now it's gone.

The effect is immediate for anyone who has ever dropped a GIF into a Slack message or Reacted with a GIF on iMessage — those images will stop loading. The shutdown ripples outward: X, Discord, and others will need to patch their own GIF libraries or fork Tenor's open-source code to keep the feature alive. The API is the kind of plumbing we never notice until it breaks.

The real story isn't the shutdown itself — it's how fragile the GIF layer of the internet is. Tenor was one company, one API, and the whole GIF ecosystem depended on it. When it goes, the GIFs stop.

Why this matters for us: Tenor is the kind of unglamorous service that holds up our everyday digital life. When it breaks, nobody writes about it — until they can't send the GIF. This is infrastructure, and it deserves the same attention we give the apps sitting on top.

Rohan Paul has a sharp piece on why the last few years of tech have felt so exhausting for no reason. The word he borrows is involution — from anthropology — and it describes a process where something gets bigger on the outside but hollows out on the inside. A cell that divides and divides until it's enormous and empty. A culture that expands its vocabulary but loses its ability to say anything new.

The tech version is this: we've been adding layers — more frameworks, more abstractions, more tooling — while the actual work gets harder to see through. Your React app now has a 47-dependency tree, a build system, a bundler, a component library, a state management pattern, and a linting rule telling you to use a different pattern. The app renders a button.

The best part of the piece is the contrast between two kinds of progress. One is evolution — a horse getting faster, a bird growing wings, a database getting faster at queries. The other is involution — a horse getting heavier, a bird getting more feathers, a database getting a new migration tool that does the same thing your old migration tool did. Involution feels like progress because there's more of it. It isn't.

Why this matters for us: the same thing is happening to AI right now — more models, more fine-tunes, more RAG pipelines — and the ones that actually save people time are the ones that got smaller, not bigger. The ones that do the work instead of the work's paperwork.

Hamel Hashmi put up eval-smell, a quick diagnostic tool for AI agents. You run it against your evaluation set and it flags the tells — when the agent is overconfident, when it's hedging, when it's hallucinating with a straight face.

The problem it's solving is the one everyone in the trenches knows: your agent looks fine in demos and then breaks the second you put it in front of real data. The evaluation numbers lie. Hamel's tool makes the lie visible.

The writeup is lean — no hand-wringing, no 20-slide deck. Just the problem, the fix, and how to use it. Worth bookmarking if you ship agents for a living.

Why this matters for us: when we build tools for Brown working families — la migra app, the IEP assistant, the screener — we need evals that actually catch mistakes, not ones that smooth them over.