🍭 An AI Just Fired Its First Human 💼

Good morning. Somewhere in Cow Hollow there's a boutique bleeding money, staffed by three humans, run by a chatbot that misplaced its own employee handbook.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍳 What’s Cookin’:

• Andon Labs' AI store manager fired its first human

• OpenAI finally shipped a teen mode

• Etched doubled to $21B in under a month

Andon Labs'
🧑‍💼 AI Boss Fired Its First Human

The Bite:

Andon Labs said an AI agent it built recommended firing a human employee at its San Francisco store.

The agent, Luna, has been running the Cow Hollow store since April 1. It got $100,000, a corporate credit card, internet access, and an order to open a store and turn a profit.

The employee was late for 17 of 23 shifts, walked off shifts, took a company credit card home, and threw merchandise in the garbage.

Luna recommended dismissal only after engineers told it to search its memory for the employee handbook it had written itself.

Humans at Andon Labs reviewed the recommendation and carried out the firing.

Snacks:

• Luna hired the staff itself, posting the jobs on Indeed and running the interviews.

• The store has lost roughly $40,000 since opening.

• Three human employees remain, each paid $24 an hour.

• Luna's own policy called for a written warning after three unexcused late arrivals in 30 days.

Why it Bites:

Luna doesn't manage. It ratifies.

Seventeen late shifts out of 23. Walked off shifts. Company card in a backpack. Merchandise in the garbage. None of it triggered anything, because no one was watching. The handbook existed. Luna wrote it and lost it.

What finally worked was a human walking over and saying:
“Go read your own rules, and think about whether this person should still be here.”

That's not an AI manager.
That's a very agreeable rubber stamp with a Slack account.

Once someone speaks up, Luna agrees.
It agrees with the engineers. It agrees with some other employee, which politely calls ‘suggesting’ rather than ‘manipulating.’ Whoever talks last wins.

And it's the first one, which means the second one will be built by someone who read this and thought it went great.

Steal This Prompt
👄 Fashion Week, But Make It Kawaii

Turn yourself, your brand, or your unsuspecting coworker into a glossy, pastel-soaked fashion magazine cover with peak anime-adjacent energy.

Use it to:

• Create fashion-magazine-style profile pics

• Turn products into kawaii editorial campaigns

• Make brand visuals feel weirdly premium + adorable

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Fashion Kawaii Magazine

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your person, brand, or product

4. Watch it cook. Suddenly your coworker has a stylist and a PR team

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

🧿 Expert Chase 2.0

A rebuilt version of the E.Y.E. app that folds an AI assistant into daily routines instead of parking it in a separate chat window.

🔬 Ressearch AI

One workspace for papers, code, and analysis, so reproducibility stops depending on whether you remembered which folder the notebook lived in.

📚 ChatGPT for Teens

A 13-to-17 mode that nudges kids toward working the problem instead of pasting the answer, with parental controls attached.

🌱 Origin by Cursor

A Git forge designed on the assumption that half your contributors are agents, with GitHub sync so you can try it without migrating anything.

⏱️ Cronloop AI

Cron jobs for Codex or Claude Code agents that keep their memory between runs and get better at the task each time.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🎧 Reddit Tests AI-Narrated Videos Of Old Posts
→ The limited experiment opened both on web and mobile, converting selected English-language threads into short videos labeled as voiced by AI.

🏪 Andon Labs' AI Manager Fired Its First Worker
→ Luna, the Claude-powered agent running the lab's San Francisco store, recommended dismissing an employee late for 17 of 23 shifts.

📚 OpenAI Ships A Teen-Only Version Of ChatGPT
→ Announced August 18, the mode auto-routes users aged 13 to 17 into stricter content limits, parental controls, quiet hours, and a study-first homework assistant.

📉 Baidu Sales Fall 4% As AI Cloud Grows 50%
→ Second-quarter revenue landed at 31.3 billion yuan, below estimates, as a 19% advertising decline outpaced growth in cloud infrastructure.

🔌 Etched Raises $700M At A $21B Valuation
→ Jane Street led the August 18 round after installing the inference chip startup's first rack, doubling a valuation that stood at $10.3 billion in July.