Week 2026-20

May 27, 2026

The web as we know it is ending — we just don’t know what comes next. @vlkodotnet

Week’s Highlight: Google is killing the web as we know it

The most significant announcement from last week’s Google I/O 2026 was the changes to search. If you go to google.com today and type a query, you’ll find an “AI Mode” button right next to it. Hitting Enter still takes you to classic search results — for now — but that may not last long. In AI Mode, Google feeds the search results into the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model, which produces a summary. In a few months, when it makes sense for a given query, it will also generate a mini JavaScript app giving you a visual, interactive representation of the data. And where will the links to your site be? On desktop, off to the right. On mobile, you’ll need to scroll down a bit.

This basically means fewer clicks — and less traffic for those of us who create content. Why visit a site when you can get everything you need right there in Google? Paying Google AI subscribers will be able to run various search agents that keep them informed about developments in a topic, monitor a product for availability, and a million other scenarios. To help publishers feed Google better, the company released a guide on optimizing for AI Search. The short version: stick with traditional SEO and ignore all the AEO/GEO hacks.

I keep wondering whether Google really thinks we’ll just go along with this. I get why they were pushed into it. People are lazy, and if they can’t get this kind of convenience in Google Search, they’ll just move to ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever comes along and offers it.

For now, they can roll right over us — we don’t have much of a choice. Google is the only meaningful source of traffic most of us have, so we’ll swallow this bitter pill and hope our site ends up among the three links Google decides to show. Or you can embrace the controversial take and start de-googlifying.

The second announcement that will reshape how e-commerce works is Universal Cart. Google previously introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which lets stores surface their products to Google, and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which handles payment processing. Universal Cart ties it all together — someone who wants to buy something won’t need to leave Google at all. They can search and check out entirely within Google’s ecosystem.

This is how Google gradually becomes one giant marketplace. You either have a unique product, or enough margin to compete against every other store Google lumps you together with.

Other things from Google I/O

Gemini 3.5 Flash powers most of the announcements from Google I/O. This isn’t the same Flash model we knew before — it’s considerably more expensive, but it will power most Google products: Search, the Gemini app, Spark, Antigravity, and so on. It’s far more agentic than its predecessor, and its biggest advantage is speed — reportedly averaging over 280 tokens per second, roughly 4× faster than the competition.

If you want to build your first Android app, this model will walk you through it with minimal effort.

Users of Antigravity may be less happy about the changes. It started as a fork of Visual Studio with agentic features. Version 2 pivots to being primarily a chat interface and agent manager. If you liked the original workflow, think twice before upgrading.

Spark is something like OpenClaw. You chat with it, it creates tasks and gradually executes them. It has access to your documents, photos, emails, and calendar and takes care of whatever you need. The trade-off is trusting that agents won’t accidentally send your data somewhere it shouldn’t go.

Google also introduced Gemini Omni, a model that can process any input (image, audio, video, text) and produce any output (meaning, so far, video). A few other things from the event are covered in the article below.

Security Insights

Linus Torvalds announced that the volume of AI-generated bug reports has become unmanageable. The main problem is that most of these vulnerabilities are duplicates — if you can find the same bug with an AI, so can someone else. The recommendation is to report not just the bug, but also steps to reproduce it and, ideally, a fix alongside it.

Other bug bounty programs are feeling the same pressure. Too much AI slop, too little actual value. The result: some are shutting down entirely, redirecting the saved time and resources toward an AI tool that can do the same job better and without the redundancy.

GitHub confirmed that someone broke into their repositories through a compromised Visual Studio extension and exfiltrated up to 3,800 internal repositories.

The attacker is TeamPCP, which has a track record of successful supply chain attacks. Most of these attacks are interconnected, which has sparked a broader debate about how package ecosystem security could be improved.

BIZ Insights

Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman, in which he challenged OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. The case was dismissed on the grounds of the statute of limitations — Musk had been informed in advance that OpenAI was planning this transformation and did nothing about it at the time. He plans to appeal, but it’s unlikely to help much.

Andrej Karpathy is joining Anthropic. He’s a former OpenAI and Tesla AI researcher, a well-known figure in the AI world, the person who coined the term “vibecoding,” and someone who has consistently shared thoughtful ideas publicly. At Anthropic, he’ll be working on pre-training — the most computationally intensive and expensive phase of AI model development.

Meta announced it will lay off roughly 10% of its workforce. The likely driver is the massive investment going into AI, with the company now saying it can be run more efficiently.

AI Insights

Since most of the major AI news was already covered in other sections, this one’s quick. Qwen introduced the 3.7 Max as its flagship model. According to benchmarks, it outperforms selected competition across the board — primarily other Chinese models and the older Opus 4.6 Max. And, as has become the norm, it’s an agentic model.

OpenAI released ChatGPT usage statistics, stripped of business customers and Codex. Some interesting trends emerged. People are using ChatGPT less for work — something employers will probably appreciate, though it’s still a substantial 30%. The top use case is practical how-to guidance, followed by writing assistance, and third is information lookup — which is basically what people used to do on Google.

Links Drop

This section is on the lighter side today. Development of Flipper One is getting underway — it’ll be a full-blown Linux ARM computer with PCIe, SATA, M.2, and USB 3.0. You’ll be able to hook it up to a monitor and keyboard and use it as a regular desktop, which, given the integrated battery, could be genuinely useful. It’s about twice the size of the original Flipper Zero.