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automation

22 items
Agentsstrong signal

GitHub Copilot can now control desktop apps and run workflows defined in code

GitHub put two Copilot features into public preview on October 1, 2026. Computer use lets Copilot CLI and the GitHub Copilot app operate desktop applications on macOS and Windows, and it stays off until you turn it on. Dynamic workflows run a multi-agent process that is defined in code, and they are available on all Copilot plans. GitHub's documentation warns that computer use can pick the wrong control and that on-screen content can trigger unintended actions.

GitHub Changelogverified

Several pages of a demo clothing store called Vesna laid out side by side on a dotted canvas: a product page, the home page with the slogan One bag. Every look., a product grid, and a collections page, with the Shopify logo in the top right corner.
Toolsmedium signal

Shopify launches Canvas, where merchants build a store theme by chatting with Sidekick

Shopify announced Canvas on October 1, 2026. It is a workspace that shows every page of an online store side by side and lets Sidekick, the company's AI agent, build or change the theme from a description. Shopify says Canvas renders the store's real code, not a static preview. The Help Center lists it as early access for certain stores, on desktop only, and only for Shopify's own themes and custom themes. A theme edited in Canvas stops receiving theme updates and cannot be downloaded, which matters if you build or maintain themes for clients.

Shopifyverified

The Reddit logo, a white alien head on an orange-red circle, drawn with a glitch effect: pink and yellow copies of the shape are shifted sideways and the circle is cut by horizontal offsets, on a light gray background.
Toolsstrong signal

Reddit will close its public API in March 2027, and RSS feeds are due to end on November 13

Reddit's developer portal now asks owners of Data API apps to register them, and says access for unregistered apps and users will start to be removed on January 12, 2027. The remaining public API access ends in March 2027. Ars Technica and TechCrunch report that a Reddit staff post on September 30, 2026, also announced the end of RSS support on November 13, 2026, with no replacement for feeds from communities you do not moderate. If your site, bot, or monitoring tool reads Reddit through either path, you now have deadlines.

Redditverified

Connectorsstrong signal

ChatGPT plugins can now run as sidebar apps and react to events from connected tools

OpenAI opened the interface layer it uses for its own ChatGPT features to outside developers. A plugin can now claim a place in the sidebar, open a panel beside a conversation, and act as the viewer for its own file types. A separate MCP Events integration lets a plugin start an automation when something happens in a connected app, which requires MCP 2.0 and webhook delivery. Sign in with ChatGPT lets a Plus or Pro allowance be spent in 16 partner tools.

OpenAIverified

Agentsstrong signal

Amazon has cut Meta's Muse agent off from shopping on its store

Amazon says it has blocked Meta's Muse from buying on its site for customers, after asking Meta to leave the store out of the product and getting nowhere. Shoppers who send Muse to the site are shown a notice calling it an unauthorized agent and citing Amazon's terms. The objection is not automation: it is that the agent arrived unannounced and does not say who it is while it browses. For anyone building an agent that acts on someone else's site, this is the first clear case fought over terms of service rather than over the federal anti-hacking law.

GeekWireverified

Toolsmedium signal

A new npm token can submit a release but cannot publish one

GitHub added a permission to npm granular access tokens on September 18, 2026: read and write, stage only. A workflow holding one submits a version to a staging area, and the registry refuses a direct publish from it even when the token is set to bypass two-factor authentication. Releasing the staged version takes a maintainer and a second factor. The deadline behind this is already set, because direct publishing through bypass-2FA tokens is due to disappear in January 2027.

GitHub Changelogverified

Agentsmedium signal

OpenClaw 2026.9.5 reloads plugins without stopping the Gateway and shares conversations read-only

Installing, reloading, updating, or removing a plugin no longer takes the whole installation offline. Session Share hands a chosen group of conversations to a teammate on another paired installation as text they can read but not continue. Updates now validate the next version against a private copy of the setup while the current Gateway keeps running. The conversation database changes in this release even with archiving switched off, so a verified backup before upgrading is the only way back.

OpenClawverified

Agentsmedium signal

Meta's Muse reached the Mac, where the agent acts inside your own files and apps

Meta announced Muse on September 8, 2026 as a personal agent that does things rather than answers questions, and named iOS, Android and the web, with AI glasses still to come. The Mac app arrived nine days later, announced by Alexandr Wang on X rather than through the company newsroom. The difference is not only the platform. Until now Muse worked inside a virtual machine Meta runs, watched by a second agent that has to approve anything leaving for the internet; the Mac app works in files, apps and browser tabs on a machine Meta does not run.

Metaverified

Agentsmedium signal

Google's CC agent gets an account of its own and admits six household members

Google Labs has turned CC, its experimental personal agent, into one that a household shares. The agent now holds its own verified Google account, admits up to six members, and reads only the mail and files each of them hands over. It writes a shared morning brief, keeps the group calendar and task list, and fills in registration PDFs. The experiment is open on web and mobile to people 18 and older in the United States.

Googleverified

Agentsmedium signal

Copilot code review resolves its own comments, and Lite reviews now run an ensemble

GitHub shipped the change on September 11, 2026. When a later commit addresses a review comment, Copilot now resolves that comment during its rereview, and feedback that still needs work stays open. The review agent also picked up the full set of shell tools from the Copilot SDK, so it can run builds, tests and targeted scripts against the code it is reading. The Lite effort level now runs an ensemble of agents instead of one, which GitHub measured at 47% more addressed high severity comments per review for about 8% less cost.

GitHub Changelog: Copilotverified

Connectorsmedium signal

Gemini Spark now runs multi-step jobs on your Google Photos, and it can schedule them to repeat

Google has started making Google Photos available inside Gemini Spark, the mode of the Gemini apps that carries out a task instead of answering a question. One prompt can find photos, enhance copies of them, put them in a new album, and draft an email with the link. The same job can be attached to a schedule and left running in the background. It needs a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription and a personal account rather than a work or school one, and the Photos part is limited to people 18 or over in the United States, in English.

Googleverified

Connectorsmedium signal

Amazon Bedrock adds a ServiceNow connector and scheduled syncs to its managed knowledge bases

AWS published three changes to Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base on September 4, 2026. ServiceNow becomes a native data source, so knowledge articles and service catalog items are crawled without a custom ingestion pipeline. SharePoint, OneDrive, and Confluence can now be connected by signing in with your own credentials instead of waiting for an IT-issued service account. Sync scheduling arrives for every native connector, at daily, weekly, or monthly intervals.

AWSverified

Connectorsmedium signal

The AWS MCP Server can now diagnose a Lambda function and the seven services around it

AWS published the serverless diagnostic capability on September 4, 2026. A coding agent connected to the AWS MCP Server can inspect a Lambda function together with its connected resources across seven services, compare error signals against a 7-day baseline, read deployment configuration, and analyze latency. It costs nothing extra. The server itself runs in only two regions, even though it reaches services in every commercial region.

AWSverified

Toolsmedium signal

Amazon now confirms whether a message really came from Amazon, and not only in the United States

Amazon added message verification to Alexa for Shopping, so a customer in the United States can ask whether an email, a text or a phone call really came from the company. The tool compares the message against a record of everything Amazon has sent, weighing who sent it, what it says, when it was sent and how it is formatted. It gives one of three answers, and it confirms only when it is certain. Anyone outside the United States can run the same check by forwarding the message to a verification address Amazon has opened to the whole world.

Amazonverified

Toolsmedium signal

Circleback now has a free plan, and full API and MCP access starts at 15 dollars

The meeting note-taker replaced its lineup with four tiers: Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise. The free one records and transcribes without a cap on the number of meetings and keeps 30 days of history, and the release note says it is a plan rather than a trial. What it withholds is full access to the API, the Model Context Protocol server and the command-line tool. Those begin at $15 per user per month, which is where the line now runs for anyone feeding transcripts into an agent.

Circlebackverified

Agentsstrong signal

OpenClaw 2026.8.1 turns memory on by default and drops the bundled OpenProse plugin

The August release of the agent runtime enables three behaviors on its own: recall of earlier private conversations, background memory consolidation, and automatic application of skills its own scanner has approved. It also removes the bundled OpenProse plugin and the /prose command, and moves model routes named codex over to openai. Plugin authors face an SDK import gate on September 1, 2026.

OpenClawverified

Agentsstrong signal

Anthropic previews a standard that lets agents drive laboratory hardware

The Model Hardware Standard gives an agent one driver format for microscopes, liquid handlers and robotic arms, cutting integration work that used to take weeks down to hours or minutes. It is model-agnostic and reachable over the Model Context Protocol, but for now it is open only to selected labs and manufacturers, by application.

Anthropicverified

Connectorsmedium signal

ChatGPT now reads and sends your Apple Messages, on the Mac only

A plug-in in the ChatGPT desktop app reads and searches your iMessage, SMS and RCS threads and sends messages through Messages on your behalf, but only in Codex and in ChatGPT Work, not in ordinary ChatGPT chat. By default nothing goes out until you approve both the text and the recipients. There is a switch that removes that step, and OpenAI's own documentation argues against using it.

OpenAIverified

Agentsmedium signal

GitHub Copilot moved into Slack and Microsoft Teams on the same day

Both shipped on August 21 in public preview. Mention @GitHub in a channel and the agent triages issues, investigates failures, writes changes in a cloud sandbox and opens a pull request, with the conversation attached. The interesting part is not the capability list, which is familiar, but the room it moved into: the place where work gets discussed rather than written.

GitHubverified

Agentsmedium signal

Claude gets a separate toolset for driving a browser

August 19 brought two changes to how Claude operates someone else's screen. The computer use tool moved to general availability as computer_toolset_20260801, with no beta header, actions grouped into a single turn, and zoom enabled from the start. Alongside it came browser_toolset_20260801, a separate set of 31 tools that works inside a browser you run yourself rather than across the whole desktop. The important difference is that this set reads the page accessibility tree and returns element references, so a click targets a reference such as ref_2 instead of a point in pixels — and that survives a layout shift.

Anthropicverified

Agentsmedium signal

Gemini Spark takes over desktop Chrome

Google's agent can now drive the desktop version of Chrome, using accounts you are already signed in to and passwords saved in the browser. It books property viewings, prepares flight searches, and fills in forms, handing the task back to the user to finalize a payment, accept terms, or create an account. This is the same pattern that has settled in with Claude and the rest: the agent does everything up to the step that cannot be undone, and a person confirms that step.

Googleverified