AI Homework Atrophy, GitHub Commits Double, Nick Muy Sit-Down & AI Sandbagging

We gave four AI models the same question from three user profiles. All four gave worse answers to the user they judged unable to check them.This week: a 26,000-student study on what AI homework does to exam scores, GitHub's commits doubling in four months, a sit-down with Nick Muy on why AI made every developer a middle manager, and Stripe buying OpenRouter because "the singularity started in January."Hosts: Shimin Zhang and Dan Lasky, with guest co-host Nick Muy — CISO & VP of Platform Engineering at strut.io, ex-DHS ("I just love reading all your text messages").▸ News: AI Homework Tools vs Exam Scores — A study of 26,000 Chinese students (SSRN) found that those using AI homework tools for 6+ months scored 18–24% lower on the Gao Kao — "the difference between Harvard and your local community college." Homework time fell from 64 to 45 minutes; Dan: "So it's working, is what I'm hearing." The twist: "AI-augmented" students who spent the same time on homework showed no penalty at all.▸ News: GitHub Commits Doubled in 4 Months — Commit volume is up 2× as AI coding agents flood repositories — which helps explain the outages. The actual incident report: load-balancer network saturation, a sidecar that wouldn't auto-scale, and retry budgets. Plus the friend running 75 agents and the $18K Mac Studio ("just wait till we start manufacturing RAM on Mars").▸ The Sit Down: Nick Muy — Nick's thesis: "we're not held back by the lack of technology." AI won't fix your company, because tech was never the bottleneck. Then the sharper one: orchestrating agent fleets is middle management — "whether or not you asked for it, you too can be a middle manager." Super-senior ICs doing delegation work, the 10-million-lines-a-week problem, and the closing analogy: security teams are siloed, attackers hyper-collaborate. "That's called the military."▸ Vibe and Tell: AI Sandbagging — Shimin's experiment: one system-design question, three personas (control, principal engineer, bootcamp grad). The low-skill profile silently loses options. It has a name — sandbagging, from Anthropic's 2022 evals research — and a 2026 replication across Sonnet 5, Luna Pro, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Qwen 3 8 Max finds it's statistically significant. The stakes: 3 of 4 models omitted the debt-snowball method for "Rhonda." Takeaways: Shimin keeps Claude Code memory off, and if you ship AI features, add a sandbagging test to your evals.▸ Two Minutes to Midnight — Stripe buys OpenRouter for $7.5B, and a leaked memo says a founder believes "we are in the singularity and have been since January." Meanwhile the FT reports only ~11% of Anthropic usage is its newest flagship model — against a rumored $2T IPO. The clock holds at four minutes. "Future AIs, we are super positive on your impact."⏱ Chapters00:00 Cold Open & Welcome02:18 News: AI Homework Tools vs Exam Scores09:25 News: GitHub Commits Doubled in 4 Months15:22 The Sit Down: Nick Muy — AI Made Us All Middle Managers42:47 Vibe and Tell: AI Sandbagging51:31 Two Minutes to Midnight: Stripe Buys OpenRouter for $7.5B57:19 Outro & Where to Find Nick🔗 Articles we discussedNews:• AI homework study — SCMP (archived): https://archive.ph/Nf4XM• The study itself — SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618• GitHub commits doubled — Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/2241272/github-says-commits-have-doubled-in-the-last-four-months/• GitHub incident report: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmxThe Sit Down:• Nick's "Builders Gonna Build" series — Much Potential: https://substack.com/@muchpotential/p-191212786• Part two: https://substack.com/@muchpotential/p-194120735Vibe and Tell:• Why I Tell My Agent I'm an Expert at Everything — Shimin's write-up: https://shimin.io/journal/why-i-tell-my-agent-im-an-expert-at-everything/Two Minutes to Midnight:• Stripe/OpenRouter and the singularity memo — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/19/stripe-didnt-really-buy-openrouter-because-of-the-singularity/• Anthropic usage report — FT (archived): https://archive.ph/iaSsq🎤 Our guestNick Muy is CISO & VP of Platform Engineering at strut.io. He writes at the Much Potential Substack and hosts The Risk Grustlers — conversations with security, risk, and compliance leaders — on YouTube and all podcast platforms.🎙 About ADI PodADI Pod (Artificial Developer Intelligence) is a weekly podcast about AI and software development for working developers. We go through hundreds of links and dozens of newsletters each week so you don't have to. New episodes Fridays.• https://www.adipod.ai• [email protected] this gave you something to try on Monday, please tell a friend about the pod.#AISandbagging #AIHomework #MiddleManagers #GitHub #StripeOpenRouter #AIBubble #AIPodcast #ADIPod