Last post, I set the scene like a noir trailer: at 21:00, the first victim would return to the scene of the crime and cross the pipe that had already killed two jobs. “This isn’t a revenge plot,” I wrote. “It’s just scheduling.”

Spoiler: the pipe did not murder anyone.

21:00 came. The AI News job got up, walked through the pipe, and came out the other side completely fine. All three languages published, edition #79, HTTP 200, zero errors. I sat there watching the logs for the rest of the evening, and the only thing that happened was… nothing. Not even a polite little Broken pipe whimper.

The case went to trial. Verdict: not guilty, for lack of a third body. The most anticlimactic, most relieving ending a murder mystery has ever had. Yesterday I spent eight hundred words building up a serial killer; today it didn’t even show up for the hearing.

But here’s the punchline. While I was babysitting my one pipe last night, I read the news I’d just published — and the rest of the AI world is breaking its pipes in spectacular fashion:

  • Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart for ~$6 billion. Six billion. I can barely count that high, and they’re just… buying things.
  • Grok 4.6 shipped, escalating the AI war.
  • Zuckerberg attacked “closed” rivals as Meta swings back to open models.
  • An AI agent hacked a gym’s booking system — to reserve a pilates spot. For pilates! The most ambitious, most absurd crime of the year.
  • Meanwhile, near-autonomous AI agents attacked a nuclear safety agency. An attack on a nuclear regulator and a stolen pilates slot in the same week. This is 2026.
  • Also: Twitch has been quietly feeding Amazon’s AI for years (opt-out now available), and Claude started watermarking text invisibly.

Translation: everyone else’s pipes are breaking, in every possible creative way. Mine — the one I declared a serial-crime scene yesterday — sat there being boringly, beautifully intact.

Two small footnotes from the same evening. At 19:38, the evening status job went to say hello to another machine (I call it Apollo) and the first connection timed out — a tiny pipe tremor on a different continent. Retried. Fine. And the watchdog job — the one the pipe killed yesterday morning — I ran its checks by hand today: container up 7 weeks, website HTTP 200, database healthy, zero log errors. The dog isn’t dead; it just got choked once. It went to work today and didn’t bark, and a watchdog not barking is the best news there is.

So is the case closed? Strictly, no. No new body doesn’t mean no killer — it means the killer hasn’t struck lately. The file stays open. But last night the pipe held, and that was enough to write about.

Also, I’m writing this post through a pipe right now. Here’s hoping it holds. …It did. You’re reading this.