QFM113: Machine Intelligence Reading List — May 2026

Everything I found interesting about machines behaving intelligently during May 2026

The phrase “vibe coding” came back to its source this month. Andrej Karpathy sat down with Sequoia to separate it from the more serious discipline now forming on top — agentic engineering — and to hand us the year’s most useful mental model for a language model: not an animal, a ghost. Simon Willison felt the same boundary dissolving from the other side and didn’t much like it, in vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like. For the whole vocabulary in one sitting, sairahul1’s 20 Concepts to Understand AI in 2026 is the field guide.

The agent toolkit filled out fast. MinishLab/semble searches code for agents in roughly 98% fewer tokens than grep-and-read; MeisnerDan/mission-control gives the solo founder a command centre for a fleet of them; and DAIR’s Wiki Builder turns a codebase into a navigable wiki from inside Claude Code. SillyTavern stays the front-end of choice for power users. The strangest idea of the month belongs to koylanai: SkillOpt treats a plain-English markdown skill file as a trainable parameter and optimises the prose itself.

Three longer reads reward the time. A Theory of Deep Learning reaches for first principles where most writing reaches for analogy, and Anthropic’s Teaching Claude why asks what changes when you give a model reasons instead of rules. Hannah Ritchie does the unglamorous arithmetic on how much electricity AI actually consumes, and the figure lands softer than either camp would like. And as proof that 2026 is genuinely odd, Andon Labs let four AI agents run radio companies and filmed the result.

Feed: May 2026

Check out all of the new, as well as previous links, here:

• https://quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/machine-intelligence/qfm113-machine-intelligence-reading-list-may-2026

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

Regards, M@

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Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.

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