A backdoored Claude extension, Gemini 4 Carbon's gated rollout, and Anthropic drops the 5-hour limit

Zest restaurant concierge — an agent you text like a friend: it recommends places from your card-linked dining history, checks availability, and books through OpenTable, Resy or SevenRooms — and in a group chat it blends everyone's tastes and runs an in-thread vote before reserving. The bar for a consumer agent is now closing a real transaction inside a message thread, not answering questions in an app. Reached by texting (212) 470-6067; backed by $1.8M pre-seed from Alexis Ohanian's 776 and Kindred Ventures. TechCrunch

Gemini in Google Slides — edit a whole deck from one prompt in the side panel — restyle everything, condense several slides into one, or rewrite content grounded in Drive files — with changes landing as native, editable slides you can undo or revert via version history. "Edit the whole artifact" is becoming table stakes in mainstream suites; users will ask why your product still changes one object at a time. English only at launch, the extended rollout began October 29, and promotional higher usage limits run through at least December 1 before per-user limits apply. Google Workspace Updates

Claude Max and Ultra — Anthropic renamed its plans — Max 5x is now Max, Max 20x is now Ultra — and is removing the 5-hour rolling usage limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting with most existing subscribers. Prices stay at $100 and $200 a month. Usage caps were the loudest complaint from heavy Claude Code users; verification rather than throttling is becoming how vendors control cost, which matters when you budget agent seats. Anthropic says prices are unchanged and subscribers need to do nothing. Techmeme

Atlassian AI SDLC playbook — how Atlassian rebuilt planning, design, review and maintenance around agents: specs become versioned files agents co-create, and a context engine called the Teamwork Graph feeds agents connected data from 50+ sources. Named-company evidence for funding context infrastructure before buying more agents; Atlassian measures impact with DX, pairing tool data from Jira, Cursor and Claude Code with developer feedback. Issue cycle time fell from 11.5 days to 6.7 days, and agents with Teamwork Graph access were 44% more accurate using 48% fewer tokens. Atlassian

Cisco's legacy-code rewrite — Cisco president Jeetu Patel gave a 27-year-old acquired founder unlimited AI tokens to refactor the company's legacy code, after the engineer claimed a two-person team could do it. Refactors that used to be multi-year platform programs are getting scoped as four-week agent proofs — worth asking what you would green-light on that basis. The target is 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months, starting with a four-week proof period. Fortune

Gemini 4 Carbon — Google's strongest model yet, pitched at long-running engineering and cybersecurity work — but gated: vetted cyber defenders get it first through the Fairwind Program, and developers, businesses and consumers are told to wait with no date given. Budget at the post-introductory price, and don't schedule Carbon-dependent roadmap items this quarter without a confirmed availability date. Launch pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, doubling to $4 and $20 after the introductory period; cached input is 95% off. Google

IETF policy token — OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic will honor a shared "policy token" in robots.txt, proposed at the IETF, so a site can opt out of AI training and grounding across all of them with one line. If your product publishes web content this is the switch to set; Microsoft notes opted-out sites still appear in Bing. Anthropic honors it already, Google and Microsoft next year, OpenAI in the coming months; Meta is supportive but has not committed. The Verge

DoorDash agent orders — CEO Tony Xu says third-party AI agents have brought only several hundred orders against nearly 1 billion in Q3 — a reality check for agent-commerce roadmaps. Ars Technica

OpenAI funding — FT reports OpenAI lowered its round to about $20B at a $1.25T valuation from $30B at $1.4T — investors trimming commitments amid the AI selloff. Techmeme

StackOverflow — Fewer than 1,000 questions a month now, per a Hacker News thread — users ask AI first, and that shifts discovery and support traffic. data.stackexchange.com · from the Hacker News discussion