OpenAI takes the Navier-Stokes medal after it learned that two mathematicians were ahead

By Javi and Pablo, with a camera melted by the heat of Córdoba · Café con Codely

On September 8 OpenAI announced that it had solved Navier-Stokes, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems. Carlos Santana called it official and historic. According to Simon Willison, the result came from about 10,000 GPT-6 Astra agents over 88 hours and 300 billion output tokens. At the public API price, that is about 15 million dollars.

Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had spent a year on the same problem with private Codex sessions paid from their own pocket. On September 3 Buckmaster wrote to OpenAI to avoid a race. They offered him free compute and, on Sunday, an urgent video call. Alpöge was not invited because he works at Anthropic.

In the call, OpenAI showed a prompt and said the model had needed little human intervention. Then it admitted that a whole team started to work on the problem in the days after it learned about their progress. Buckmaster asked if the model was trained on his Codex sessions. OpenAI answered that it did not look at user data and did not answer the second question.

OpenAI gave him two options: publish only the Euler part and give up the Navier-Stokes credit, or sign the paper without Alpöge and credit the model. He refused both. Javier Gamarra sums it up as the third strike for OpenAI after the Musk trial and the military contracts. Javi and Pablo agree: even if they copied nothing, spending millions to arrive before two people is not fair play. Watch in the video.

Amazon publishes a manifesto for coding with agents: you are the architect, not the typist

Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and part of the Kiro team, wrote ten Frontier Engineering principles from what she sees in teams across Amazon. The first one says it all: the job is no longer to write code, it is to write the intent and verify that the output matches it. The other nine are about the environment that makes agents work better.

Javi does not find it revealing, but he finds it well structured. His reflection: if what motivates you is to type code, this transition hurts. The alternative is in the other nine principles, in building the harness so the AI meets human standards. Pablo does not miss writing code, and Rafa, as he says, no longer does either. Watch in the video.

Spotify cuts Claude Code tokens by 90% with two hooks and Gemini 2.5 Flash

Dimitri Mazmanov, Principal Product Manager at Spotify, published how he reduced his Claude Code usage. A PreToolUse hook blocks reads of files over 350 lines and redirects them to a bulk-reader skill. That skill reads the files with Gemini 2.5 Flash at temperature 0.2 and returns only a list of bullet points.

A second skill, code-writer, delegates mechanical code to the same cheap model from an example of the existing pattern. The idea is simple: Claude thinks, the cheap model reads and writes. Pablo warns that he has not tried it and that the Fable subscription in low already pays off for him. With pay per use he would consider it. Watch in the video.

The utility of the week

Ice

Free macOS utility that hides menu bar icons in two levels: the ones you show with a click and the ones you almost never touch. Javi has used it since Bartender stopped working well. Its only problem was that the hover stole the focus from the active application. The fix: disable the open-on-hover option in the settings and assign a keyboard shortcut to each hidden section.

icemenubar.app

The chat weighs in

albertcuestascasas3300: That is not how herdr works. If you close the terminal your agent keeps going because the server runs the agent. But if the machine hibernates it stops there, and when you open it you have the agents back

ciltocruz: For Windows, a great clipboard manager is Ditto. I share it as my micro-tool of the week

albertolahuerta: No pain, no gain, or also the saying: you do not learn on someone else's back. Since you removed the proverb section, here you have one

Agenda

NSSpain XIV in Logroño · 2026-09-16
OpenExpo Europe in Madrid · 2026-09-22
React Alicante 2026 · 2026-09-24
GeeksCAT Conf, the evolution of the Festa Open Source, in Girona · 2026-09-25
Software Crafters Barcelona 2026, with the café live from the BAU · 2026-10-16

The song of the week

Pablo: «Give Me the Night» — George Benson (It came up on his Spotify radio and he saved it for the café. Disco vibe with a guitar and a bass line that, Javi confirms, have groove.) Watch in the video.

Javi: «A la sombra de mi sombra» — Extrechinato y Tú (From the album where Fito, Robe and Manolo Chinato put music to Chinato's poetry. Pablo did not know the record and liked all of it.) Watch in the video.

The café's music playlist: cdly.to/playlist

The saying of the week

«Puerco fiado gruñe todo el año»

A pig bought on credit grunts all year: debts bring continuous trouble because the creditor never stops asking. Javi picks it with his eyes covered, always under the letter P. It is the last official week of the proverb section, and the chat proposes its replacement: no pain, no gain. Watch in the video.

More Codely

Event Bus en Kafka: diseño de infraestructura

The course moves to the software architecture category because an event bus is a piece of infrastructure and an architecture pattern at the same time. It explains how the Kafka Queues from KIP-932 work and how to design your event system with them.

The joke of the week: What does a .GIF say to a .JPEG? Get animated, old man.

All the news we covered

#CaféConCodely · @CodelyTV · Previous cafés: cdly.to/cafe

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