American startup Reflection AI has introduced Beam, a new open-weight AI model designed to compete with some of China's most advanced AI systems while using far less computing power. Unveiled on October 5, Beam is built for coding, complex reasoning, and AI-agent tasks. The company claims its model can match leading Chinese alternatives, including Z.ai's GLM-5.2, while using three to four times less computing power for certain reasoning tasks. The announcement has attracted attention across the AI industry, with some investors describing Reflection AI as the "DeepSeek of the West." However, Beam's performance claims have not yet been independently verified.…
In September 2026, we started replacing Jira, the project-tracking tool we had been using, with our own tool, Icecat Projects. A month later, our teams use it every day, and much of the work in it is done by artificial intelligence (AI) agents: programs that take on a task, carry it out and report back. Here is what inspired us, what we built, and what we learned. Why leave Jira Our coding agents could already write code. What they lacked was a place to receive work, ask questions and report back. A Jira ticket is written for a colleague who…
