Remote-first AI coding startup Kilo doesn’t think software developers should have to pledge their undying allegiance to any one development environment — and certainly not any one model or harness.

This week, the startup — backed by GitLab co-founder Sid Sijbrandij — unveiled Kilo CLI 1.0, a complete rebuild of its command-line tool that offers support for more than 500 different underlying AI models from proprietary leaders and open source rivals like Alibaba’s Qwen.

It comes just weeks after Kilo launched a Slackbot allowing developers to ship code directly from Salesforce’s popular messaging service (Slack, which VentureBeat also uses) powered by the Chinese AI startup MiniMax.

The release marks a strategic pivot away from the IDE-centric “sidebar” model popularized by industry giants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, or dedicated apps like the new OpenAI Codex, and even terminal-based rivals like Codex CLI and Claude Code, aiming instead to embed AI capabilities into every fragment of the professional software workflow.

By launching a model-agnostic CLI on the heels of its Slack bot, Kilo is making a calculated bet: the future of AI development isn’t about a single interface, but about tools that travel with the engineer between IDEs, terminals, remote servers, and team chat threads.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Kilo CEO and co-founder Scott Breitenother explained the necessity of this fluidity: “This experience just feels a little bit too fragmented right now… as an engineer, sometimes I’m going to use the CLI, sometimes I’m going to be in VS Code, and sometimes I’m going to be kicking off an agent from Slack, and folks shouldn’t have to be jumping around.”

He noted that Kilo CLI 1.0 is specifically “built for this world… for the developer who moves between their local IDE, a remote server via SSH, and a terminal session at 2 a.m. to fix a production bug.”

Technology: Rebuilding for ‘Kilo Speed’

Kilo CLI 1.0 is a fundamental architectural shift. While 2025 was the year senior engineers began to take AI vibe coding seriously, Kilo believes 2026 will be defined by the adoption of agents that can manage end-to-end tasks independently.

The new CLI is built on an MIT-licensed, open-source foundation, specifically designed to function in terminal sessions where developers often find themselves during critical production incidents or deep infrastructure work.

For Breitenother, building in the open is non-negotiable: “When you build in the open, you build better products. You get this great flywheel of contributors… your community is not just passive users. They’re actually part of your team that’s helping you develop your product… Honestly, some people might say open source is a weakness, but I think it’s our superpower.”

The core of this “agentic” experience is Kilo’s ability to move beyond simple autocompletion. The CLI supports multiple operational modes:

• Code Mode: For high-speed generation and multi-file refactors.

• Architect Mode: For high-level planning and technical strategy.

• Debug Mode: For systematic problem diagnosis and resolution.

Solving multi-session memory

To solve the persistent issue of “AI amnesia”—where an agent loses context between sessions—Kilo utilizes a “Memory Bank” feature.

This system maintains state by storing context in structured Markdown files within the repository, ensuring that an agent operating in the CLI has the same understanding of the codebase as the one working in a VS Code sidebar or a Slack thread.

The synergy between the new CLI and “Kilo for Slack” is central to the company’s “Agentic Anywhere” strategy. Launched in January, the Slack integration allows teams to fix bugs and push pull requests directly from a conversation.

Unlike competing integrations from Cursor or Claude Code —which Kilo claims are limited by single-repo configurations or a lack of persistent thread state — Kilo’s bot can ingest context from across multiple repositories simultaneously.

“Engineering teams don’t make decisions in IDE sidebars. They make them in Slack,” Breitenother emphasized.

Extensibility and the ‘superpower’ of open source

A critical component of Kilo’s technical depth is its support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This open standard allows Kilo to communicate with external servers, extending its capabilities beyond local file manipulation.

Through MCP, Kilo agents can integrate with custom tools and resources, such as internal documentation servers or third-party monitoring tools, effectively turning the agent into a specialized member of the engineering team.

This extensibility is part of Kilo’s broader commitment to model agnosticism. While MiniMax is the default for Slack, the CLI and extension support a massive array of over 500 models, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Gemini.

Pricing: The economy of ‘AI output per dollar’

Kilo is also attempting to disrupt the economics of AI development with “Kilo Pass,” a subscription service designed for transparency.

The company charges exact provider API rates with zero commission—$1 of Kilo credits is equivalent to $1 of provider costs.

Breitenother is critical of the “black box” subscription models used by others in the space: “We’re selling infrastructure here… you hit some sort of arbitrary, unclear line, and then you start to get throttled. That’s not how the world’s going to work.”

The Kilo Pass tiers offer “momentum rewards,” providing bonus credits for active subscribers:

• Starter ($19/mo): Up to $26.60 in credits.

• Pro ($49/mo): Up to $68.60 in credits.

• Expert ($199/mo): Up to $278.60 in credits.

To incentivize early adoption, Kilo is currently offering a “Double Welcome Bonus” until February 6th, giving users 50% free credits for their first two months.

For power users like Sylvain, this flexibility is a major draw: “Kilo Pass is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I can use my credits when I need them and save them when I don’t—it finally fits how I actually use AI.”

Community, security, and competition

The arrival of Kilo CLI 1.0 places it in direct conversation with terminal-native heavyweights: Anthropic’s Claude Code and Block’s Goose.

Outside of the terminal, in the more full featured IDE space, OpenAI recently launched a new Codex desktop app for macOS.

Claude Code offers a highly polished experience, but it comes with vendor lock-in and high costs—up to $200 per month for tiers that still include token-based usage caps and rate limits. Independent analysis suggests these limits are often exhausted within minutes of intensive work on large codebases.

OpenAI’s new Codex app similarly favors a platform-locked approach, functioning as a “command center for agents” that allows developers to supervise AI systems running independently for up to 30 minutes.

While Codex introduces powerful features like “Skills” to connect to tools like Figma and Linear, it is fundamentally designed to defend OpenAI’s ecosystem in a highly contested market.

Conversely, Kilo CLI 1.0 utilizes the MIT-licensed OpenCode foundation to deliver a production-ready Terminal User Interface (TUI) that allows engineers to swap between 500+ models.

This portability allows teams to select the best cost-to-performance ratio—perhaps using a lightweight model for documentation but swapping to a frontier model for complex debugging.

Regarding security, Kilo ensures that models are hosted on U.S.-compliant infrastructure like AWS Bedrock, allowing proprietary code to remain within trusted perimeters while leveraging the most efficient intelligence available.

Goose provides an open-source alternative that runs entirely on a user’s local machine for free, but seems more localized and experimental.

Kilo positions itself as the middle path: a production-hardened tool that maintains open-source transparency while providing the infrastructure to scale across an enterprise.

This contrasts with the broader market’s dual-use concerns; while OpenAI builds sandboxes to secure autonomous agents, Kilo’s open-core nature allows for a “superpower” level of community auditing and contribution.

The future: A ‘mech suit’ for the mind

With $8 million in seed funding and a “Right of First Refusal” agreement with GitLab lasting until August 2026, Kilo is positioning itself as the backbone of the next-generation developer stack.

Breitenother views these tools as “exoskeletons” or “mech suits” for the mind, rather than replacements for human engineers.

“We’ve actually moved our engineers to be product owners,” Breitenother reveals. “The time they freed up from writing code, they’re actually doing much more thinking. They’re setting the strategy for the product.”

By unbundling the engineering stack—separating the agentic interface from the model and the model from the IDE—Kilo provides a roadmap for a future where developers think architecturally while machines build the structure.

“It’s the closest thing to magic that I think we can encounter in our life,” Breitenother concludes. For those seeking “Kilo Speed,” the IDE sidebar is just the beginning.

The Microsoft Cordless Phone System debuted quietly in late 1998, marking the company’s first move into hardware. It plugged directly into a Windows PC, aiming to combine ordinary calls with the power of home computers. This product was launched on October 6th, and by November, it was available in stores for an anticipated price of $199.95 ($395 today).

The system consisted of three major components: a 900MHz cordless handset, a base unit, and a separate charging dock. People would simply plop the dock down wherever they thought it most convenient. The base unit would simply plug into a conventional landline and communicate with the computer via a serial port. Without the computer, you’d just receive a standard cordless phone, good for basic calls, with respectable range, clear sound, and 40 interference-free channels. It included all of the normal functions you’d expect, such as a hold button, redial, volume control, out-of-range alerts, and low power notifications.

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When it was connected to the PC, things became much more fascinating. Microsoft included Call Manager software that worked with Windows 95 and 98. The application requires a Pentium 90 or higher processor, at least 16MB of RAM (32MB was suggested), a sound card with a microphone and speakers, and an open serial connection. It wasn’t like you could just turn off the computer and let it do its thing; for complete functionality, the machine needed to be powered on with the program operating quietly in the background.

Call Manager was able to import contacts from the Windows address book, allowing you to manage phone numbers, set priorities, and even give personalized messages to certain callers. When you received an incoming call, the phone would read the caller’s name from the address book aloud if the Caller ID matched a contact, which could be useful for deciding whether to answer the phone right away.

Voice commands stood, as you would click a button on the phone, wait for the tone, and then simply say, “Call Dad,” and it would dial the appropriate number. Similar actions, such as “call back” and “delete message,” allow you to manage communications. On the PC side, Microsoft had included Voice integration, which allowed you to select a number off the screen and dial it up with a single voice command.

Voicemail has all the bells and whistles, with messages kept on the computer’s hard drive rather than a separate unit, and it could hold thousands of messages depending on how much space was available. You might create individual voicemail boxes for different members of your family or workplace, with bespoke greetings for each caller. Your top priority contacts would ring through, while others would be routed to voicemail or banned. Anyone could even access the messages remotely, which was quite handy. There’s your call log, which automatically records every incoming and outgoing call so you can readily review recent calls.

The package also included features like speed dial, do not disturb options, and voice notes. The phone was also capable of taking up calls on the handset and then routing them to the PC speakers. Sales, however, were more or less flat, since one of the most significant constraints was that in order to use it at all, you had to leave your Windows 9x system on all the time, which most people were not doing back in ’98, especially when they went to bed in the dark of night. Furthermore, it was more expensive than your average cordless phone, thus it only lasted a year or so on the market. After that, Microsoft largely abandoned the cordless phone concept and went on to other projects.

from the cascading-failure dept

It’s darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn’t funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we’re proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak in America continues to rage, immigration detention camps are starting to feel the effects.

Earlier this week reports indicated the Dilley detention center in Texas was going on a sort of soft lockdown due to confirmed cases of measles among those detained.

“ICE Health Services Corps immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread and infection, ceasing all movement within the facility and quarantining all individuals suspected of making contact with the infected,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin said medical officials were monitoring detainees and taking “appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection.”

“All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” she added.

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We are definitely in “prove it” territory when it comes to this administration and immigration questions. That’s all the more so if the government, as they’ve done via other excuses in the past, limits or restrains entry to these facilities from other lawmakers who want to check DHS’ homework and uses the measles outbreak as the reason for it.

Neha Desai, a lawyer for the California-based National Center of Youth Law, which represents children in U.S. immigration custody, said she hopes the measles infections at Dilley are not used to “unnecessarily” prevent lawmakers and attorneys from inspecting the detention center in the near future, citing broader concerns about the facility.

“In the meantime, we are deeply concerned for the physical and the mental health of every family detained at Dilley,” Desai said. “It is important to remember that no family needs to be detained — this is a choice that the administration is making.”

It’s also worth remembering that the spread of disease is a recurring feature in the concentration camp industry. Deaths from disease as well. And, unlike the trope mentioned above, these are infections immigrants are getting from America, not bringing to her soil.

And it’s not just one detention camp, either. The Florence Detention Center in Arizona is also dealing with measles infections.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports one ICE detainee in the Florence Detention Center in Pinal County tested positive for measles on Jan. 21.

Two more measles cases have recently been confirmed among people who are also in federal custody in the county, according to a spokesperson for the Pinal County Public Health Services District. But the spokesperson did not provide details about which facility the other two infected individuals are in, or whether any of the three cases in the county are linked.

As Desai said in the quote above, this is a choice. Or, rather, a series of choices. It’s a choice made by Trump and his minions to carry out this inhumane, disorganized, haphazard campaign of brutality on illegal immigrants. This could have gone many ways, but Trump chose cruelty on purpose. It’s a choice to put RFK Jr. in charge of America’s health and then watch idly, leaning back with folded arms, as the country experiences the worst measles outbreak in decades over the past 13 months. It’s a choice to not pivot on any of the above.

And it’s a choice to leave South Carolina swinging in the wind as the measles outbreak there will no doubt continue to spread to the rest of the country.

State health officials are reporting 29 new cases of measles in the state since Friday, bringing the total number of cases in South Carolina related to the Upstate outbreak to 876. The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) said there are currently 354 people in quarantine and 22 in isolation. The latest end of quarantine for these cases is Feb. 24.

Those numbers will continue to rise, but they are already breathtaking. 2025 saw a measles infection count nationwide of 2,267. South Carolina has generated nearly 40% of that total in one month in one state. 18 states have already had measles infections within their borders this year. The 2026 totals are going to make 2025 look like peanuts.

And it could potentially be hardest on the human beings who are shoved like sardines into these immigrant detention camps. Diseases like the measles will spread incredibly fast there. And, despite DHS’ claims to the contrary, I just can’t find it in me to believe that this administration is going to put a priority on detainee’s health.

Filed Under: arizona, concentration camp, dilley detention center, donald trump, florence detention center, ice, immigration, kristi noem, measles, rfk jr., south carolina

Once somewhat of an outcast in Hollywood, today ElevenLabs counts some big stars on its roster, and it has just raised a $500m series D round.

ElevenLabs has raised $500m in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital with partner Andrew Reed joining the board. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq participated, with new investors coming on board including  Lightspeed Venture Partners, Evantic Capital and Bond.

The new round gives ElevenLabs an $11bn valuation, more than tripling its valuation in the space of a year. ElevenLabs started out in 2022, developing a human-like AI text to speech model that got it into hot water in the early days with various Hollywood stars like Emma Watson. Voice actors took them to court at the time and ElevenLabs subsequently settled the lawsuit.

These days some of Hollywood’s elite are fully on board. In November 2025 it launched its Iconic Marketplace, adding actors Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey to its roster. Having been burnt early on, the company today describes Iconic Marketplace as solving “a key ethical challenge in AI-driven media creation by enabling the ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognisable voices”.

“We started by building a voice that could sound human – and we did,” said said Piotr Dabkowski, co-founder of ElevenLabs. “Today we are building foundational models across the full audio stack – text to speech, transcription, music, dubbing and conversational models with a world-leading research team.”

“This funding helps us go beyond voice alone to transform how we interact with technology altogether. We plan to expand our Creative offering – helping creators combine our best-in-class audio with video and Agents.”

ElevenLabs says the funding will help it to continue its international expansion across London, New York, San Francisco, Warsaw, Dublin, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bengaluru, Sydney, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris and Mexico City, where they plan to have “go-to-market teams” to support enterprise adoption.

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