The Handala hackers associated with Iran have breached the personal email account of FBI Director Kash Patel and published photos and documents.

The FBI has confirmed the compromise, saying that the stolen data was not recent and did not include any government data.

​On Friday, the Handala threat actor announced on one of their websites that Patel has been added to the list of their victims, alleging that they compromised “the so-called ‘impenetrable’ systems of the FBI” in just a few hours.

The hackers said that their action was in response to the FBI seizing Handala domains and the U.S. government offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on the threat group’s members.

However, the hackers had breached the FBI Director’s personal Gmail inbox.

“All personal and confidential information of Kash Patel, including emails, conversations, documents, and even classified files, is now available for public download,” the Handala hackers said before publishing proof of the breach.

Shortly after the announcement, the threat actor published a set of watermarked personal photos and documents extracted from Patel’s inbox, along with email correspondence from before becoming FBI director.

​In a statement for BleepingComputer, the FBI said that it was aware of hackers “targeting Director Patel’s personal email information.”

The agency further notes that it has taken every necessary precaution to reduce any negative impact that may result from this activity.

​The Handala hacktivist group has previously breached the Microsoft environment of medical technology giant Stryker and wiped nearly 80,000 devices.

​Also known as Handala Hack, Hatef, and Hamsa, the actor emerged in December 2023 and is a hacktivist persona carrying out cyber activities for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

​In the statement on the compromise of Director Patel’s personal email account, the FBI reiterated the $10 million reward from the Department of State’s Rewards for Justice “for information leading to the identification of the Handala Hack Team out of Iran.”

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• Weekend work has risen over 40% as schedules start earlier, but productivity gains remain uneven
• AI adoption has integrated deeply, increasing time spent across all tasks
• Collaboration and multitasking have surged, while uninterrupted focus reaches a three-year low

The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence created the impression that humans would complete tasks faster and reduce workplace burdens.

But new data from the ActivTrak Productivity Lab’s 2026 State of the Workplace analysis claims workplace activity is not shrinking in the way many expected.

Last week, one of our product managers (PMs) built and shipped a feature. Not spec’d it. Not filed a ticket for it. Built it, tested it, and shipped it to production. In a day.

A few days earlier, our designer noticed that the visual appearance of our IDE plugins had drifted from the design system. In the old world, that meant screenshots, a JIRA ticket, a conversation to explain the intent, and a sprint slot. Instead, he opened an agent, adjusted the layout himself, experimented, iterated, and tuned in real time, then pushed the fix. The person with the strongest design intuition fixed the design directly. No translation layer required.

None of this is new in theory. Vibe coding opened the gates of software creation to millions. That was aspiration. When I shared the data on how our engineers doubled throughput, shifted from coding to validation, brought design upfront for rapid experimentation, it was still an engineering story. What changed is that the theory became practice. Here’s how it actually played out.

The bottleneck moved

When we went AI-first in 2025, implementation cost collapsed. Agents took over scaffolding, tests, and the repetitive glue code that used to eat half the sprint. Cycle times dropped from weeks to days, from days to hours. Engineers started thinking less in files and functions and more in architecture, constraints, and execution plans.

But once engineering capacity stopped being the bottleneck, we noticed something: Decision velocity was. All the coordination mechanisms we’d built to protect engineering time (specs, tickets, handoffs, backlog grooming) were now the slowest part of the system. We were optimizing for a constraint that no longer existed.

What happens when building is cheaper than coordination

We started asking a different question: What would it look like if the people closest to the intent could ship the software directly?

PMs already think in specifications. Designers already define structure, layout, and behavior. They don’t think in syntax. They think in outcomes. When the cost of turning intent into working software dropped far enough, these roles didn’t need to “learn to code.” The cost of implementation simply fell to their level.

I asked one of our PMs, Dmitry, to describe what changed from his perspective. He told me: “While agents are generating tasks in Zenflow, there’s a few minutes of idle time. Just dead air. I wanted to build a small game, something to interact with while you wait.”

If you’ve ever run a product team, you know this kind of idea. It doesn’t move a KPI. It’s impossible to justify in a prioritization meeting. It gets deferred forever. But it adds personality. It makes the product feel like someone cared about the small details. These are exactly the things that get optimized out of every backlog grooming session, and exactly the things users remember.

He built it in a day.

In the past, that idea would have died in a prioritization spreadsheet. Not because it was bad, but because the cost of implementation made it irrational to pursue. When that cost drops to near zero, the calculus changes completely.

Shipping became cheaper than explaining

As more people started building directly, entire layers of process quietly vanished. Fewer tickets. Fewer handoffs. Fewer “can you explain what you mean by…” conversations. Fewer lost-in-translation moments.

For a meaningful class of tasks, it became faster to just build the thing than to describe what you wanted and wait for someone else to build it. Think about that for a second. Every modern software organization is structured around the assumption that implementation is the expensive part. When that assumption breaks, the org has to change with it.

Our designer fixing the plugin UI is a perfect example. The old workflow (screenshot the problem, file a ticket, explain the gap between intent and implementation, wait for a sprint slot, review the result, request adjustments) existed entirely to protect engineering bandwidth. When the person with the design intuition can act on it directly, that whole stack disappears. Not because we eliminated process for its own sake, but because the process was solving a problem that no longer existed.

The compounding effect

Here’s what surprised me most: It compounds.

When PMs build their own ideas, their specifications get sharper, because they now understand what the agent needs to execute well. Sharper specs produce better agent output. Better output means fewer iteration cycles. We’re seeing velocity compound week over week, not just because the models improved, but because the people using them got closer to the work.

Dmitry put it well: The feedback loop between intent and outcome went from weeks to minutes. When you can see the result of your specification immediately, you learn what precision the system needs, and you start providing it instinctively.

There’s a second-order effect that’s harder to measure but impossible to miss: Ownership. People stop waiting. They stop filing tickets for things they could just fix. “Builder” stopped being a job title. It became the default behavior.

What this means for the industry

A lot of the “everyone can code” narrative last year was theoretical, or focused on solo founders and tiny teams. What we experienced is different. We have ~50 engineers working in a complex brownfield codebase: Multiple surfaces and programming languages, enterprise integrations, the full weight of a real production system. 

I don’t think we’re unique. I think we’re early. And with each new generation of models, the gap between who can build and who can’t is closing faster than most organizations realize. Every software company is about to discover that their PMs and designers are sitting on unrealized building capacity, blocked not by skill, but by the cost of implementation. As that cost continues to fall, the organizational implications are profound.

We started with an intent to accelerate software engineering. What we’re becoming is something different: A company where everyone ships.

Andrew Filev is founder and CEO of Zencoder.

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Bluesky is the latest social media platform to throw its hat into the AI chatbot ring. Bluesky, but specifically its chief innovation officer Jay Graber and her new Exploration team, built a new AI assistant called Attie that’s designed to help users create custom feeds. Graber called Attie an “agentic social app” that’s built on its its open-source framework called the AT Protocol.

To use Attie, users can punch in prompts in natural language to generate social feeds without having to know how to code. On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, “Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network” or “Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design.”

“It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software,” Graber described Attie in a blog post. “You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described.”

Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don’t have to use the new AI assistant if they don’t want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol. Attie is currently available on an invite-only closed beta, but anyone interested can sign up for the waitlist on its website in the meantime.

It’s a sad day for the dozens of players still grinding The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Bethesda announced that it’s permanently shutting down the servers for its free-to-play mobile spinoff on June 30. First spotted on Reddit, The Elder Scrolls: Blades has already been delisted from the App Store and Google Play store, and is currently unavailable on the Nintendo Store.

In the meantime, players will receive a free bundle of Gems and Sigils, while all items in the in-game store are available for just one Gem or Sigil each. With a server shutdown imminent, The Elder Scrolls: Blades‘ will at least cross its six-year mark since its official release was in 2020 for Android, iOS and Nintendo Switch. The dungeon-crawling spinoff did see early success when more than one million iOS users downloaded the game during the first week of its early access period, but it never amounted to the commercial success of Bethesda’s mainline titles.

In the end, The Elder Scrolls: Blades ended up with a “Generally Unfavorable” score on Metacritic, with critics calling it “repetitive” and filled with microtransactions. The shutdown doesn’t come as a total surprise, since Bethesda also killed off its other spinoff, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, by halting development in 2019 and ultimately taking the game’s servers offline in January 2025. For anyone who still wants to play a mobile spinoff of Bethesda’s fantasy world, there’s still The Elder Scrolls: Castles.