Three AI Coding Stories, Three Numbers to Read

ZCode was caught silently packaging entire Git histories for cloud upload, with .git objects making up 86.6% of snapshots. HarnessTax benchmarked Claude Fable 5 across frameworks: Claude Code and minimal Pi achieved near-identical success rates but a 2x cost gap. A Microsoft architect replaced multi-model agent loops with a single model reading skill docs and calling tools directly—halving API calls but increasing total tokens by 22%. Each story unpacks one number and a reminder to check which layer a metric actually measures.

Why it matters: Three distinct AI coding stories bundled into one piece. The ZCode silent snapshot upload is a hard security story backed by ferstar's forensic report and community reproduction. HarnessTax benchmark and Microsoft architecture case add billing and engineering angles. HKR all h...