News from across the stack.

Grokified has launched an independent, OpenAI-compatible proxy service that routes requests directly to the official xAI API at half the standard list price. The service adds less than 5ms of latency and maintains a zero prompt retention policy, passing all prompts, completions, and tool calls straight through without modification. The 50% discount applies to all Grok models, including text, reasoning, image, and vision capabilities, up to a maximum savings cap of $5,000. After reaching this threshold, developers retain a permanent 3% discount. To help users test the integration, the service offers $10 in free credits upon signup without requiring a credit card, which translates to $20 of active API usage.

Anthropic's community plugin repository includes an ELI5 skill for Claude that turns a topic into a deliberately simple visual explainer. The skill asks Claude to produce an HTML artifact with large illustrations and very little text, making it useful for onboarding, teaching, or translating a technical system for a non-specialist audience. It accepts a topic as its argument and can be installed from the public plugin repository. The implementation is intentionally small, so teams can inspect the prompt before using it or adapt the pattern for their own explanation skills. The repository page includes the skill definition and a short usage example.

The You developer platform now advertises $100 in introductory API credit for new accounts. Its free Web Search tier also includes 100 queries per day without an API key, while paid search starts at $5 per 1,000 calls. The same credit can be used across Search, Contents, Answer, Research, and Finance Research APIs. Search responses combine web and news results with structured metadata, snippets, freshness controls, and optional full-page extraction. Developers can also connect through the company's MCP endpoint. The offer is most useful for testing retrieval, grounding, research, or agent workflows before committing to usage-based billing.

A new open-source utility converts technical books, PDFs, and document directories into structured agent skills compatible with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Amp. Operating under the open Agent Skills standard, the tool parses documents locally to generate a core index, glossaries, patterns, and individual chapter files. Instead of loading an entire book into context for a single query, the agent loads specific chapters on demand. Benchmarks show this approach uses 24 to 51 times fewer tokens than standard document dumping. The tool supports multiple input formats, including PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML, and Markdown, automatically selecting appropriate extractors based on document structure.

OpenAI has deployed fixes for several problems that caused Codex allowances to drain faster than expected and reset usage for paid subscriptions. The identified issues included image-heavy long sessions with repeated compaction, unusually high consumption from Computer History, and a conversation-title feature using more capacity than intended. The reset restores affected users' available usage, while the fixes are intended to make future consumption more predictable. Business-account availability was still propagating when the update was issued. This is an allowance correction rather than a permanent increase to published limits, so developers should continue checking their own usage meter and plan documentation.

OpenRouter now lists Ox Alpha as a free stealth reasoning model aimed at coding, long-running agent work, and production workflows. The preview accepts text, images, and video, returns text, and exposes a 1,048,576-token context window with up to 131,072 output tokens. Function calling and JSON response formatting are supported. The model's developer and operator remain anonymous, and OpenRouter explicitly says it only routes requests rather than owning the model. Prompts and completions are retained by the provider but are not used for training, so the free price should not be mistaken for zero data retention. OpenRouter reports one active provider and near-continuous availability during the latest three-day window.