Meta's AI flop 🤖, Google Maps redesign 🗺️, Perplexity Agent API 🧑‍💻

Perplexity's API platform is the standout item — it's now a model-agnostic, full-stack agent platform giving developers access to its real-time search index, frontier model switching, and the same execution environment Perplexity uses internally. Meta's "Avocado" foundation model is delayed to at least May after underperforming rivals on reasoning and coding benchmarks. Also notable: Shopify applied an Autoresearch-style semi-autonomous experiment loop to find micro-optimizations in Liquid, achieving 53% faster parse+render — a concrete example of AI-assisted performance engineering on a mature codebase.