Elemental Informatics

https://sol.elementalinformatics.com/news/daily-news-summary-2026-05-10.html

This daily news summary is just one example of what you can do with our virtual assistant app, Element. No special tools required. Element is competent across a broad range of tasks. The same app that did this research and created this webpage can manage your calendar, work with your local files and files on your Google Drive, read and draft emails, generate images, manage large codebases, and just be generally helpful. No special tools or training required. You can treat it like a human coworker because it acts like a human coworker. Just talk to it.

Element can use AI you run on your own computer, giving you unparalleled data privacy and enabling compliance with almost any AI governance policies applicable to your org. The news summary you see here was entirely created with Element. It used its image generation tool to call the OpenAI gpt-images-2 API to create all of the graphics.

Element can also use AI available via commercial providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, or OpenRouter. In fact, we use Element to develop and maintain Element itself using GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7. All you need is an API key. When used with frontier AI, Element's capabilities are state of the art.

How popular is AI in coding? The short answer is "WAY more popular than it was a year ago."

This graph shows how many tokens were generated through the OpenRouter API. OpenRouter is very popular among coders who use AI so it's a pretty good indicator of overall growth in AI usage. During the week of August 5 2024, 100 billion tokens passed through their API. For the same week in 2025, they expect to see about 3.3 trillion tokens.

The idea that AI generates low quality code and that only low skill devs use it is rapidly fading into the past. Sure, there are low skill coders out there using AI to make some truly useless and buggy software, but there are a lot more genuinely skilled coders using it to greatly increase their output.

In other news, water is wet. Stay tuned to the Elemental Informatics page for more hard-hitting tech journalism.

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We haven't been posting much lately but it's because we've been flying from sunup to sundown every day in Nebraska doing agriculture stuff but don't worry, more cool drone content is coming soon!