G'day. Five releases from the last day or so, why each one matters, and how to try it. Every one is free this week. About a five-minute read.

Steam's October Next Fest started at 4am Sydney time today and runs until 4am on Tuesday 27 October. It's Valve's showcase of games that aren't out yet: you can play free demos, watch developer livestreams and chat with the people making them. Every game in the fest has to release after 26 October, so you're playing things before almost anyone else does.

Why it matters: it's the cheapest way to find next year's favourite game, and wishlists and demo feedback during the fest really do shape which small studios make it.

TRY IT → free. Open the Next Fest page in Steam, filter by genre, and install a few demos. Wishlist anything you like so Steam tells you when it launches. Steam: Next Fest · Steamworks: October 2026 dates and rules

Superlite is a new open-source plugin for Claude Code, announced on Monday by engineering manager Iheatu Chris Wogu. You describe what you want, answer one batch of questions and approve one plan. It then splits the build into tasks that can run side by side, gives each task to the cheapest Claude model that can handle it (Opus plans, Sonnet builds, Haiku takes the simple jobs), and reviews the result. Instead of stopping to ask you things, it writes down each decision it made so you can check them later. It still stops before anything destructive, public-facing or security-sensitive, and it never pushes or merges without you. In the author's own benchmark it built a test project in 16.1 minutes, against 33.6 minutes for the popular Superpowers workflow, with both passing all 177 hidden tests.

Why it matters: most agent time goes on waiting for a human to say "yes". This is a working example of handing over the boring approvals while keeping the risky ones.

TRY IT → the plugin is free (MIT licence, according to its README). You pay for the Claude usage it runs on, and the author notes it can cost more than Superpowers. In Claude Code, run /plugin marketplace add iha2/superlite, then /plugin install superlite@superlite-dev. Don't switch on Superpowers in the same session. GitHub: iha2/superlite · The author's write-up

Sphinx is a new open-source tool that adds an understanding check to agent-written code. When you push to a protected branch, such as main, Git waits while Sphinx asks you to predict what your change will do. A separate reviewer model writes the questions from the committed code, without seeing the chat that produced it. Get one wrong and it explains, then gives you a new scenario. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Pi or a plain git push, and there's a "Skip this time" button when you're in a hurry.

Why it matters: vibe coding is fast until something breaks and nobody knows how the code works. This makes sure at least one human does before it ships.

TRY IT → free (MIT licence). The reviews run on your existing Claude Code or Codex plan, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you pay only for those tokens. Install sphinx-understand from npm, then run sphinx install. It runs on macOS, Linux or WSL, not on native Windows yet. Note that it sets your global Git hooks, so it checks pushes to main in every repository on your machine until you change that. Sphinx · npm: sphinx-understand

Steph Ango (kepano), Obsidian's CEO, has released Pele, a new library for drawing diagrams and charts from Mermaid syntax, the plain-text format that AI chatbots and coding agents use for flowcharts. He says it's 100 to 500 times faster than mermaid.js, has a bundle six times smaller, has no dependencies, is easy to theme and adapts to screen width. He says it will be the renderer in the next version of Obsidian.

Why it matters: AI tools write a lot of Mermaid diagrams, and slow rendering makes long notes and docs crawl. This is a drop-in way to make them snappy in your own apps and docs.

TRY IT → free (MIT licence). Paste a diagram into the playground on pele.run, or add it to a web project with npm install pele. Pele · kepano's announcement

Riot Games' K/DA, the virtual pop group made up of League of Legends champions, released a new single and music video on Monday, FIRESTARTER. It features MIYEON and SOYEON of i-dle, Sophie Powers and Mimi Webb, and it passed 2.6 million YouTube views within its first day. Riot says the full FIRESTARTER EP is out on 21 October.

Why it matters: it's one of the slickest examples of a game studio running a full music brand, and a reminder that the line between games, animation and pop keeps getting thinner.

TRY IT → free on YouTube. You can pre-save the EP from League of Legends' post on X. YouTube: K/DA FIRESTARTER · League of Legends on X: EP date

Also shipped

Skip this: agent setups that "never ask permission" for anything. Even Superlite stops before pushing, merging or doing anything destructive. Keep whatever agent you run set up the same way.

Five to Try is curated with AI help and checked by a human. Hit reply and tell us what you tried.

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