I write a newsletter about startups and investing—for ai builders of all levels.

I record mini-tutorials, review tools I’m testing, share my insights from an exited founder turned investor.

a big few days of launches, and ofc i’ve been sick - but feeling better and i’ve got two vids today from two actually good ai tools;

first up, factory^1,114. it’s finally available for general access. sign up and use it now^1,114.

here’s me using it to change a load of code across different files.

(also on youtube²⁰⁶)

so this is a background agent, it’ll write code for you, submit PRs, etc. it’s also the first platform that allows you to work with agents: local + synchronous and remote + asynchronous.

i’ve tried a lot of background agents; cursor, codex, jules, devin etc and factory did what i asked with zero problems (and zero lines of code written by me).

(disclaimer - i’m an investor, and a really fucking happy one with how well this works)

next up, retool agents. you can use it here⁸⁰⁹.

retool was around in the no-code days to help teams create internal tools but it was more low-code and less no code tbh. BUT NOW….

they’ve released their ‘Agents’, which is a super simple agent builder with a lot of powerful features; mcps, workflows, trigger via email or chat, evals, datasets and logs.

these are all the tools devs have available today but now non-devs can use them too!

here’s me building a couple of agents in less than 10 mins.

(also on youtube²⁵⁵)

this is genuinely one of the simplest ways i’ve tried to create agents - particularly ones that aren’t basic ones. Like my founder analysis tool is just an agent with an interface now (or trigger by email).

retool benefits from having years of building a lot of components for workflows over the years, and now their AI system has access to those.

the ai assistant helps craft instructions, creates its own tools you can use and customise.

i truly recommend this to build agents⁸⁰⁹, and share them with the community to inspire one another and remix interesting ones!

🔎 News worth knowing

• Claude is getting a voice mode in beta¹²⁰, will start rolling out next week. I’m still not over the hump using ChatGPT voice mode, for one, it keeps thinking im speaking welsh - i know like 4 words and have a faint accent. and secondly, the interrupting just doesn’t let you take a few secs to think.

• Telegram will integrate Grok⁹¹ in its app for $300M in cash/equity and 50% of the revenue of Grok subscriptions sold via Telegram. Elon, we’re open to inserting Grok in the newsletter for just slightly less…

• Run LLMs on audio¹³⁰ with AssemblyAI’s Speech API to get transcripts, summaries, sentiment, and Q&A. One API for accurate transcription and advanced speech understanding. Try the API¹³⁰ today.*

*sponsored

want to partner with us? Click here³⁴

🌐 What I’m consuming

• AI eats the world⁹⁸³ by Ben Evans.

• Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software⁴⁴⁶, says Rick Rubin, Pmarca, Ben and Ben.

• State of AI in the Enterprise³⁸⁵ report from Box.

⚙️ Tools I’m tinkering with

• MagicPath⁴¹⁹ - Design beautiful components for functional applications with AI. (raised $6.6M seed)

• Clado AI³⁸³ - Search over 200 million profiles, finding you thousands of people for sales, recruiting, and more from a simple prompt.

• Zapier Agents²⁶³ - Organise, monitor, and launch fully autonomous AI workflows.

• Parabola⁵¹⁰ - Automate the work that you thought would always be manual.

• Experience by Odyssey²⁰¹ - AI video you can watch and interact with, in real-time! (demo¹⁰³)

• Zochi by Intology AI²⁰¹ - PhD level research agent with its paper accepted at ACL 2025.

• Fairies^282† - The best general-purpose agent for builders.

• Sky⁵⁰³ - AI that floats over anything you do on your Mac.

• Slack AI¹¹⁶ customers can now get summaries of their Catch Up cards. (anyone use the catch up cards?!)

• Token Monster^451† - The most powerful chatbot on Earth. Automatically routes prompts to the best models + combines results. I just got Matt to add Exa too :)

🥣 Dev dish

• Agents API by Mistral¹⁰² - it has built-in connections for code execution, web search, MCP tools and more.

• Elevenlabs²⁰² now lets you initiate hundreds of outbound calls simultaneously.

• typed-ffmpeg⁹⁹ - a modern, Pythonic interface to FFmpeg.

• edamagit⁸¹ - Magit for VSCode

• Stay¹⁴³ - Visualise data structures & algorithms in real time.

• Tesseral¹⁰⁰ - open-source auth

🍦 Afters

• I pre-ordered The magic of code³³⁴ - new book coming next month from the author of the half-life of facts.

• I’m judging Bolt’s vibe coding hackathon^108† starting tomorrow. Lovable is also planning one⁸⁰.

• Production grade AI Memory¹¹⁶ - June 18th, SF.

• The Economist is hiring¹⁰⁴ a technical lead for their AI lab.

That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋

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