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.

Hey folks,

Quick house-keeping;

Ben’s Bites Fund II is now live! I’ll be sharing the deck, link, etc either tomorrow or early next week. If you’re interested in potentially investing in the fund, pop your details here⁵⁰⁶. (my previous 2 funds are top-decile performing and I’m focusing on AI developer tools and infra) - Bridging devs to non-devs and giving technical founders distribution.

If you’re thinking about what to do next (start a co, join an early team etc), fill in this 1-min form⁴³⁰ - 87% of folks already want to meet similar people, 61% want to start a company and 62% want to join a founding team. There’s lots of talented, ambitious builders in this group and I’ll announce more on this soon…

Comments under free newsletter posts are now open to everyone - email replies get threaded and hard to respond to! If you want to talk about anything feel free to comment or join the chat.

If you want to sponsor this email and get a bunch of users, get in touch⁸⁶.

I attended a16z’s London Speedrun meetup last night and met some awesome folks, many of which read this email - hey dave, martin, and others! It was pretty much just a social mixer with the awkward dance of do I stand on my own or be the approacher, scary stuff. Speedrun is interesting because in a year they’ve amassed almost the same number of applications as YC.

Cursor has hired two leaders from the Claude Code team¹⁰⁵ (CC). Boris Cherny¹¹⁵, CC’s maker, will join Anysphere (Cursor’s parent company) as head of engineering and Cat Wu¹⁵⁵, CC’s PM, will join as head of product at Cursor. Cursor and Claude Code are both great products and desperately need the features of each other.

Cursor is going to look a lot different in the coming months - I frequently ask Claude Code to spawn multiple parallel agents so I assume thats already on the way, but also task management is great in CC (although less visual).

Grammarly acquired Superhuman³⁹⁹. I guess me refusing to pay for Grammarly means nothing now I give them (via Superhuman) $40/mo.

Restive Ventures¹²⁵ is now accepting applications from startups using AI to reinvent financial services. They will invest $500k+ at market terms and open up their extensive network of founders, regulators, and industry leaders. Apply now⁸⁴ to partner with one of fintech's leading early-stage funds!*

SF Compute is partnering with Modular to offer fast compute at market prices⁶⁷. Its new Large Scale Inference (LSI)⁵¹ service is OpenAI compatible and can be used for off-the-shelf open models and custom models. If you’re a growing startup, reach out to them.

*sponsored

want to partner with us? Click here⁸⁶

🌐 What I’m consuming

• New work from Sakana AI lets models collaborate¹⁴⁰ with each other to improve performance on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark.

• A comparison of open-source RL libraries¹⁸⁹ for LLMs.

• How Exa built its multi-agent web research system²⁴⁶ with LangGraph and LangSmith.

• The missing guide to subagents in Claude Code³⁸⁶.

• I shipped a macOS app^715† built entirely by Claude Code.

• Coding agents 101⁴⁶³ - A practical guide to using them for engineers.

• How to give Claude Code access to a browser³¹⁵ that you can also use.

• Walking away from Arc and building Dia²⁵⁷ as the AI native browser.

• Tools you need to build claude code³⁷⁵ on your own.

⚙️ Tools I’m looking into

• CodeRabbit¹⁴⁸ reviews every PR with AI, offers smart fixes, and supports AST Grep rules. Free for open-source.*

• Lazy⁴²¹ - One shortcut to capture & chat with your notes, everywhere.

• Terminal by Merit⁹⁰ - Remove administrative overhead for paying open-source projects and contributors.

• String¹⁴⁹ - Text to agent creators with a special focus on connecting platforms to each other. (demo⁷⁷)

• ChilledSites⁴⁵² - Build professional-looking websites without paying thousands to agencies.

• Stagehand¹⁷⁹ (browser automation library) is now in python too. pip install stagehand

• Shortcut³⁶² - One-shot most knowledge work tasks you would do on Excel. (demo²⁴¹)

²⁴¹

*sponsored

🍦 Afters

• Bethany from our community is launching a cohort for AI builders this August. Check it out at buildfirst.ai²⁴⁵

• Vibe2prod²²³ - hire an engineer to convert your “work on my laptop” code to production-ready stack.

• Over the last 12 months, 95.8% of ChatGPT users visited Google, while 9.8% of Google users visited ChatGPT - from similarweb¹¹¹

• Pay per crawl¹⁰⁹ beta by CloudFlare allows publishers on the web to charge AI scrapers.

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

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• Read about me⁴⁶ and ben’s bites