←Ben’s Bites Waybackbensbites.com/p/ai-talent-wars-are-pure-drama17 Jul 2025sent to 137,688opened 39.6%clicks 12,201unsubs 120← 15 Jul · 22 Jul → · random

The newsletter for ai builders of all levels. Mini-tutorials, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.

We’ve got a few open ad slots over the summer. Wanna partner with us39?


Hey folks,

A teaser from OpenAI526 on something launching today. I’ve tested an early preview and sure it’s interesting enough but not revolutionary…(yet?) You can probably guess what it is, or just check X for any recent leaks 👀.

ChatGPT’s image creation is one of the best, but it’s not really great when you want to do precise edits to an existing image. OpenAI just added high-fidelity editing to their Image API293. Editing faces, logos, and other details will now result in fewer instances of irrelevant changes.

Google is finally making 2.5 Pro available on AI mode in search134 (+ deep research too). It’s still under a dropdown, not the default. And if you’re a normal google search user, it still takes 3+ clicks after you’ve hit enter on your query to reach ai mode. And search can make a call on your behalf to local business but i’ll trust that one when I try it - been watching that demo for half a decade now 😅.

The leaders of Claude Code left Anthropic a couple weeks ago for Cursor, but Anthropic has played Uno reverse. Both are back at Anthropic353. Claude Code supremacy continues. And feels like Anthropic is doubling down on features for Claude Code. Organisations that use Claude Code can now access detailed analytics125 of their org wide use.

I’m tinkering with Claude Code interface for non-technical people so you don’t have to use it through the terminal (because Claude Code is just generally the best agent I’ve used, not just for coding tasks), and a few other UX/UI abstractions to make it easy. Will open-source when it’s in a reasonable state (bit rough around the edges atm but works!)

Voxtral129, a new family of voice transcription models from Mixtral, is worth paying attention to. It comes in two variants 3B and 24B—the 3B one is nice and small for running on your laptop and gives you roughly similar performance on audio transcription as Gemini 2.5 Flash. The 24B variant is good for self-hosting for companies because latency and cost will be much better than using a closed-source provider.

Hostinger Horizons is doing a live session on how to turn idea into apps without code/with AI for Ben’s Bites readers. Next Thursday, 24th July. Register here144.

A quick shoutout to AI Tinkerers112 - I went to the LDN event yesterday and met some great people. There were some awesome demos too, my favourite was personalised Hacker News166 - you rate 10 random posts to onboard (swipe or click) then the feed shows you tags on what you’ll love, may like, and want to skip. You can see the prompt they generate for you and tweak it too if you’d like. I replaced my pinned HN with this one 😃. Josh built an MCP with auth and payments in 10 minutes. And I spoke to the founder of Superoptix64 - an agentic ai framework that automates the harder parts (ie, not the agent set up bit).


🌐 What I’m consuming


⚙️ Tools I’m looking into

  • Chronicle499 helps you make designer-grade presentations with AI for free. It is like Cursor for presentations!*

  • Asimov265 - The coding research agent built for understanding code, not just generating it.

  • Mozart AI231 - Your music co-producer that helps with inspiration, suggestions, and improvements for every sound you create.

  • Toksta286 - Saves hours of manual digging when finding startups that solve your exact problem.

  • Supermemory Graph248 - View and navigate across all your memories and their connections.

  • Appier183 - Shopify for making SaaS with built-in database, auth and more.

  • ChatGPT’s record mode298 is now available in Plus plan too, on the MacOS desktop app.

*sponsored

🥣 Dev dish

  • FireGEO233 - Open source Semrush for AI. Monitor your website’s presence in AI search results.

  • Sniffly82 - A tool to analyse Claude Code logs and understand your usage patterns and errors.

  • Make it Heavy76 - framework to simulate Grok Heavy functionality, fully open-source and running in your terminal.

  • dotcom.chat124† - an open-source, minimal, functional MCP client.

  • How to install Claude Code to GitHub93 and use it as a background agent. (video)


🍦 Afters

  • 50 articles about designing AI products426. A good read if you’re a product/frontend person looking to get upto speed on what matters in an AI-native app.

  • Andrew Ng is starting AI Aspire203 - an advisory firm to help companies with AI strategy (in partnership with Bain & Company).

  • OpenAI might be partnering with Shopify to let users buy via ChatGPT. OpenAI might take a cut82 from these sales.

  • Perplexity64 and Gemini61 are offering a free subscription to a wide user base in India.

  • And a massive shout-out to Anne-Laure who I’ve known for many years and invited me to chat with her - my first time in a podcast studio!


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


AI talent wars are pure drama
an attempt at making claude code user friendly

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695youtube.com/watch?v=XHqC70la8Xc
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426lukew.com/ff?tag=ai design
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346firstround.com/ai/shopify
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270youtube.com/watch?v=EjLkFc1xgR4

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Substack · essay