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.

Hey folks,

I haven’t done a list of tools that I use regularly (aka my daily-drivers 😉) so here’s some that I switched to and have not churned from:

• Factory.ai^1,546 - browser-based AI coding tool. Super easy to use and the actual agent is better than Claude Code and others (ie it doesn’t just list files and search patterns). I used it this morning to build a timezone converter that works by highlighting text (here’s it in action^1,141). oh and some other BIG news coming here v soon.

• Granola^1,046 - it’s just the best meeting note taker. Not being present in the call is just better for everyone. They have a Zapier integration to pull out notes but waiting for their API/MCP so I can get factory to make some magic workflows and save to my folders. (linked my referral link but I dont get money, just pride)

• Dia Browser⁸²⁸ - having a quick AI assistant accessible on any web page or when opening a new tab has become a very go-to move for me. And I love the custom skills for quick workflows (like pull all the AI news from hacker news today). 5 free invites here⁶³⁶

• ChatGPT/Claude - mostly only using these on mobile atm to be honest. I flit between the two, no loyalties or ties to either tbh.

• Monologue^1,673 - this replaced Whispr Flow for me; speech-to-text transcription when on my laptop. (linked my referral link but again, no money, just dopamine)

And honestly, that’s pretty much it! I try a bunch of email tools but nothing is perfect, so I’m going to just use Factory to make my own (I’ve built A LOT with it recently - more actual shipped projects than previously using Claude Code). 🫨

OpenAI released a new speech-to-speech model called gpt-realtime¹³² for developers. Plus, the Realtime API now supports MCP and image inputs. Essentially, you now have the toolkit for building long audio/video chat sessions. Pricing’s not there though, gpt-relatime is 20% cheaper than gpt-4o’s realtime pricing, but it’s still too expensive to be packaged into a $20/mo plan. It is $32/$64 input/output per million “audio” tokens, that’s roughly 15 minutes of chatting per $1 of API spend.

xAI has a new coding model: Grok Code Fast 1⁹⁰. Unusual choice of optimisation (faster vs smarter), but users in Cline, Cursor and other tools are liking the model. I haven’t tried it yet.

After years of not training on users’ data by default¹⁰⁶, Anthropic will now start doing that from 28th Sept. Of course, you can opt out, but another one of Anthropic’s "oh we don’t do that—like other evil labs” is down the drain.

a16z releases its consumer apps data every 6 months, and Olivia found a spike in Claude’s traffic that she couldn’t explain. Keshav went through Ben’s Bites editions from that week and found a likely reason⁴¹².

Attio²¹³ is the AI-native CRM for the next generation of teams. Sync your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds your CRM—enriching every company, contact, and interaction with actionable insights in seconds. Join fast-growing teams like Granola, Flatfile, Modal, and more. Start for free today.²¹³*

ps: OpenAI has a dedicated page for startups³¹³ where they list build hours, cookbooks and guides.

*sponsored

🌐 What I’m consuming

• What AI policy for school boards³¹² can look like.

• Can AI help understand how the brain learns¹⁹⁰ to see the world?

• Demos and tips on how to use subagents³²⁰ in Claude Code.

• Mass Intelligence^267† - AI is no longer niche. Everyone is starting to get access to powerful AI.

• The state of play for AI creative tools³⁷¹.

⚙️ Tools to tinker with

• Sparkle Search³²⁹ - Easiest way to find the files on your desktop.

• OpenChat²⁴⁷ - Open-source macOS app to run AI models locally. (download⁶⁵ the app)

• Conductor¹⁷⁷ - Run a bunch of Claude Codes in parallel.

• Glif³²⁶ - Use nano-banana to create images with custom aspect ratios.

• into.md⁵⁴⁰ - Convert any webpage into LLM-friendly markdown.

⁵⁴⁰

*sponsored

🥣 Dev dish

• Xcode (Apple’s IDE) 26 Beta⁷¹ now works with both Claude and GPT-5.

• PR Arena¹²⁷ - Software engineering agents head-to-head.

• SemTools¹⁴⁰ - Add blazing-fast semantic search to your entire filesystem without a vector database.

• MCP workflow for spec-driven development¹⁷⁷ with Claude Code.

🍦 Afters

• CloudFlare and BrowserBase⁹⁰ are partnering to give web crawling agents unique identities.

• OpenAI, Cursor and Perplexity are using SerpAPI¹⁶⁵ - a startup that sells scraped results from Google Search.

• PuzzleJAX⁸⁶ - Hundreds of grid-based games to test models for reasoning and learning.

• YouTube is beta testing search based on natural language. Another request from me: better captions.

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

• Find me on X³², Linkedin³³, or Instagram³⁰

• Read about me³⁴ and ben’s bites

📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth²⁸