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,

Off the back of Tuesday’s email where I mentioned my favourite ‘daily-driver’ AI tools…

• Factory (AI coding agent) now offers credits - get $40 off¹³⁶ + get $40 credit with your own link (any credits I get I’ll do a giveaway for you guys 🙂)

• Dia (AI browser) gave me thousands of invites (instead of just 5) - skip the waitlist⁵⁴⁷

  • PLOT THICKENER - as this email was scheduled I got wind (from TBPN¹¹⁰) that the company behind Dia has agree to be acquired by Atlassian¹⁷⁵ in an all-cash transaction (read; no one is locked in to stay working there 🥹, well, fuck) - keeping our email title today, no notes.

OpenAI is on a shopping spree. They acquired Statsig¹⁴⁶, and its founder, Vijaye Raji, is becoming CTO of Applications at OpenAI. Statsig is basically an A/B testing company with OpenAI, Anthropic (😬) and others as its customers. Plus, OpenAI grabbed a team building “Cursor for Xcode⁹⁴”—likely to improve Codex CLI. It is also starting a new “OpenAI for Science⁸¹” initiative, teaming up a small team of academics and researchers to use AI for scientific discoveries.

Listen Labs put up this billboard in SF. When deciphered (spoiler alert), reveals; [listen][labs][ai][/p][uzzle] — (listenlabs.ai/puzzle³⁹⁹). A cool hiring challenge for engineers.

From the portfolio:

• Rork App for iOS⁴³⁶ - Make an iOS app and publish it to the App Store, right from your phone. Free for next two weeks. (It recently hit top of the App Store charts)

The AI Runtime driving top consumer AI apps from prototype to 1M users in <30 days is now available publicly.

• Adaptive Graphs auto-scale workloads from 10 to 10M users

• Automated MLOps handles observability and intelligent failover

• One-click A/B Tests deploy with no code changes

Try Inworld Runtime today!⁸⁶*

*sponsored

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Why Replit is betting AI prices¹²¹ will not come down. (paywalled) - tldr; Investors expect competition to lower prices, but Masad says limited competition in coding models keeps prices high.

• Slash commands vs subagents³³⁰: how to keep AI tools focused.

• AI will supercharge modelbusters¹⁹⁴.

• How to build a school with AI⁵⁸⁶ where students beg not to take a summer break. This was a pretty awesome episode thinking about what schools of the future could look like - hopefully they cross the pond to the UK!

• Will AI be as big of a catalyst for a consumer AI wave^164† as mobile?

• State of the software engineering job market³⁴⁰ in 2025.

³⁴⁰

⚙️ Tools to tinker with

• AssemblyAI¹⁴⁵ – Speech-to-text API that separates speakers and detects 99+ languages.*

• Changelogs AI¹³² - free, open source, changelog generator from just your github repo.

• Warp Code¹³⁵ - A suite of features for shipping agent-generated code all the way from prompt to production.

• AI Key²⁸⁵ - A small device that you can plug into your phone to give AI full control.

• Raycast now has extensions for Cursor Agent¹¹⁰.

• Replit Agent¹¹⁰ now works with any framework or language. Smart move. Most “text-to-app” tools have their choice of frameworks that they work best with, but terminal tools like Claude Code work with anything, and vibe-coders are leaving Lovable, Bolt, etc., in favour of these general tools.

• maxly.chat^268† - An open canvas for chatting with AI, so you fork and branch conversations whenever you want to. This is something Keshav and I have brainstormed on a while ago!

¹⁰⁹

*sponsored

🥣 Dev dish

• ChromaSwift⁷³ - Build search and retrieval into your iOS apps (beta).

• Zed integrated Claude Code⁸⁷ in their IDE such that it can work even outside the terminal.

• Conductor¹⁰³ (multiple claude code sessions in parallel) now supports Amp Code too.

• Beeper (a DMs aggregator) now offers a desktop API⁶¹ and MCP⁴⁷ to take your DMs and chats to any AI app.

• AI Elements¹⁸³ by Vercel is now open-source - a component library and custom registry built on top of shadcn/ui to help you build AI-native applications faster.

🍦 Afters

• Anthropic has raised $13B⁴³, valuing it at $183B, and OpenAI is planning an employee share sale that would value it at $500B⁴⁰. Mistral, if you remember them, is also raising, at a $14B valuation.⁴³

• Exa raised $85M in Series B⁷³ funding at a $700M valuation to build the search engine for AI.

• Coreweave is acquiring OpenPipeAI⁶⁸, a library to easily do RL over LLMs.

• ChatGPT Projects²³⁶ are now available in its free plan too.

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

• Find me on X³⁹, Linkedin³⁷, or Instagram³²

• Read about me³⁸ and ben’s bites

📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth²⁹