The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.

Hey folks,

GPT-5-Codex has a mini variant now.⁸⁸ It’s not that far from the big brother on SWE-Bench Verified. The model is only available in Codex CLI and IDE extensions. API is coming soon, though. Codex-mini gives you 4x the mileage of Codex. Also, all paid ChatGPT plans now have double the rate limits for Codex.

Kimi K2 Thinking¹⁹² is an open-weights model that is now #1 on many benchmarks like HLE & BrowseComp across all models (not just open ones). Kimi models seem to have really great writing taste, while being great at coding tasks and being cheaper.

So the trend of models that go further continues with two options: closed-source RL-ed models (Composer, SWE-1.5) and huge MoE open models (GLM, MimiMax, etc.)

Replit now lets you add AI features to your apps¹⁵⁶ with zero extra setup. No need to make developer accounts, get API keys, etc. You can use 300+ models, including Gemini, OpenAI, Claude or even open-weights models from OpenRouter. The AI cost is billed against your credits. Smart move tbh.

There’s a new stealth model on OpenRouter named Polaris Alpha, which looks a lot like GPT-5.1⁷⁴. I also caught a few leaks for Nano Banana 2¹²⁰, mostly creating realistic images of news channels.

Eliminate AI anxiety. Build with confidence. AI agents are the future—but centralized systems create costly risks. With Airia, prototype and orchestrate AI agents securely while creating a resilient, decentralized AI ecosystem for your organization. Get started today at airia.com¹⁰²*

Droid updates - I’ve been on a pretty steep slope learning to be a bit of a developer 😬. I shipped our new docs site¹¹¹, run the changelog⁴⁵ process, started making guides⁵⁵ (with help from Ian Nuttall) and lots more. We’ve got a new (super simple) MCP feature³³ to add/remove/enable and disable MCPs, plus some big new things coming out the next couple of weeks. You can join the discord³⁵ to hear about early access 👀.

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Teach your AI to think like a senior engineer⁷³¹.

• AI progress and recommendations⁴⁵¹ from OpenAI.

• Building Cursor Composer¹⁶⁹ with Sasha Rush.

• Highlights from USV’s 2025 Annual Meeting¹²⁴ (captured with AI).

• From words to worlds²⁰⁴: Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier.

• What today’s AI (memory) products²⁰⁴ can learn from Chrome’s early design explorations of web history.

⚙️ Tools and demos

• Voices has the best voices for AI-assistants. BMW found their voice with Voices–join the product launch¹²⁵ on Nov 13, 1pm ET to see how.*

• DeepWiki²⁰¹ - Understand any GitHub repo with navigable and comprehensive docs generated on demand.

• Voice Conversion by Hume¹³⁰ - Generate the same pacing, pronunciation, and intonation with one recording across any voice you choose.

• Papiers²⁰⁴ - A new interface for arXiv papers with mindmaps, children/parents of a paper, X discussion surrounding it and more.

• Parse^349† - Build an API for any website in minutes, 100x faster than browser using automations.

• Swipe by vectors.fun¹⁸⁴ - A new way to steer image models. Start with a prompt, swipe left/right to steer the model towards what you’re thinking of. (read more³⁴)

🥣 Dev dish

• Parallel’s new Search API¹⁰¹ claims the highest accuracy with the lowest cost across a range of benchmarks—built specifically for agents.

• Gemini API now has a fully managed RAG file search¹⁶⁸ with generous free storage, embedding generation and more.

• Vercel Sandbox CLI⁵⁵ - Create, run, and manage secure, ephemeral Sandbox environments right from your terminal.

• MCPorter⁴⁵ - Generate a self-contained bun CLI out of any MCP server. (an implementation for the code execution for MCP thesis)

• Kimi Writer¹⁹² - An autonomous agent powered by the kimi-k2-thinking model for creating novels, books, and short story collections.

• cc-trace⁹⁶ - A claude skill that lets claude code reverse-engineer itself.

• jsxtool^87† - An in-browser IDE for building React UIs.

• A unified diff viewer⁶⁰ that parses standard unified diffs and renders them as minimally as possible for React.

🍦 Afters

• Quora has a new mission¹²⁷ - grow the world’s collective intelligence.

• SoftBank is repeating history²⁸⁵ - it has sold its entire stake in Nvidia worth ~$5.8B.

• Inception AI⁶¹ is building diffusion-based LLMs for code and text generation. They just raised $50M¹⁸ led by Menlo Ventures.

• Gamma¹⁵⁷ has raised its Series B at a $2.1B valuation while being profitable. (I’m an investor)

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

• Find me on X¹⁴, Linkedin¹⁹, or Instagram¹⁶

• Read about me²¹ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth¹²,

Thanks to today’s sponsors who made this newsletter possible :)

Airia and Voices.com.

Wanna partner with us¹³? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.