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,

I’m launching a fun little thing: droidmas.com⁵³⁵ - jokes and games around concepts in ai dev. Day 1 is about benchmarks, live now.

Anthropic has acquired Bun³²¹. Bun makes JS code run faster, and the company is filled with the best JS devs. The story of how this came to be^584† is crazy. OpenAI also bought a company, Neptune AI¹⁸⁸ (tools for AI researchers).

Opus 4.5 is finally available on Claude Code with Pro plans ($20/mo). The limits are not as generous, but at least you can use it :) Claude Code has crossed $1B in run-rate revenue just 6 months after launch, and the rumours are that Anthropic is planning an IPO.

Google Workspace Studio⁶⁹⁰ is now GA. It’s an automation builder, but it looks like it can handle much more complex use cases (connect multiple apps beyond Google’s ecosystem, add different AI steps in between), all with just prompts.

Mistral released a few models: Mistral Large 3 and Ministral 3⁷⁹. Mistral Large 3 is in the same leagues as DeepSeek 3.2 and Kimi K2. I’m more excited by Ministral models. They come in three sizes: 14B, 8B, and 3B with base, instruct and reasoning variants for all three.

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🌐 What I’m consuming

• How is AI changing work inside Anthropic?²⁸⁷ Basically, engineers feel ~50% more productive, 27% of Claude-assisted tasks were projects that “would not have been done otherwise.

• Lessons from building AI agents for messy government PDFs⁵⁰⁴.

• What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent²²³.

• One year of using ChatGPT Pro as my first hire⁴⁷⁰.

• Cursor’s guide for non-technical hires⁵⁶⁹ to build with Cursor.

⚙️ Tools and demos

• Bloom⁴⁰² - Distil your website into a living brand system and create on-brand assets.

• Exa¹³⁷ handles simple and complex queries from the same search box.

• Shortcut²⁸⁹ - Superhuman Excel Agent that takes you from beginner to pro.

• Braintrust³⁷³ (evals platform) added a feature that lets users vibe code custom annotation UIs directly on the platform.

• Anything Max¹⁸⁵ - A $200/mo plan that comes with autonomous backend and frontend testing to actually ship your vibe coding projects.

• Silvia⁴¹⁷ – Turns your entire balance sheet into a live AI dashboard. Tracks accounts, models “what if” scenarios, and surfaces insights automatically.*

⁴¹⁷

🍦 Afters

• New research from OpenAI trains a version of GPT-5 to confess¹¹¹ when it has made a mistake.

• In red teaming research from Anthropic, AI models found $4.6M worth of exploits¹⁰¹ in blockchain smart contracts.

• Building coding agents with tool execution⁹⁶ - new short course from E2B and DeepLearning AI.

• Apple’s head of UI design¹⁰⁰ is leaving for Meta to oversee AI and hardware integration.

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

• Find me on X³³, Linkedin²⁶, or Instagram²³

• Read about me²⁹ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth²²,

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

Wanna partner with us²³? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.