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,

Busy house over here as we welcomed our third, Poppy, on Thursday last week. The twins are chuffed to have a baby sister (although Max asked “where’s my boy” when we came home on Friday 😂).

On to the news!

People are just realizing that “Harness is the new app^1,989” but this was very clear early this year when we saw Claude and Gemini play pokemon. We’ve been talking about³⁸⁷ it since May but it’s gaining even more momentum now. Cursor is talking about improving their harness for Codex models²⁵¹ and Poetic used a custom harness Gemini 3 Pro to get the best score on ARC-AGI 2⁶³.

Google upgraded Deep Think with Gemini 3⁸⁷ for Ultra plan users ($250/mo). Shopify’s CTO and prev. Head of AI at Microsoft, Mikhail Parakhin⁵⁷, thinks the new version is better for coding something from scratch and notices more corner cases (and it’s faster), but still has some rough edges.

You can now delegate tasks to Claude Code²⁵⁷ directly from Slack. I played around with Claude Code on the desktop app and it’s a nice interface for Claude as an Agent. I won’t be surprised if Claude app starts to look like that by default in 2026.

Folks at HuggingFace got Claude Code and other CLIs to fine-tune an open model¹⁵⁸. It’s available as a skill. Here’s an idea for you to steal: make a local email processing app with a 3-7B model.

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.com¹²⁹*

ps: GPT-5.2¹⁰² is likely coming this week, and Google will launch its first AI glasses in 2026¹¹⁹.

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Your experts won’t train your AI⁵⁵². You have to interview them.

• How I keep up with AI-generated PRs⁴⁰⁸.

• Droid-maxxing¹⁶ - Pushing AI-assisted development to its limits.

• Google Illuminate^1,424 is quietly becoming the best research tool I didn’t know I needed.

• Better ways to build self-improving agents²⁵⁵ - A recap of 2025 NeurIPS research papers.

• A profile of ChatGPT’s product chief¹¹, Nick Turley.

• Antropic’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell²⁴¹, answers questions about AI.

• Stop juggling 5 APIs. AssemblyAI handles multilingual speech-to-text, speaker & topic detection, and PII redaction in one stack. $0.15/hr, pay-as-you-go⁴⁹, no lock-in. Get free credits³⁴ and start shipping features faster.*

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⚙️ Tools and demos

• Concierge.ai¹⁹⁵ - Engage & convert inbound website visitors into qualified leads with a custom AI answer engine trained on your brand & content.*

• Integrations by Parallel AI¹³⁸ - Get fast and cheap search data right in Google Sheets, Zapier, n8n and more.

• Open Scouts²⁹⁰ - Open source web monitoring that alerts you when anything changes (ticket drops, restocks, news, etc).

• Private Notes³⁵⁴ - 100% offline AI note-taking iOS app (built with Droid).

• Stitch²⁹⁷ by Google Labs can now convert a design image generated by Nano Banana Pro into HTML. Another Google Labs product, Mixboard¹²⁶, also got some upgrades.

• You can now connect Replit Agent⁷⁰ to remote MCP servers.

• Normal⁴¹³ - Your team’s branding partner.

🥣 Dev Dish

• Claude history explorer¹⁰⁵ - Python CLI tool to explore, search and visualise your Claude Code conversation history.

• QMD by Tobi Lutke¹³² - On-device search engine for everything. A combination of BM25 full-text search, vector semantic search, and LLM re-ranking.

📋 State of AI reports

• OpenRouter released a “state of AI” report¹⁵³ based on 100 trillion tokens used on their platform. Mostly focuses on how OSS models are used.

• Anthropic Interviewer¹⁴⁶ - Anthropic interviewed 1,250 professionals about working with AI to map their emptions and expectaations. They are now opening it Claude users too (you should see a popup if you visit Claude on Web).

• The State of Enterprise AI by OpenAI¹⁸⁶ - Haven’t got the chance to dig into this one but saw this chart. Top AI users use it much more than median users.

🍦 Afters

• Supabase is launching a white-label offering for platforms¹⁰⁰ to help them provide fully managed database services. (I’m an investor)

• Axiom Prover solved 9/12 problems²⁷ in the Putnam competition (often called as the hardest college-level math test).

• Rnj-1 by Essential AI is a strong 8B model, founder Ashish Vaswani is co-author of the Transformers paper.

• MosaicML’s (acq. by Databricks for $1.3B) founder, Naveen Rao, has a new company, Unconventional AI¹⁰⁰, raising $475M in seed funding at $4.5B valuation.

• Limitless^94† (fka Rewind, working on AI device in pendant form) has been acquired by Meta.

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

• Find me on X²³, Linkedin²⁰, or Instagram²⁰

• Read about me²² and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth¹⁸,

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

Wanna partner with us¹⁸? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.