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,

Google Labs products have been on a spree of launches: Scheduled Tasks⁴⁸⁵ and proactive suggestions¹⁹⁷ in Jules, their async coding agent. Pomelli⁴¹¹, their marketing asset creation tool, now lets you animate those generations. And some more in Stitch, their design exploration tool³⁶⁴.

Mistral is joining the CLI squad with their open-source entry, Mistral Vibe¹⁴². Its license allows you to fork/build on top of it, and it’s pretty minimal, so you can add your own take without fighting against the existing codebase (looking at you Gemini CLI).

btw, did you see? droid is the top-performing agent²⁶¹ on terminal bench, again. really cementing itself.

sorry, I digress; back to Mistral.

Along with the CLI, it released two more open-source models: Devstral 2 and Devstral 2 Small⁵⁶. They perform better than GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2, and are on par with DeepSeek 3.2 while being much smaller than them. But these models are still chunky and meant for business with a few GPUs. You’ll have trouble running even the smaller one on a MacBook Air.

Shopify launched a SimGym - Digital customers that behave like real ones. They browse your site, complete tasks, and reveal optimisation spots. You can even run A/B tests with zero live traffic. It’s part of their winter launch²³³ with more AI features.

OpenAI posted a blog claiming their new models are now reaching a “high” level of cybersecurity capabilities⁷⁵ with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max already scoring 76% (vs 27% for GPT-5 in Aug).

Attio¹⁰⁴ 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.¹⁰⁴*

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Demonstrably safe AI for autonomous driving¹⁷³ - A look into Waymo’s approach.

• 200k tokens is plenty²¹⁴ - Software development using a dozen short threads vs a longer one.

• Minimise successful test outputs¹⁶² and stop overloading your agent’s context.

• What does AI think about Hacker News comments¹⁸² from 10 years ago?

• Why AGI will not happen⁵²⁹.

• Clay’s approach to GTM²⁶⁵ for going from $1M to $100M ARR.

• Useful patterns from building HTML tools¹⁹².

• Supermemory: Raising $3M at 19³¹⁴ and going from open source to funded startup. (I’m an investor)

YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=yWbKKL6gIuM³¹⁴

⚙️ Tools and demos

• DeepSky²⁶⁹ - AI superagent for founders, builders & operators. Designed to go beyond basic LLMs for strategy, competitive intel, & market research.*

• Autopilot by Mintlify⁹⁵ - Proactively identify when your documentation needs updates based on your codebase.

• Scouts by Yutori²¹⁰ - Track topics you care about across the web and get fast, clean summaries.

• Orchids^134† - An IDE built for vibe coding with built-in browser, Supabase, and Stripe all in a single tool.

• Detail.dev¹⁴⁴ - Deep scans of your codebase that find bugs you’ll be glad to know about.

• Figma¹⁰⁸ now lets you edit images with AI to make assets fit your UI. Removing elements or background, expanding images and more.

¹⁰⁸

🥣 Dev Dish

• Gemini’s text-to-speech models¹¹⁸ got an upgrade in expression, pacing and dialogue quality.

• Claude Code⁸² tasks can now spawn async subagents, and the Claude Agent SDK⁵⁴ now lets you build with 1M context length for Sonnet 4.5.

• Relace Search⁸⁰ - Parallel tool calls to make agentic search 4x faster.

• Dev Browser¹²² - A Claude Skill to let your agent close the loop without eating up tokens. (read more⁶⁴)

• Claude Island¹⁹⁵ - Dynamic island widget for Claude Code. Everything at a glance with quick approvals without switching windows. (repo²⁷)

• Paper2Slides¹⁶³ - Open-source repo to create stunning slides from your research papers.

• Stirrup⁶⁹ - A lightweight framework for building agents by Artificial Analysis.

• A quick repo to create your Claude Code Wrapped¹²⁰.

🍦 Afters

• Generative AI in the Enterprise¹²⁷ by Menlo Ventures. It claims Enterprises lean towards using ready-made AI products much more (76%) than building them in-house.

• Anthropic, Block and OpenAI are co-founding the “Agentic AI Foundation¹⁰⁷” and donating MCP²³, Goose⁴⁵ and Agents.MD³⁴ to it.

• New suite of benchmarks from Google DeepMind quantifies how well LLMs know facts.⁷⁵ (Leaderboard⁴¹)

• OpenAI is offering certificate courses on AI foundations³²⁸ inside ChatGPT as a pilot program.

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

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• Read about me¹⁹ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth¹⁸

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