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,

OpenAI is launching a dedicated space for health-related conversations in ChatGPT - ChatGPT Health^1,283. It will be able to connect to fitness devices and your health records. These conversations will also be encrypted, not used for training, and separate from your normal chats. You can join the waitlist, and once live, ChatGPT will suggest that you move your health-related chats to this space.

Claude Code released its version 2.1.0 with a lot of minor but relevant updates. These include hot reloading for skills, teleporting sessions between web and terminal, shift+enter for new lines, demo mode for streaming, respecting gitignore, etc. Full changelog here¹⁹⁶.

Also, if you missed it, Claude Code is now available on the Claude Desktop app. Update to the latest version, and you’ll see a code tab in the sidebar where you begin new chats. It’s non-coder friendly, and you can work on files and folders locally (i.e., on your computer). Let it write code; you don’t need to look at it, you can ask it to clean up once your work is done.

🌐 What I’m consuming

• 21 lessons from 14 years at Google.^1,083

• The state of AI⁷³² going into 2026. Companies should make AI operational without turning their product into a bespoke service.

• Claude Code and why non-coders should be paying attention^1,104† (and playing with the system)

• What droid searches¹⁷⁰ - an analysis of 780,000 of its own web searches.

• Cursor rebuilt how their agent uses context²⁴¹ to reduce token usage.

• PR descriptions need to carry the context¹⁷⁴, for engineering judgment and teaching juniors.

• Behind the scenes of a coding agent asking follow-ups¹⁸⁰ on a Kanban board.

• Voice AI startups fail when they rely on low-quality models and lose early user trust. Speechmatics¹⁵⁸’ production-grade speech APIs are built for messy, real-world audio – accents, noise, and 55+ languages. Their Startup Program offers $50k in credits plus hands-on support. Apply for $50k.¹⁵⁸*

¹⁵⁸

⚙️ Tools and demos

• Interlude²⁸⁸ - log on anonymously and draw together, anytime.

• Context7²¹⁴ - The (most?) popular MCP server for documentation now returns 65% fewer tokens per query to keep your context lean.

• Control Tower²⁵⁰ - Manage projects, revenue and your team—all in one place.

• Huxe³⁹⁷ - Your personal audio companion, built by the team behind the og notebookLM experience.

• Scouts⁴⁶⁵ are always-on AI agents that monitor the web for news, price drops, or flights.

🥣 Dev Dish

• system.surf²⁵⁰ - Personal agent that controls your Mac from anywhere.

• Diffs¹⁰⁴ - Open source diff and code rendering library.

• Claude Canvas³⁷⁹ - Let claude code spawn interactive terminal interfaces for emails, calendars, flight bookings, and more.

• Ralph Wiggum Copywriter⁴¹⁶ - Learns your voice, critiques its own work, rewrites until it’s actually good.

🍦 Afters

• Anthropic is raising $10B at a $350B⁹² valuation (double from September 2025).

• xAI announced their $20B series E⁵⁸ at a $230B valuation.

• Over the holidays, Meta bought Manus AI¹⁴⁰ for a few billion.

• And most of Groq’s staff and leadership joined Nvidia via a “non-exclusive partnership⁹⁶” worth $20B (Nvidia bought the company without technically buying it).

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

• Find me on X³⁵, Linkedin³¹, or Instagram²⁵

• Read about me²⁸ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth²³

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

Wanna partner with us²⁷ for Q1?