Hey folks,

I’ve been playing a lot with Claude Cowork for my talk at Stanford later today. It’s comically bad for the average jane.

A lot of capabilities are enabled using connectors and plugins, but if you don’t know that, good luck getting it to do anything. Can’t seem to send emails, install a skill or tell me about what potential connectors are there.

Scheduled tasks in Cowork stop when you shut the lid, but Routines (similar thing) in Claude Code do not. Cowork is just now getting Artifacts¹⁸² - the mini apps on the Claude chat app that started the vibe-coding wave.

I can search for all of this, yes. but an average user will not. and they’ll walk away thinking AI is hype for the next 6 months/a year.

Anyway, the Cerebral Valley AI Summit²³⁴ is coming back to London on June 24th. I’m planning to be there.

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Most RAG systems fail in production. Gauntlet Night School on Wednesday, April 22 covers how to build one that doesn't — live and free - Register¹³². Or go deeper: become an AI-native engineer at no cost. Cohort starts April 27. Apply now¹⁹⁷

Headlines

• Opus 4.7 is out¹²⁹ - much better at vision (interpreting images) and efficient at using reasoning tokens. A new xhigh level of thinking now sits between “high” and “max”. I’ve been using it over the weekend at xhigh and didn’t face any issues (despite the general sentiment on Twitter that 4.7 is a regression).

• Claude also has a Design tab now²⁹¹ - a canvas-like interface with chat on the sidebar to explore wireframes or create high fidelity prototypes. It asks you 5-10 questions via an interactive form and then gets building. I found the image → design workflow²⁵² to be really good in the prototype mode. Has separate limits while in research preview, but expect the weekly limits to only last for 2-3 big generations max (on the $20 plan). Check out Peter’s demo⁵⁹⁹ across multiple use cases.

• Codex got a few updates: 1. Computer Use¹²³ - it can now use apps on your Mac. I’m not completely sold on it and have some questions⁸², but it does seem to work a lot faster than previous iterations of computer/browser use demos. Also, it works in the background, so your Mac is free for you to use. 2. Chronicle¹²⁴, an opt-in preview that uses recent screen context to build memories. 3. A bunch of plugins, including image generation, so that Codex can be the superapp to use AI.

• Factory AI is now valued at $1.5B¹⁹³ after their latest raise of $150M. Try the new desktop app for Droid¹³⁵, Factory’s coding agent, with 50% off on Opus 4.7 till 30th April.

My feed

• Your tools are full of data, but you’re still guessing. Backstory¹⁵⁸ - Focus on what drives revenue, based on how your business actually sells.*

• Google AI Pro and Ultra¹¹⁸ subs now work with AI Studio - higher rate limits for vibe coding in the playground.

• Julius²⁶⁸ can now generate slide decks with charts and tables, exportable as pptx.

• Galaxy Brain²⁹³ - an operating system powered by local files. I’m an investor.

• Kimi 2.6 Code¹⁷⁹ - a Claude Code-style terminal built specifically for Kimi K2.6⁵⁸.

• Moondream Lens¹⁵⁷ - fine-tune a vision model to production accuracy in hours with as few as 20 images.

• Zapier’s AutomationBench¹¹⁷ measures real work done by models - CRM updates, inbox follow-ups, multi-step tool chains. No model has cracked 10%.

• How AI made me a builder³²² without losing my taste as a designer.

• Quiver upgrades its models for vector generation - Arrow 1.1 and Arrow 1.1 Max⁷¹.

• acceptmarkdown.com²⁰⁵ - checks whether your site returns Markdown correctly for agents.

• The 5 stages of AI grief⁵⁶⁰.

• HeyGen open-sourced HyperFrames¹⁶⁴ (HTML to MP4).

• Vercel was breached⁹² via an employee’s account on another AI product. Vercel says affected customers have already been contacted. Quick check¹⁵⁰ to make sure you’re safe.

• Three OpenAI leaders left the company - Kevin Weil⁹⁰ (CPO, then OpenAI for Science lead), Bill Peebles⁶⁰ (Sora co-creator), and Srinivas Narayanan⁸⁷ (CTO for B2B Applications).

• Skill drops: skill-creator¹⁸⁸, make-interfaces-feel-better²⁴¹, and gpt-taste¹⁴² for Codex.

Afters

New post w/ random thoughts on AI (thread) I will probably get a # wrong, but here we go :) 1/12 OpenAI & Anthropic now at 0.1% of US GDP *each* In a year, AI revenue likely to be 1-2% of US GDP What does AI mean for US GDP growth? Does productivity get lost mismeasured a la

@eladgil¹⁷⁹

Introducing GPT-Rosalind, our frontier reasoning model built to support research across biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine.

@OpenAI¹¹⁵

Here's why we built and open-sourced Agentic Inbox: an email inbox you can host yourself with a built-in AI agent, running entirely on Cloudflare Workers 👇

@thomasgauvin²⁹⁸

> I've built my own email app. I use it for 99% of my email reading and writing. It does everything (just about) I need and exactly how I want it to. I can run through a full inbox faster than in any other app I've tried before. > It has its rough edges, it's imperfect, it's

@mikker²⁰³

Introducing FrontierSWE, an ultra-long horizon coding benchmark. We test agents on some of the hardest technical tasks like optimizing a video rendering library or training a model to predict the quantum properties of molecules. Despite having 20 hours, they rarely succeed

@MatternJustus¹²⁶

Scoop: a16z and Thrive investing in Cursor $2B+ round. Other details are that Cursor is finally slightly gross-margin positive. The company is expecting to reach over $6B in annual run rate by end-of the year.

@MTemkin⁹⁶

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