Hey folks,
“SaaS may be dead” - me, on tuesday
Just signed up for another SaaS tool - me, yesterday
I’m trying really hard to make interactive components for this course/reference manual I’m making. So you as a user can feel the concepts, to help understand them.
I’ve tried so many models, tools and ways to try and develop my own component styles that look good and feel right. And I think I finally found it…
I tweeted my frustrations and Pietro, who I met at OpenAI’s Dev Day last year reminded me to try Magic Path. You can have multiple agents generating design assets, components, animations, whatever on a big shared canvas.
I gave it a go on a fun experiment first and it generated some pretty awesome mechanical-style components.
magicpath slaps (with droid) tested it out h/t @skirano
@bentossell1,446
So now I have an actual workflow and tools to generate all the components I’m after. I can play with different styles and tweak the smaller parts of the components - the buttons, prompt input box, etc.

So I blew through the Magic Path free plan pretty quickly and then promptly signed up for a pro plan 😬.
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Claude Code now has a security plugin395 that checks code as Claude writes it and warns when it spots common risky patterns, like unsafe command execution, insecure HTML handling, or dangerous Python code.
DeepSWE128 tests agents on 113 original long-horizon tasks across 91 active repos and five languages. Prompts are shorter than SWE-bench Pro, but the fixes are much bigger: 668 lines and seven files on average. Current leaderboard: GPT-5.5 70%, GPT-5.4 56%, Claude Opus 4.7 54%, Claude Sonnet 4.6 32%.
From the board to building the Software Factory155. It doesn’t happen that often, but I’ve seen it a few times recently - investors in a company leave to join the company that they backed. Madison joining Factory is a big signal and a great addition to the team. If you remember, I am an investor in Factory who joined last year but I left earlier this year due to our army of young children running my life, leaving less and less time for work work. 3 under 3 is still A LOT of work 😅.
Software after software527 - this was a great read, highly recommended. Thorsten runs the coding harness, Amp and always has great takes on the space.
Clanker328 - A word for the machine.
Mainframe252 - turn the work done by your agents into short recap videos for your team.
Granite278 - long-term document for all your files. Drop them in without any tagging/folders, and later search for them in plain English.
Surya OCR 2149 - 650M parameter OCR/document model.
Claude Code trick506 for non-technical tasks - put a bunch of files in a folder, then tell Claude Code it can write scripts and make HTML.
Ramp used 10,000 home-grown security agents to find, validate and patch nearly 100 security issues109 in six days, with humans reviewing PRs before merge.
Slippery Slope184 - It’s easy to let agents get in between a person and their craft.
Supermemory253 - Building blocks for adding context to your agents.
Cursor trained Composer 2.599 by doing RL inside the actual Cursor harness.
Polar150 - fine-tune a model with your agent harness as the training environment with no code changes.
Parse 2.0217 - the most accurate document parsing API in the world.
OpenAI are slurping up a ton of talented builders149, most recently, Eric who built RepoPrompt. Great get for OAI, and congrats to Eric 😊
Auto-review skill301 for your agents, from the power-house shipper Peter Steinberger.
howtoeval318 - the no-bullshit guide to eval’ing AI agents.
AI should dramatically increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world. The OpenAI Foundation is making an initial $250M commitment to measurement, transition support, and new approaches to broadly shared prosperity. openaifoundation.org/news/economic-…
@sama106
introducing howtoeval dot com. the no-bullshit guide to eval'ing AI agents. from personal experience, and from working with the best companies in the world. there's even a quiz. link below.
@benhylak171
Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor are all great tools. They're also much more different than you think. I did a comparison of the three, but not in the usual way. I went deep on how they differ philosophically.
@theo228
Why is the creator of OpenCode pretty skeptical about AI productivity gains, and the hype around AI? A very conversation @thdxr (and lots of truth bombs:) Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 07:03 Dax’s path into tech 09:04 Early startup experience 13:16 Getting involved with open source
We're hosting an event on June 16th in San Francisco. Compile is a one-day event that brings together engineers, researchers, designers, and builders of all kinds to discuss the future of software.
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I signed up for another SaaS
new software benchmark
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Substack · essay