Hey folks,

I said Tuesday I was going on a bit of a tear with building stuff…

I scraped the OpenRouter website to build this, which constantly updates

53.5 million tokens per second are moving through OpenRouter’s top 20 apps right now. I scraped their public usage pages to show which models are being used bentossell.com/realtime-tokens

@bentossell⁷⁹⁵

I also got an email that remove.bg - which removes backgrounds on images - is being shut down in December after being acquired by Canva, so I one-shot my own version with Fable 5.1

remove .bg is being sunset so fable made me my own (you can clone it)

@bentossell³²²

People have pointed out you can do this natively on a Mac (I didn’t actually know that), but so what? remove.bg was a business, it got acquired for money, people use these kinds of things.

I’m not building these for anyone specifically or to make money with them. I just like building. I like new things. I’m doing it because I can. It’s fun. And I learn a lot about how to build by actually doing it.

Building any idea helps you have more ideas.

In tomorrow’s session breakdown, I’ll be going through (at least) one build - where I scraped 105 million rows of public government information to see where they spend our tax money… I used 2 billion tokens 😳.

With all my builds I’ll make them open-source so you can clone/remix them.

This is what my agent usage is like btw:

@nazzari

@bentossell¹⁶⁸

This is also a tool I’ll be adding to my site that you can clone 😊 stay tuned tomorrow…

p.s. I’m out of my Fable weekly usage already 🥹

Ben’s Bites is brought to you by Adobe¹²⁹

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Headlines

Claude Fable 5.1 is out¹³⁹. It is the best model you can use right now. Instead of a clear quality jump, I found it faster and easier to talk to in my use over the last 24 hours. It has a new system prompt¹²⁸ that bans it from repeating song lyrics, copyrighted logos and tweaks its response style. Things people are building with Fable:

• Mario²⁶⁹ & GTA-style²⁸⁷ games

• 3D rendering of a house²⁹⁷ (using code in Blender)

Anthropic also reduced the cost of caching inputs for Fable by 75%, making API usage about 25% cheaper than before.

OpenAI’s Astra is also coming soon¹⁸⁵ (rumours say today).

Two more new models: Gemini 3.8 Flash¹¹⁷ and Muse Spark 1.3¹⁰¹. Both are impressive, have the same base price and similar performance. But the question is: who can subsidise more tokens? Flash 3.8 comes at 50% off for the rest of the year. Meta is giving a 90% cut, in exchange for your data.

Another new model from Meta - Muse Voice transcribe¹⁹⁰ looks really insane for transcription use cases. I wish it were open-source.

Gemini models can now decide which bits of a video are worth watching¹⁵¹. Instead of sampling a video at a fixed frame rate, it searches across frames, audio and transcripts for the moments it needs. 88% fewer tokens used, up to 66% cheaper and a minor bump in accuracy on benchmarks.

Inworld built Realtime TTS-2 for the next wave of consumer apps. That takes three things: text-based voice design, sub-100ms latency at P99, and one voice identity across 200+ languages. Learn how to give your AI apps a voice¹²³.*

My feed

• Claude Code/Cowork can now use your computer²¹⁸ in the background, while you do your other work, just like Codex. Previously, Claude would take over the computer, making it unusable for you while Claude worked.

• WebMCP adds tools (that agents can use) for any action you can take on a website (vs having to use the UI). Vercel’s agent-browser now uses WebMCP¹⁹¹ if present and then falls back to clicking around on the UI.

• Generate up to a minute of 1440p video³⁰⁶ from 1-6 images, with pixel-perfect camera control.

• A prompt to stop Claude from speaking in Parseltongue⁴⁹¹.

• A 0.8B model beat GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh¹⁵¹ on one narrow task for Shopify. They open-sourced the infra to build these small models - Tangle¹³⁸.

• Did you think AI was terrible at design? Not anymore⁶⁷⁹.

• Burp²³⁶ - AI editor in your browser for videos & motion design.

• Diiverge²⁰¹ - An infinite, point-and-click adventure game. Click anything in a picture and create a story.

• Stanford scrapped 85% of its software course for agents, taste and real OSS PRs²⁶⁹

• GitHub is exploring multiplayer planning with agents¹⁵⁵.

• zoah²¹⁴ - design and code together. (waitlist only)

• Draw a shape, move it while recording, and tldraw flash turns it into an animation¹⁶⁷.

• 32 weird little creative tools⁴⁸¹.

Afters

if you are non-technical and your github looks like this I want to be friends and I want to hire you

@nazzari²²²

Over the summer, we have been sprinting on safety priorities; it's more important than ever for capabilities and safeguards to advance together. We have more to do but have made a lot of progress. We are also going to be launching our next model soon. There is an obvious tension…

@sama¹¹⁷

New plugin alert: watch all of your agents work inside of a pixel art office!

@get_bb_app¹⁸⁴

My second conversation with Sarah Guo (@saranormous), founder of Conviction. Sarah's been early to many of this generation's defining companies, and is constantly ranked at the top of the managers LPs most want to invest with. She knows the small group of 250 people pushing the …

@patrick_oshag¹⁷⁶

loving have @paper + fable make variant sheets

@Shpigford¹⁴⁰

Made a sketch artist game where you have to draw the character based on witness testimony neal.fun/unusual-suspec…

@nealagarwal¹⁴¹

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