AI talent wars are pure drama
an attempt at making claude code user friendly
The newsletter for ai builders of all levels. Mini-tutorials, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
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Hey folks,
A teaser from OpenAI on something launching today. I’ve tested an early preview and sure it’s interesting enough but not revolutionary…(yet?) You can probably guess what it is, or just check X for any recent leaks 👀.
ChatGPT’s image creation is one of the best, but it’s not really great when you want to do precise edits to an existing image. OpenAI just added high-fidelity editing to their Image API. Editing faces, logos, and other details will now result in fewer instances of irrelevant changes.
Google is finally making 2.5 Pro available on AI mode in search (+ deep research too). It’s still under a dropdown, not the default. And if you’re a normal google search user, it still takes 3+ clicks after you’ve hit enter on your query to reach ai mode. And search can make a call on your behalf to local business but i’ll trust that one when I try it - been watching that demo for half a decade now 😅.
The leaders of Claude Code left Anthropic a couple weeks ago for Cursor, but Anthropic has played Uno reverse. Both are back at Anthropic. Claude Code supremacy continues. And feels like Anthropic is doubling down on features for Claude Code. Organisations that use Claude Code can now access detailed analytics of their org wide use.
I’m tinkering with Claude Code interface for non-technical people so you don’t have to use it through the terminal (because Claude Code is just generally the best agent I’ve used, not just for coding tasks), and a few other UX/UI abstractions to make it easy. Will open-source when it’s in a reasonable state (bit rough around the edges atm but works!)
Voxtral, a new family of voice transcription models from Mixtral, is worth paying attention to. It comes in two variants 3B and 24B—the 3B one is nice and small for running on your laptop and gives you roughly similar performance on audio transcription as Gemini 2.5 Flash. The 24B variant is good for self-hosting for companies because latency and cost will be much better than using a closed-source provider.
Hostinger Horizons is doing a live session on how to turn idea into apps without code/with AI for Ben’s Bites readers. Next Thursday, 24th July. Register here.
A quick shoutout to AI Tinkerers - I went to the LDN event yesterday and met some great people. There were some awesome demos too, my favourite was personalised Hacker News - you rate 10 random posts to onboard (swipe or click) then the feed shows you tags on what you’ll love, may like, and want to skip. You can see the prompt they generate for you and tweak it too if you’d like. I replaced my pinned HN with this one 😃. Josh built an MCP with auth and payments in 10 minutes. And I spoke to the founder of Superoptix - an agentic ai framework that automates the harder parts (ie, not the agent set up bit).
🌐 What I’m consuming
This interview just landed in my inbox, so I will be watching after this email is written… The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code - Dan Shipper (Every)
The future of jobs and the economy in the age of AI - with Chief Economist and COO of OpenAI.
How and where will agents ship software?
Opportunities amidst the evolving AI adoption in the enterprise.
How Shopify built a culture for fast AI adoption.
Reflections on working at a mature version of OpenAI (May 2024- June 2025)
$200/mo products are defining the new category for narrow startups.
⚙️ Tools I’m looking into
Chronicle helps you make designer-grade presentations with AI for free. It is like Cursor for presentations!*
Asimov - The coding research agent built for understanding code, not just generating it.
Mozart AI - Your music co-producer that helps with inspiration, suggestions, and improvements for every sound you create.
Toksta - Saves hours of manual digging when finding startups that solve your exact problem.
Supermemory Graph - View and navigate across all your memories and their connections.
Appier - Shopify for making SaaS with built-in database, auth and more.
ChatGPT’s record mode is now available in Plus plan too, on the MacOS desktop app.
*sponsored
🥣 Dev dish
FireGEO - Open source Semrush for AI. Monitor your website’s presence in AI search results.
Sniffly - A tool to analyse Claude Code logs and understand your usage patterns and errors.
Make it Heavy - framework to simulate Grok Heavy functionality, fully open-source and running in your terminal.
dotcom.chat - an open-source, minimal, functional MCP client.
How to install Claude Code to GitHub and use it as a background agent. (video)
🍦 Afters
50 articles about designing AI products. A good read if you’re a product/frontend person looking to get upto speed on what matters in an AI-native app.
Andrew Ng is starting AI Aspire - an advisory firm to help companies with AI strategy (in partnership with Bain & Company).
OpenAI might be partnering with Shopify to let users buy via ChatGPT. OpenAI might take a cut from these sales.
Perplexity and Gemini are offering a free subscription to a wide user base in India.
And a massive shout-out to Anne-Laure who I’ve known for many years and invited me to chat with her - my first time in a podcast studio!
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋