BB Digest: Guess where I am?
PLUS: lots of leaks
I write a newsletter about startups and investing—for ai builders of all levels.
I record mini-tutorials, review tools I’m testing, share my insights and give you a peek behind the digital curtain from an exited founder turned investor.
Hey folks, i hope you had a wonderful Easter & 4/20 for those who celebrate. We hosted (pics below), overate and fully relaxed…
we have a new home, Substack! There’s several reasons why but it feels like a great home for the future of this newsletter. Today, we’re trying something a little different, let me know what you think.
p.s. our old site will still be available for existing members.
p.p.s. Add this email as a contact to protect us from spam flags 🙏
Let’s get into it
🔎 News worth knowing
o3 in ChatGPT has a hidden new talent. It can play geoguesser to scary accuracy (so it can help fight crime or something, right?). The Claude + MCP workflow I recorded last week (icymi) can now just be done straight in o3 - with no extra tools to install. I dunno if that deflates me or excites me…however we found o3 + tasks wasn’t that great (more on that below), so rattles my confidence on the founder analysis workflow.
Gemini 2.5 Flash is now available as an experimental model (across Gemini app, APIs and AI Studio). It’s a hybrid reasoning model where you can turn the “thinking” off or allocate a thinking budget to the model (upto 24k tokens). 2.5 Flash with no thinking is better than 2.0 Flash, but 50% more expensive. Quick impressions: This model feels undercooked.
Anthropic released a 4k+ word guide on best practices for using Claude Code, their tools for agentic coding, right from the terminal. It’s a relatively easy read, and you should set aside 20-30 mins this week and read it. Another post from them tried to find Claude’s values by analysing 300k+ anonymised chats.
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💬 Our thoughts on… o3 + tasks
I’m seeing examples/claims of using o3 with ChatGPT’s Tasks for real-time updates. Sad reality is: it doesn’t work yet. I set up a task asking it to give me real-time stock price of 5 NASDAQ companies. Here’s one of the outputs:
Two of the companies mentioned here ($FAST and $BKNG) haven’t had a stock price that low in the past 6 months.
o3 in chat is amazing at using the web search tool. But I don’t see any traces of o3 running my initial query or task prompt each time it sends me an update. This is just a bad implementation, which might get fixed soon, but until then, I wouldn’t rely on “o3 + Tasks” for real-time info.
⚙️ Tools I’m tinkering with
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Ion - AI visual editor for your codebase, so PMs and designers can ship. Curious on people’s thoughts, I tried but think hit a few early bugs and haven’t re-visited yet.
Quadratic - AI that understands spreadsheets. Chat with data, create graphs, models, dashboards and more.
Tablextract - Extract tables from PDF and images and save hours of work.
I found Stagehand when tinkering with MCPs. Made by browserbase, you can build repeatable browser automations with natural language and code.
Conteflow looks interesting. Content creation for people who hate creating content. I do IF I feel like I have to, but its easy when there’s no pressure.
Netlify Drop - drag and drop your html/css/js files and you get a link to share your site.
Pydantic launched a simple AI agent framework (28 lines of code)
Figma is working on a text-to-app tool. Feels like everyone will have their own, like they all have native automations now.
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🌐 What I’m consuming
Cline is like an AI coding agent in Cursor (like Devin), so i’ve been testing it. They just released their full system prompt which is interesting to analyse for your own prompting. Funnily, they did it as lots of proprietary LLM instructions have been leaked. Garry Tan one-shotted Manus for an online guide.
Google released quantised variants of Gemma 3 (its open-source models).
Vercel’s AI SDK - this video has the complete breakdown, how it works and cloning Deep Research in 30 mins.
Cursor’s latest release includes a bunch of (very welcomed) features. I’m excited by; automated rules, images in MCP, improved agent, and project structure in context.
Building Windsurf and the magic of AI coding. (remember it’s being bought by openai)
AI-assisted search actually works now (almost).
We always read what Ethan has to say on new models.
This was a really good read on putting AI agents to the test, Dex feels like most ‘agents’ are not actually agentic. So what makes AI agents actually good enough?
Can AI run a vending machine business? This was such an interesting read.
🍦 Afters
Tell Claude to ‘ultrathink’ instead of ‘megathink’, or ‘think’. but apparently saying please and thank you wastes 10s of $millions every year in GPU costs 😅
Who’s building terminal wrappers? I’m testing Warp which I like so far. I want a terminal that can code like Claude Code/Codex, but I haven’t a clue on using the terminal. which seems problematic…
I switched my phone to dark mode to stop myself going on it so much. It feels like its working but we shall see…
I can write more about why we switched to Substack but it all fits into a theme of mine atm…use less shit. I want to use less tools to run my business, less things to use altogether and stop trying to ‘optimise’ everything. im in a digital refresh, i’ll write about what gets cut and what stays.
this tweet was a banger (and true) - about people who think everything is too competitive
im just about to kick off fundraising for the latest Ben’s Bites Fund, starting with a trip to SF on Sunday (and a very busy week of meetings). i’ve been a lot before but always welcome food recs 😋. Also I’m very inspired by founders inc model.
We hosted Easter, lots of family, food and very hyper kids
That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋
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Congrats on the migration!