BB Digest: Rise of agentic models
PLUS: How I build with MCP
Digest #550 | Building with AI? Get Pro and join the community
Hey folks,
You’re over-building stuff…i think. Well, I am definitely. Every time i ask claude/chat to give me options to build XYZ, its always the same; full stack, agent, etc. BUT with Claude + MCPs you don’t have to build anything and can get the same results. I did a quick (free) video to show you how to use claude + mcps to build tools and workflows super easily. (posted on twitter too)
I’ll create a write-up later but couldn’t get it done in time for the email today.
Also, registrations for Bolt’s Guinness World Record Hackathon are on—excited to judge the submissions, hope to see tons of bb folks submitting.
Let’s get into it
🔎 What’s Trending
OpenAI’s new batch of thinking/reasoning models o3 and o4 mini are out now. o3 is the best model out there, roughly tied with Gemini 2.5 Pro. There’s something special about these two models: they use tools (like web search, code execution, image analysis) within their thinking. They are trained for it. I feel these are ahead of the thinking models we’ve been talking about. Instead, I’d call them agentic models.
o3 and o4 mini replace o1 and o3 mini in ChatGPT. You can read more about o3 in this amazing review by Dan.
OpenAI also released an open-source command-line tool called Codex CLI. It’s supposed to be their replacement for Claude Code, but early reactions are not great.
You can now connect your Gmail, Calendar and Docs with Claude. And these new interations enable Claude’s take on deep research. With a new feature called “Research”, Claude can gather info from all these sources (including the web), reason over it and help you get work done. Research is only available for Max, Team and Enterprise accounts.
Grok is getting feature parity with top AI apps. Grok Studio can create documents, run code and build mini web apps (like Artifacts/Canvas). It just got a Chatgpt-like Memory feature and new Google Workspace integrations.
Veo 2, Google’s video generation model, is rolling out to all Gemini Advanced users in the Gemini app. Plus, Whisk Animate is also generally available.
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⚙️ Top tools
Conversational AI that finally gets you 🎧 Flow by Speechmatics understands every word in 55+ languages – no repeats. Try it free today.*
Gamma - Native AI tools for creating a presentation, website or social media design. New brand and just hit $50M ARR!
Launch week by Firecrawl:
Fire-1 - A scraping agent that can interact with the web, like using a filter button or search box.
Change Tracking - Automatically detects and details changes on websites.
Zite - Use AI to build apps, use no code to edit them.
Distro - Get interviewed about any piece of content on the internet ans share your expertise.
n8nChat - Create automations in seconds by generating n8n workflows.
Mirage Edit by Captions - Go from a text prompt to a fully-edited talking video, featuring actors that don’t exist.
Arcads added gesture control, so you can make AI avatars cry, laugh, be shocked etc.
More tools →
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🌐 Around the web
OpenAI wants to a) buy Windsurf for $3B and b) create a social network.
Figma holds the trademark for “dev mode”. Now they want Lovable to stop using it. 🤦♂️
Testing a single prompt with 7 different AI builders. Who creates the best app?
That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋
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