i'm fed up of bad AI software
why do ai companies do this?
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’m going to kick off today with a mini-rant, if you allow me…thanks, here it is.
i’m so f*ckin’ sick of bad AI software. we’ve been promised the world will change, everyone will get rich, no-one has to work again bla bla bla. and then we get tools that claim they are great at xyz or ‘never use/do abc again’.
it’s all bullshit.
take perplexity for example. they’ve raised ~$900M, have ~100 employees and they just shipped their assistant to kill siri (apparently).
“it can book a reservation for you”
no it cant. it just adds search params to opentable. thats fine(ish), but did no one check it in a different location than where they are based? didnt work for me
“it can set up reminders for you”
not really. it added a reminder on my reminders app (fine), set to recurring (didnt ask for that), and set the time for yesterday (🙄 - and got the time wrong)
this mini essay, with demos and examples, is fantastic and hits the nail on the head. Why are so many companies shipping just crappy software with AI tacked on? Every email writer I’ve tested is awful, many text-to-app builders that claim to be better than the current front-runners are also awful.
it feels like there’s so much hype about ai that everyone just markets to the hype. with little to no substance.
another post, this time reviewing Cluely - which went viral as it allows you to ‘cheat’ in realtime. but, the title of the post says it all “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything”
i think hyped launches add new paying users which is contributing to these not quite true $000’s M ARR stats we’re seeing. it’ll all come out in the wash.
rant over.
on to the good stuff!
🔎 News worth knowing
ChatGPT’s viral image generation model is now available for developers to build upon. It costs ~$0.20 to generate a single high-quality image, which is quite reasonable. This model is impressive at editing an existing image and combining multiple images, so creating apps around those capabilities might be a decent idea.
Exa is an AI search company. It basically indexes content on the web into embeddings for semantic search. It’s one of the few companies that have meaningfully different results from big G and that i really like in the ai-search space. Sorry, I went off topic, but they have released a “webset” of 500 AI Agent companies with funding stats, market strategy and more.
ACI.dev is the open-source infrastructure that connects your AI agents to 500+ tool integrations with multi-tenant auth, granular permissions, and access through direct function calling or a unified MCP server. Solve your hardest AI agent challenges instantly, check out the codebase on GitHub!*
*sponsored
want to partner with us? Click here
⚙️ Tools I’m tinkering with
The AI assistant for Shopify devs. Gadget keeps your apps secure & ready to scale, so you go from prompt to launch in minutes. Start for free.*
Peek Money is using LLMs to make personal finance judgment-free. It tracks your spending and talks to you casually about it without boring spreadsheets or scary graphs.
DocSend charges $240/mo for a glorified PDF viewer. Perfect example of something you can build in an evening (a week max). Oh! someone just did.
Invoice builder in 1 day using Bolt? someone did that too.
Dia, a text-to-speech model you can run on your MacBook, sounds better than ElevenLabs in their demo. It’s open-source, and you can try it here.
Bolt’s agent got a design upgrade - it’s good! but i haven’t had enough time to test how much better i think it is. the CEO did an interview here.
Context7 - an MCP for indexed documentation for different tools. Alex posted this in our community, what a find!
Replit Auth is enabled in Replit agent - you can spin up social logins or email/pwd, user management, email lists etc.
Matt is one of the most impressive prompters i’ve ever come across (and invested in). he just released ‘Github for prompts’ - check it out, some real gold in there.
Adaptive launched their app builder. it took 22minutes (!!) to build an ‘invoice generator’ BUT the tool was done really well, it gives you the option to draw on your tool to steer the convo which is v interesting. good things to those who wait… ?
*sponsored
🌐 What I’m consuming
Exa released a “webset” of 500 companies in the AI Agent space with funding stats, market strategy and more.
OpenAI projects $125B of revenue in 2029, too little if they were done with automating all knowledge work. Anthropic is also claiming "virtual workers" in your office by 2026.
The White House is planning to bring AI to K-12 classrooms.
If you’re building an AI app, you need to cheat a little. Well, not technically, I just mean you need to “look at the data” you’re processing and generating. All top AI engineers are saying it.
why openai actually wanted to buy cursor instead of windsurf (apparently)
Lenny launched an AI podcast hosted by Claire Vo. do we need to do a podcast club?
an alternative approach to building in Cursor as a vibe-coder
Character AI will soon have videos. They trained a video generation model—Avatar FX. It’s not available to use yet. And I’m sure you can guess what lots of people will generate… but I like the otter video..
🍦 Afters
Looks like robots can finally make my bed.
The creator of React has just joined Replit after using it for a couple months.
Pieter Levels’ vibe coding games hackathon concluded and winners picked. the winner did a write up of his GTA-themed taxi game (which works really well!)
alana is a builder/investor. she made her homepage in the style of apple notes, and now, she created an MCP server about herself. I think everyone will have a ‘personal api’ in the future - want to know what im up to? reading? watching? - just hit my API :) (if you’re working on this, lmk)
150M+ users, $200M revenue - what am i? a female romance fantasy ai micro drama netflix of course.
Replit Auth is enabled in Replit agent - you can spin up social logins or email/pwd, user management, email lists etc.
Stop over-building
We’ve all done it. Big idea → ask an llm → cusror/replit/lovable/etc → build → bug-fix … hours pass, dopamine gone.
maaybe you power through!
The trap
I initially set out to build a founder analysis tool that would take GitHub, LinkedIn, and Twitter URLs of startup founders and generate scores and insights about them. My instinct & LLMs input said to build a full-stack application with:
A front-end interface
Backend APIs to handle the data collection
Integration with various platforms
Storage for the analysis results
Complex logic to determine scoring
Sound familiar?
But as the project grew more complex, I found myself spending more time on scaffolding than on the actual analysis capabilities I wanted to build.
Here’s my full video walkthrough: