Let AI point it out
stealth models, image editing and a unique battle
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.
Hey folks,
There’s a new stealth coding model, Sonic, popping up in Cursor, Cline and other coding tools. The word on the street is it’s xAI’s Grok-4 Code.
At their Pixel devices event, Google released some new AI features. You can now edit your pics in Google Photos just by telling it what to do, ChatGPT-style. I wonder if this is their rumoured ‘nano banana’ model. And Gemini Live, their voice-video mode for Gemini, can now highlight stuff on your screen in video mode, use more of your apps, and even match your mood. The highlighting part is actually nice UX.
btw, Qwen-Image-Edit, a new open-source image editing model, has basically caught up to the top proprietary model (Flux Kontext) on the leaderboards. I’m seeing devs switch from Kontext to Qwen Image hosted on Fal or Replicate.
The adoption of customer support bots is interesting. No one really wants them, but everyone’s finding success building them. ElevenLabs, a voice AI startup, now supports a text-only mode for its conversational agents. ps: they've also launched their V3 API for more expressive text-to-speech.
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Who’s your money on? Factory (a portfolio company) is running a Man vs. Machine Hackathon where half the participants can't use LLMs, and the other half can use any AIs and agents. IRL in SF 6th September (event link).
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🌐 What I’m consuming
How 1500 early-stage companies are raising, spending, and hiring in 2025.
Just one more prompt - confessions of a Claudoholic.
RAG is dead, and context engineering is king.
Microsoft's head of AI on why we should not build seemingly conscious AI.
If agents are building your app, who gets the W-2?
Don't outsource your judgment to AI as a PM.
A new tomorrow, today - a short essay on creative work in the age of AI.
Dylan Patel (Semianalysis) on GPT-5, GPUs vs TPUs, and monetisation of AI apps.
How Modal built a Data Cloud from the ground up.
State of AI Dev Tools & Agents - A recap of the last quarter.
⚙️ Tools to tinker with
Triple Whale's Moby Agents - Drive smarter, faster decisions across your entire business with the only AI agents built for ecommerce.*
pond.computer - Stream UI components from LLMs, not just words.
Simulations by Sierra - Test your agents by simulating conversations between AI and mock user personas.
Magic Path now supports real-time UI generation. (Watch the founder prototype with it).
Firecrawl V2 - 10x faster scraping with better DX and an easy-to-use playground. (They also just raised a $14.5M Series A).
Sublime now lets you vibe search your X bookmarks.
Blue - A voice assistant that can control every app on your phone, so you can get work done hands-free.
Electric Sheep – Agentic GenAI video editor that turns footage into finished highlights via chat.
everyday.new - Personal AI that handles simple tasks and multi-step workflows.
Wonder - A design tool on an infinite canvas with taste and understanding of your design.
Graphite Chat - Talk to your codebase right in your review workflow.
Line by Cartesia - The modern voice agent development platform.
LiveKit Cloud - Deploy AI voice agents easily and leave the engineering headache to LiveKit.
Zapier agents can now work together, i.e., one agent can hand off a task to another.
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🥣 Dev dish
RenderGit by Karpathy - Render any Git repo in a single static HTML page for humans or LLMs.
Warp is leading the new Terminal Bench leaderboard by a pretty big margin.
AGENTS.md - A simple open format for guiding coding agents. Factory AI (portco) is using it.
withMCP - Turn your API Server into an MCP with 1 line of code.
Streamdown - A drop-in replacement for React markdown designed for AI-powered streaming.
Statusline - Show Git status, GitHub notifications, and smart path in Claude Code.
Self-host any N8N workflow on Replit in five minutes.
Learn how to build full-stack on Cloudflare with this new course.
A guide to running Claude Code inside a secure sandbox.
🍦 Afters
Zed raises $32M Series B and plans to extend Git for AI.
The team behind Dia is hiring by explaining what they are working on.
Perplexity is working on a feature called SuperMemory (different from supermemory.com).
Looking for a design engineer role? Reach out to Ridd.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth
Hi Ben, I was wondering if you would be interested in participating in our research about the future of AI in Creative Industries? Would be really keen to hear your perspectives. It only takes 10mins and I am sure you will find it interesting.
https://form.typeform.com/to/EZlPfCGm