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,
‘Nano-banana’ aka ‘Gemini 2.5 flash’ is Google’s new native image generation and editing model, is now out to everyone on the Gemini app and API. It’s the best image gen model out there, it’s very fast and cheaper than others. It feels very creative for infographics too.
I tested it against a few of the thumbnails for the newsletter where I either was using ChatGPT’s image generations or I had to open up pixlr (photoshop-lite on web). The quality of generation is much better than ChatGPT, it doesn’t have the glossy look or the sepia finish on all the images like ChatGPT’s images do. Plus it can handle basic text additions etc. really well. I had issues with modifying aspect ratios and making collages though.
Here’s an example: Original image → nano-banana → ChatGPT in order.
Anthropic has opened the research preview for “Claude for Chrome” and from the looks of it, it feels like a pretty nice implementation of the “do tasks for me” agent. It triggers like a chrome extension, open up in a sidebar, listens to your prompt and then takes over the open tab to do your job for you. I’m just waiting for my approval before testing it out.
OpenAI’s Codex-CLI now has image inputs. I saw a tweet covering other improvements too; IDE extension, code reviews in GitHub and more.
A live coding challenge of humans vs AI is happening soon. The group will be randomly split in half and assigned manual or AI code. $15k prize for the winners. It’s approval only but if you tell them I sent you, you’ll get approved :) - it’s hosted by Factory (one of my portfolio companies).
Vibe coding apocalypse & how to survive it (by the ex-CTO @ GitHub). Essentially you should learn backwards (which is what I do) - build the thing and learn how it works on the go (plus rebuild it several times)
ChatGPT helped locate a stolen Lamborghini after two years.
Someone messaged the owner on Instagram asking about the Lamborghini and sent a photo - ChatGPT accurately identified a blurred vehicle in the background, leading the owner to Denver, where police recovered the car — tibor
