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,
I haven’t done a list of tools that I use regularly (aka my daily-drivers 😉) so here’s some that I switched to and have not churned from:
Factory.ai - browser-based AI coding tool. Super easy to use and the actual agent is better than Claude Code and others (ie it doesn’t just list files and search patterns). I used it this morning to build a timezone converter that works by highlighting text (here’s it in action). oh and some other BIG news coming here v soon.
Granola - it’s just the best meeting note taker. Not being present in the call is just better for everyone. They have a Zapier integration to pull out notes but waiting for their API/MCP so I can get factory to make some magic workflows and save to my folders. (linked my referral link but I dont get money, just pride)
Dia Browser - having a quick AI assistant accessible on any web page or when opening a new tab has become a very go-to move for me. And I love the custom skills for quick workflows (like pull all the AI news from hacker news today). 5 free invites here
ChatGPT/Claude - mostly only using these on mobile atm to be honest. I flit between the two, no loyalties or ties to either tbh.
Monologue - this replaced Whispr Flow for me; speech-to-text transcription when on my laptop. (linked my referral link but again, no money, just dopamine)
And honestly, that’s pretty much it! I try a bunch of email tools but nothing is perfect, so I’m going to just use Factory to make my own (I’ve built A LOT with it recently - more actual shipped projects than previously using Claude Code). 🫨
OpenAI released a new speech-to-speech model called gpt-realtime for developers. Plus, the Realtime API now supports MCP and image inputs. Essentially, you now have the toolkit for building long audio/video chat sessions. Pricing’s not there though, gpt-relatime is 20% cheaper than gpt-4o’s realtime pricing, but it’s still too expensive to be packaged into a $20/mo plan. It is $32/$64 input/output per million “audio” tokens, that’s roughly 15 minutes of chatting per $1 of API spend.
xAI has a new coding model: Grok Code Fast 1. Unusual choice of optimisation (faster vs smarter), but users in Cline, Cursor and other tools are liking the model. I haven’t tried it yet.
After years of not training on users’ data by default, Anthropic will now start doing that from 28th Sept. Of course, you can opt out, but another one of Anthropic’s "oh we don’t do that—like other evil labs” is down the drain.
a16z releases its consumer apps data every 6 months, and Olivia found a spike in Claude’s traffic that she couldn’t explain. Keshav went through Ben’s Bites editions from that week and found a likely reason.
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🌐 What I’m consuming
What AI policy for school boards can look like.
Can AI help understand how the brain learns to see the world?
Demos and tips on how to use subagents in Claude Code.
Mass Intelligence - AI is no longer niche. Everyone is starting to get access to powerful AI.
The state of play for AI creative tools.
⚙️ Tools to tinker with
Sparkle Search - Easiest way to find the files on your desktop.
OpenChat - Open-source macOS app to run AI models locally. (download the app)
Conductor - Run a bunch of Claude Codes in parallel.
Glif - Use nano-banana to create images with custom aspect ratios.
into.md - Convert any webpage into LLM-friendly markdown.
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🥣 Dev dish
Xcode (Apple’s IDE) 26 Beta now works with both Claude and GPT-5.
PR Arena - Software engineering agents head-to-head.
SemTools - Add blazing-fast semantic search to your entire filesystem without a vector database.
MCP workflow for spec-driven development with Claude Code.
🍦 Afters
CloudFlare and BrowserBase are partnering to give web crawling agents unique identities.
OpenAI, Cursor and Perplexity are using SerpAPI - a startup that sells scraped results from Google Search.
PuzzleJAX - Hundreds of grid-based games to test models for reasoning and learning.
YouTube is beta testing search based on natural language. Another request from me: better captions.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth
May I please beg you to tell us more, much more, about why you are finding Dia Browser so useful in your daily grinding for XPs for the XP god?
> **Ben Tossell**: Tools I actually use daily <https://www.bensbites.com/p/tools-i-actually-use-daily>: 'Dia Browser - having a quick AI assistant accessible on any web page or when opening a new tab has become a very go-to move for me. And I love the custom skills for quick workflows (like pull all the AI news from hacker news today)...