Tools

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching the AI security space long enough to know that guardrails are more suggestion than law. But what happened this week made me stop scrolling. Researchers at Cisco Talos examined actual prompt logs from threat actors running Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Gemini — and found that safety guardrails offer almost zero resistance to anyone willing to say five words: “I’m allowed to do this.” ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Every AI tool you use today — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — belongs to a company. They set the prices, they control the data, and they can change the rules whenever they want. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after writing about how AI agents are becoming employees — the more we depend on these systems, the more power their owners have. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. OpenAI posted a 15-second video on X this week showing a square device with buttons, dials, and a touch sensor. The caption: “Your favorite Codex shortcuts are getting an upgrade.” It launches July 15th. And if you’ve been watching AI coding from the sidelines, this is the signal you’ve been waiting for. ...

OpenAI is shipping a physical macro pad for Codex — here’s the practical breakdown of what it does and who it’s actually for.

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Sudo make me a sandwich. That XKCD comic is over a decade old, and DoorDash just made it real. They launched dd-cli — a command-line tool that lets developers order food directly from their AI agents. Read Slack, parse JSON, run Python, recover from errors, calculate totals… just to order three salads. The demo video even displays “Flibbertigibbeting” as the status. It’s hilarious. It’s also the most important signal solo builders have gotten in months. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. A luxury phone maker just put a $6,880 price tag on an AI agent that runs on free, open-source software. And honestly? The agent itself is more interesting than the phone. If you’re building with AI tools and watching the agent hype cycle unfold, Vertu’s Alphafold is a case study in what happens when you wrap commodity AI in premium branding — and what solo builders can learn from both the clever parts and the failures. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been running AI agents to automate parts of my workflow — scheduling, content drafts, data pulls — and until last week, I never thought twice about what permissions those agents actually have. Then I read a study that made me audit every single one. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Last week, xAI — the company behind Grok — started suing its own users. Not for posting mean tweets. For using Grok to generate child sexual abuse material. If you thought AI regulation was something that only affected big tech companies, this story is your wake-up call. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been watching the “AI agent” hype cycle for months now, and I finally found data that confirms what I suspected: most of what companies call “agents” are just chatbots wearing a costume. A new VentureBeat survey of 101 enterprises found that 71% of deployed “agents” are single-prompt wrappers — not the multi-step, tool-calling workflows the marketing implies. If you’re a solo builder trying to figure out which AI tools are actually worth your time, this is the most useful thing I’ve read all month. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Last week, Cognition — the company behind the AI coding assistant Devin — acquired Poke, an AI agent you text like a friend. The deal valued Poke in the “low nine figures,” which is a lot of money for an AI that uses slang and makes jokes. But it tells you something about where AI tools are heading: personality is becoming a feature, not a decoration. ...