AI Tools

Anthropic shipped four models in two months, and the naming has scrambled half the developers I talk to. Claude Opus 5 — launched July 24, 2026 — is the one worth your attention. It matches frontier performance at half the frontier price, and introduces something no previous Claude model had: an effort dial that controls how much thinking you pay for per request. I’ve spent the last week running Opus 5 through actual work. Coding tasks, research synthesis, long-document analysis. If you read my breakdown of what Fable 5 and Mythos mean for AI users, you know Anthropic’s lineup has been a moving target. Fable 5 got banned, came back, and sits at $10 per million input tokens. Sonnet 5 is cheaper but weaker. Opus 5 lands in the middle — and on paper, it’s the smartest buy in the entire Claude family. ...

OpenAI is launching a physical macro pad for Codex, and it follows the same pattern that made calculators, mice, and touchscreens mainstream.

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been testing AI image and video tools for over a year now, and the hardest part has never been the generation itself. It’s picking the right tool. Every week there’s a new model claiming to be the best, and unless you’re deep in the weeds, you’re basically guessing. Runway just launched something that could change that — a model router that automatically picks the best creative AI model for your specific request. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. When General Intuition raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation to train AI agents on gaming data, the story was about where AI is going. Glow’s $180M raise at a $1.2B valuation is about something closer to home: what’s already running on your laptop right now — and who’s watching it. ...

Update August 2025: Google’s Gemini has surged past 1 billion users, making it the company’s fastest-growing product ever, while Google has also announced it will retire the classic Google Assistant on phones starting September 4. More details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you’re a solo developer shipping code to production, you probably have a nagging feeling you should be running security scans. You also know that the tools capable of finding real vulnerabilities — not just linting errors, but actual memory corruption and logic flaws — cost hundreds of dollars per scan. Google just made that problem a lot smaller. ...

Update August 2026: recent developments in meta ai may affect the information in this post — see details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I’ve been paying for ChatGPT Plus and testing Claude for months. They’re both solid — but last week Meta quietly rolled out something that made me rethink my entire AI stack. Meta AI can now manage your calendar, run recurring tasks on autopilot, and do research you can steer in real time. And it’s free. ...

🎧 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. ...

🎧 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 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. ...