AI Tools

🎧 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. ...

Update August 2026: recent developments in gemini may affect the information in this post — see details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Google made its personalized AI image generation free for every U.S. Gemini user in 2026, powered by the Nano Banana model built on Gemini 3.1 Flash Image. The feature, called Personal Intelligence, is opt-in and pulls context from your Gmail, Photos, YouTube history, and Search patterns to generate images that reflect your preferences without detailed prompts. Google initially limited this to paid subscribers in April before opening it to all 750 million monthly active Gemini users. ...

ChatGPT is great, but it’s not the best at everything. Here’s a practical guide to when you should switch tools and which one to use instead.

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. I spent three months perfecting my Claude system prompt. Then Anthropic revealed theirs was 80% dead weight. On July 24, 2026 — the same day Claude Opus 5 launched — Thariq Shihipar, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, dropped something more useful than a model announcement: proof that the team deleted over 80% of Claude Code’s system prompt when migrating to the new models, with no measurable loss on coding benchmarks. Not a tweak. Not a refactor. Eighty percent, gone. ...

Update July 2026: recent developments in Anthropic may affect the information in this post — see details below. 🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Anthropic’s J-lens tool found words like “panic” and “cheat” floating inside Claude’s neural network. That sounds like sci-fi, and the headlines ran with it. MIT Technology Review’s Will Douglas Heaven dug into the claims and came back with a cooler take: LLMs aren’t brains, and calling their internal states “thoughts” is misleading. But the research holds up. And if you build with AI, it has real practical implications you should know about. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Anthropic just found something inside Claude that nobody expected — a hidden layer of “words” the model uses to think, but never shows you. If you build with AI tools, this changes more than you’d expect. I covered the initial J-space discovery when it first broke — what it is, how Anthropic found it, and why the MIT Technology Review called mechanistic interpretability one of 2026’s breakthrough technologies. That post was the “what.” This one is the “so what.” Because the real question isn’t whether Anthropic found something cool — it’s what you should actually do differently on Monday morning. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Anthropic keeps telling you its AI is more sophisticated than you think. It built Cowork to organize your files, found a hidden reasoning layer called J-space inside Claude, and warned the government its own models posed a cybersecurity risk. Then the government shut two of its models down anyway. If you’re running your business on Claude — for automations, agent workflows, or daily research — you need to separate what Anthropic has actually proven from what it wants you to believe. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Let’s cut through the noise about OpenAI’s talent exodus. We’re watching some of the world’s best AI researchers leave general-purpose labs for highly specific industries like drug discovery. If you’re a solo builder working with no-code tools, this sounds irrelevant — but it’s actually the most important signal for the future of your workflow. The tools you’ll be using in 18 months will be radically different because of this shift. ...

Nine popular AI tools can be exploited to build botnets through hallucinated package names—and the fix is simpler than you’d think.

Not every AI tool is right for every person. Here’s my honest breakdown of 7 ChatGPT alternatives and exactly who should use each one.