No-Code

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. 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. ...

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. 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. ...

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