The first big exit in AI
little tools for making life easier
Overview
Hey folks,
Heading to a Q&A with Sam Altman later today in London so a bit rushed for time to part any ‘wisdom’.
I’m currently still mid-building the reference manual, but it’s coming along now! I’ll release a couple preview lessons hopefully by next week.
I’m using Codex as my ‘workhorse’ agent. Mostly because it’s easiest access on mobile while plugged into all my local files. I’m using it for a bunch of automations, check my inbox and triage (rip my little email build), ingesting a bunch of my twitter bookmarks to summarise all the stuff I’m saving and organising it into topics in my memory system - so i can ask ‘what do we know about agent memory’ and it’ll pull from all the posts i’ve saved.
I spent a lot of time talking to agents less, unless I was actually working. But I’m now leaning back into just talk to agents about everything.
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Headlines
SpaceX is acquiring Cursor for $60B in an all-stock deal. Cursor also launched a few new things at Compile, their first conference (it had chalkboards on stage).
A GitHub alternative in waitlist - Origin for code storage/git hosting.
Smoother transitioning between local and cloud agents.
And they teased a new Cursor model that’ll do much more than coding.
Midjourney (the image generation company) is building an ultrasonic body scanner under a new division called Midjourney Medical, and a Spa in San Francisco.
Claude Design now follows your design system, lets you edit the canvas directly & syncs with Claude Code plus more tools like Replit. On the design tool theme: Framer now connects to external agents like Claude Code and Codex, and v0 has a new design mode.
OpenAI’s financials got leaked - Ed Zitron says audited 2025 financials show $13.07B revenue and $34B costs, with Jack Raines adding useful context on the margin debate. Also, Noam Shazeer, Google’s Gemini co-lead and Transformer co-author, is joining OpenAI.
As part of the Spring '26 Edition, Shopify now lets any developer build end-to-end agentic commerce experiences. Use Catalog API to query billions of merchant products, and the Universal Commerce Protocol to power the full commerce journey from product discovery to checkout. See what else is new.*
My feed
Like insurance for cloud spend: Archera insures AWS/Azure/GCP commitments; reservation savings without the downside. Start with $0 platform fees.*
Copilot Cowork, the latest tool from Microsoft, faces the same issue as Claude Cowork. It forces an artificial choice between chat and work, while Codex lets a chat naturally become the work thread.
Grok Imagine Video 1.5 - sharper image-to-video with better physics and speed.
Computer use, Chrome extension, memory and Chronicle in Codex are now available in Europe as well.
Tacit Labs - applied research lab for AI and biology.
AutoWiki by Factory AI - Generate a structured wiki for your code that updates on every push.
Block built a tool called Builderbot that coordinates agents across our entire codebase. Here’s how.
Side-by-side comparison of website designs built by Fable 5, Opus 4.8 and Kimi K2.7 (read more).
Exa Agent - web research API using cheaper model orchestration.
Ploy - AI marketing platform for websites, SEO, CRM and campaigns. Founded by Webflow’s founding CTO.
HumanLayer - agentic IDE and collaboration layer for software factories.
API for Cursor - local MacOS app that lets you use Cursor’s models with any harness.
Vercel launched Eve - an agent framework that they hope is Next.js for agents. Also see Flue (which hopes to be Astro instead).
Three ways Codex can use a computer.
killedbyopenai.com - graveyard for things OpenAI killed
/visual-plan - visual plans for Codex/Claude Code.
Polar is moving away from Tailwind to an LLM-safe design system.
Build logs
- by Keshav
Details
Before Fable was removed, I used it to make a tiny CLI utility for moving files between my Samsung S24 Ultra and my M3 MacBook Air.
I just wanted to plug the phone in with a cable and move photos, screenshots, PDFs, etc. without downloading another random app or uploading everything over WiFi.
It suggested two options, guided me through the setup (which only took 30 secs), and then wired everything by itself.
The only hiccup was the terminal command it picked for this utility: droid, which was already being used by Droid, the coding agent from Factory AI.
I renamed it to phone, and now I can search photos, videos or any file on my phone from my Mac terminal, and transfer files both ways: my phone to my Mac, and my Mac to my phone.
Afters
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Source
Originally published at www.bensbites.com.
