Writing research made easy - Ben's Bites

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Writing research made easy

Improving vision using code

Jan 29, 2026

The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.

Hey folks,

Prism by OpenAI - It’s a LaTeX editor for scientists to draft/work on research papers with AI. Free for ChatGPT users, with unlimited projects and collaborators. It has an editor that both you and GPT-5.2 can edit, and a preview that renders the LaTeX input. Read more on their blog. Also, Prism’s founder went from idea to OpenAI in less than 16 months.

Two thoughts on this:

1. Last year, the first release from OpenAI was Operator - a web browsing agent, and we saw dozens of variations of it in 2025. This year might be document editors.

2. AI for developers is a relatively solved problem for OpenAI. Their next “frontier” target audience is definitely scientists with plans to build an AI researcher intern by Sept 2026.

—Keshav

Related: OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, recently talked about licensing OpenAI models to companies in a way that if they contribute to a discovery, OpenAI can get a piece of the pie. (more clarifications)

Gemini 3 Flash can now plan how to analyse an image and use tools to zoom in and annotate it for better visual understanding. It increases performance on visual benchmarks by 5-10%. Google calls it “Agentic Vision ”, though OpenAI’s models have had this since o3.

Chrome is also becoming an AI browser. The Gemini integration now opens a sidebar with features like image generation, access to other Google tools, and auto-browsing. Only in the US for now.

Give your AI the power to listen. Gladia is a speech-to-text API that turns real conversations into structured data for agents, workflows, and automation. ~300ms latency, 94% accuracy, and a lightweight SDK lets you add production-grade voice in minutes. Test real-time or async in our playground.*

🌐What I’m consuming

• AI-assisted development at Block - Repo readiness, parallel agents and automated PRs.

• How can agents automate improving a software product using a closed loop of user feedback to shipped features?

• Can AI make you feel disempowered about your reality - new research from Anthropic.

• How does the creator of Clawdbot (now Moltbot) ship?

⚙️ Tools and demos

• PropelAuth is the #1 choice for developers building in B2B. Signup/Login, MCP, RBAC, Enterprise SSO, and more , all out of the box.*

• Momo - Stop asking your team for progress updates. Connect all your work tools and build your team’s memory.

• Ami Browser - Build a feature → your agent tests the web app and fixes bugs.

• Manus Skills - Turn a session into a skill or import Skills from others.

• o11 - The copilot you deserve in all your Microsoft 365 Apps.

• Shortcut - The Excel AI agent that you can actually use and works better than Claude, Copilot and others. (demo on 4 real tasks)

• Variant - Enter an idea and get endless (beautiful) designs as you scroll. (see more)

🥣 Dev Dish

• Ian built this skills directory with a file explorer to read the skill, an upvote/downvote system and a cli to bring them to your projects.

• Beautiful Mermaid - Render diagrams to understand your code, but cleaner than plain Mermaid.

• Rivet - Universal API for automatic coding agents in sandboxes. (docs)

• vercel-react-native-skills - Lessons from building the v0 iOS app and Vercel app.

• OpenInspect - Open-source background coding agent system inspired by Ramp’s Inspect.

• Gemini CLI has hooks now and hence a Ralph Wiggum extension.

🍦 Afters

• Flapping Airplanes - new foundational lab with $180M in seed funding to make training for AI models more data efficient. Kate from WSJ has a write-up on this company and the growing category of neolabs.

• Anduril is hosting an autonomous drone racing competition to compete for $500,000 and a job at Anduril.

• Snap is making Specs (its unit for building AI glasses) a distinct subsidiary.

• Many members of the Cline team have joined Codex.

That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋

• Read about me and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail from A Beautiful Mind

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