Something big is happening - Ben's Bites
Something big is happening
not just $60m seed rounds...
Feb 12, 2026
Hey folks,
Thomas Dohmke (ex-GitHub CEO) launchedEntire — a new company building the “next developer platform” for agent-human collaboration. $60M seed led by Felicis (!! $60m seed?!). Their bet - code in files and PRs is a dying paradigm so what’s next is intent → outcomes in natural language. Their first ship is Checkpoints. It captures the full agent context (transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls) alongside every git commit. People are talking about the new-age GitHub often on Twitter (I’m taking a stab at my own!). Whether Entire is it, or the start of many attempts at it, someone needs to build the infra layer for a world where agents write the code.
OpenAI shippednew primitives in the Responses API for long-running agentic work: server-side compaction (multi-hour agent runs without hitting context limits), containers with networking (agents can install libraries and run scripts with internet access), and native Skills support with a pre-built spreadsheets skill. Pus they put out 10 tips on running multi-hour agent workflows reliably.
Claude Cowork is now on Windows. Full feature parity with macOS — file access, multi-step tasks, plugins, MCP connectors.
Matt Shumer’s “Something Big is Happening ” went mega-viral. It’s a long essay aimed at non-tech people explaining where AI is right now. The gist: he describes what he wants built in plain english, walks away for 4 hours, comes back to finished software. GPT-5.3 Codex “helped build itself” per OpenAI’s own docs. Whether you think the essay is brilliant or slop (Will Manidis wrote a fantastic counter-essay called “Tool Shaped Objects” comparing AI hype to FarmVille — well worth reading), it clearly hit a nerve with many. John Coogan also had a good take: AI is not Covid, it’s a series of S-curves, not one exponential.
Universal-3 Pro is a new promptable speech model for production from AssemblyAI. Guide transcription upfront instead of fixing it later. Control industry jargon, speakers, disfluencies, and formatting in a single pass. Free to try through February.*
🌐What I’m consuming
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Lex Fridman interviewed Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw creator) — 3+ hour deep dive. origin story, why it went viral (180k+ GitHub stars), security concerns, GPT-5.3 Codex vs Opus 4.6, acquisition offers from OpenAI and Meta, and whether AI agents replace 80% of apps. good listen.
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Karpathy on DeepWiki + the increasing malleability of software. Maybe you don’t install giant libraries anymore — you point your agent at them and extract exactly what you need. “libraries are over, LLMs are the new compiler.”
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Nader Dabit wrote “You Could’ve Invented OpenClaw” — a full tutorial building OpenClaw’s architecture from scratch. Sessions, SOUL.md, tools, permissions, gateway pattern, compaction, memory, cron, multi-agent. ~400 lines of Python. One of the best explainers on how these agents work. Point your agent to the markdown version + say “build it” to give it a go 😊 (i’ve made a couple of my own)
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Meng To recorded a 41-min tutorial on shipping products, designs and articles with OpenClaw and Codex.
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Mitchell Hashimoto says AI-friendly code storage is what kills GitHub. Whoever builds the critical infrastructure that agentic coding providers need.
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Lenny Rachitsky asked for OpenClawimpact and horror stories. The contrast is fun — people love it and hate it in equal measure.
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Boris wrote up hisworkflow for working with Claude Code: Plan in a dedicated doc, annotate it, iteratively work with a persistent artifact that doesn’t get compacted. Says plan mode sucks across all coding agents.
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Agents training future AI models — hamza tested whether current models can actually do this. spoiler: it’s more complicated than the narrative suggests.
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“I improved 15 LLMs at coding in one afternoon. Only the harness changed. ” — this is a banger. he built a new edit tool called Hashline for his open-source coding agent (oh-my-pi, a fork of Pi). instead of making models reproduce exact text to edit files (which fails constantly), every line gets a short content hash. models reference the hash to say “edit this line.” result: Gemini improved 8%, Grok Code Fast went from 6.7% to 68.3% — a tenfold improvement. no retraining, no new models, just a better tool interface. “ the model is the moat. the harness is the bridge. burning bridges just means fewer people bother to cross. ”
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⚙️ Tools and demos
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NemoVideo - Scientific workflow for viral hits. Pro-grade, effortless video editing agent. Stop betting on luck & chat your way to virality.*
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WebMCP is here. Chrome 146 has an early preview (behind a flag) that lets AI agents query and execute services on websites without screenshotting and clicking around like a drunk robot. Websites expose tools directly to agents. Wes Bos tried it — says it’s way faster and way easier to adapt existing apps. Agents are finally becoming first-class citizens of the web.
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Warp launched Oz — a platform to orchestrate agents in the cloud. Spin up hundreds of agents from terminal, browser, API, or your phone. Each gets a Docker environment to build, test, and write PRs.
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Style Dropper by Variant — point it at anything, absorb ‘the vibe’, apply it to your designs.
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ashe built a Claude Code/Codex skill that uses the new X API to help with tweet drafts — pulls Matt Gray’s writing guide, trending posts on your topic, and your best posts from the last 30 days.
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keep.surf chrome extension — save tabs, bookmarks, and links, turn them into an API, give the skill to your OpenClaw agent.
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Lindy launched Lindy Assistant — talks to you through iMessage, connects to 100s of apps, helps with meetings and emails, proactively finds ways to save you time.
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Nebula — set up any cron or webhook by just asking. activates agents or workflows with specific instructions. keeps running all day every day.
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Happycapy is now open to everyone — an “agent-native computer” in your browser and on your phone. powered by Claude Code + MiniMax (Opus 4.6, Minimax M2.5). secure cloud sandbox, agent teams, task automation. no installs, just run.
positioning as the all-in-one alternative to running OpenClaw yourself.
🥣 Dev Dish
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pgrok — a free ngrok alternative. point a wildcard domain to a VPS, install on both ends, done. runs 100% on your infrastructure. built on opentui.
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Simon Willison built Showboat and Rodney — two tools to help coding agents demonstrate their work beyond just running automated tests.
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Tambo 1.0 — open-source generative UI toolkit for React.
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Happycapy is now open to everyone — an “agent-native computer” in your browser and on your phone. powered by Claude Code + MiniMax (Opus 4.6, Minimax M2.5). secure cloud sandbox, agent teams, task automation. no installs, just run. positioning as the all-in-one alternative to running OpenClaw yourself.
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Repo Prompt 2.0 — new built-in Agent mode using RP’s MCP tools, first-class Codex support (leveraging its app server), plus Claude Code and Gemini CLI support. brand new onboarding too.
🍦 Afters
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swyx’s career advice : “always reflect where the smart/ambitious people are and just dive in.” physical/mental nexus is king.
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Ryan Hoover on reputation in the AI era : brand and trust are increasingly important. the long game matters even more tomorrow.
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Claude Code in Slack now has Plan Mode. Give Claude a complex task, it asks clarifying questions and shows an implementation plan before coding.
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OpenAI:Deep Research now runs on GPT-5.2. rolling out now with more improvements coming. (wtf was it running before?!)
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
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