Dreaming up personal agents - Ben's Bites

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Dreaming up personal agents

OpenClaw's maker is joining OpenAI

Feb 17, 2026

Hey folks,

I’ve been running my own AI agent for a while now. It reads my emails, checks my calendar, manages my projects, and runs on a Mac Mini in my house 24/7. I built the whole thing through a terminal — talking to a coding agent, not writing code myself.

It’s a bit janky, but it’s mine and it works. I love it.

I’m not the only one doing this. OpenClaw blew up because people realised that an always-on agent with access to your stuff is genuinely useful. There’s a wave of people building personal agents right now. And my guess is, if you’re not - you will have one this year.

That’s where Dreamer comes in (and no, it’s not an ad or investment - just a tool and team I have massive respect for).

David Singleton (former Stripe CTO + big Ben’s Bites fan!) and Hugo Barra built Android together. Now they’ve started Dreamer with designer Nicholas, 14 others and $50m in funding.

A simple pitch: if you can dream it, you can build it.What is it?

Dreamer is a platform where you build agentic apps by talking. You describe what you want, and an AI agent called “Sidekick” builds it for you in minutes. There’s also a more detailed coding agent for when you want to go deeper. Either way, you never think about hosting or deployment. The platform handles all of it.

That’s the bit I care about most. I spend a stupid amount of time on infrastructure. Getting servers running, keeping things alive, debugging why something crashed. That stuff is fine when you’re learning, but it’s not the point. The point is the thing you’re trying to make.

Sidekick learns about you over time and acts as the privacy layer, controlling what data each app in Dreamer can access. It can spin up temporary agents for specific tasks, integrate with third-party tools and coordinate between your different apps. All of that wiring is done for you out of the box.

What can you actually build?

Turns out, a lot:

You describe what you want, Sidekick builds it, you iterate by talking. Build time is 6-10 minutes for moderate complexity. Once you’ve built something, you can share it in a gallery for others to use or remix.

There are loads of tools that help you build with AI right now — Claude Code, Cursor, Replit, Droid. But they’re still pretty technical.

Dreamer isn’t a coding tool. It’s not an IDE with AI bolted on. It’s a platform where the conversation is the input and the app is the output.

Live now

Dreamer had four months of closed alpha with strong engagement, and it's now moving to public beta today with a partnership with Anthropic.

2026 is the year of the personal agent, but right now it’s still a technical hurdle. Dreamer is the closest thing I’ve seen to making that accessible to everyone.

ReadDavid’s deep-dive on how Dreamer works under the hood for the full story.

Now back to the top stories;

Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI , and OpenClaw will become a foundation. He’ll work on bringing agents doing things and interacting with each other into OpenAI’s core products.

A bunch of new models released recently:

GPT-5.3-Codex Spark by OpenAI - 3x-5x faster than GPT-5.3-Codex. Think of it as a mini model (there are performance dips for that speed). It’s also a text-only model with just a 128k context window. Runs on Cerebras’ hardware and available for Pro ($200/mo) subs. See it in action in Pi.

Minimax M2.5 and GLM-5 - Two models from Chinese labs that are worth paying attention to. M2.5 scores similarly to Opus 4.5 in coding benchmarks, and GLM looks really good at tool calling—while both of them are wayyy cheaper than Opus or GPT models.

Gemini Deep Think 3 - Based on Gemini 3 Pro, scores 84.6% on ARC-AGI 2 (vs 68.8% from Opus 4.6), available for Gemini Ultra subscribers, and that’s… it. They say it’s coming soon to the API, but there aren’t many details to care about this model. It does score really well on academic tests compared to other models, though. And I think that’s what matters to Google/DeepMind here. Why?

Because OpenAI claims GPT-5.2 derived a new result in theoretical physics. GPT-5.2 simplified a complex formula to describe a particle’s behaviour. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is “new work”. OpenAI is also throwing their models at other hard problems in Math and testing how well they do at 1stproof.org (read more)

Why’s there always a meeting bot in your Zoom call? Blame Recall.ai. They power every meeting AI app, from Cluely to Hubspot to Clickup. Recall.ai handles the hard part: getting recording data across meeting platforms. **Get started with $100 in credits. From the portfolio:

🌐What I’m consuming

⚙️ Tools and demos

🥣 Dev Dish

🍦 Afters

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

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