Friday Finds: March 14, 2025
2 minutes read
Another week, another collection of interesting links from the corners of the web. This week’s edition leans heavily into AI innovations with a few other interesting discoveries mixed in.
AI
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An open-source AI coding assistant for VS Code that uses a dual Plan/Act approach and can execute terminal commands. The integration with existing workflows looks promising.
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Focuses on AI-driven development workflows with solid integration capabilities for existing codebases. Worth exploring if you’re looking to incorporate AI into your development process.
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Self-described as “the first UGC Foundation Model,” specializing in generating talking videos and user-generated content. The outputs are impressively natural.
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Vercel’s generative UI tool continues to improve. The ability to transform text descriptions into functional React components with Tailwind CSS makes rapid prototyping much more accessible.
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Takes AI beyond content generation into brand strategy by analyzing business data, market trends, and cultural shifts. Interesting to see AI moving into more strategic territory.
Tools
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AI assistant specifically for command line tasks. If you’re regularly working in the terminal but sometimes struggle to remember specific command syntax, this is incredibly useful.
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Suite of specialized AI image tools covering everything from upscaling and sharpening to background removal. The quality is impressive considering the convenience of having everything in one place.
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Not AI-related, but a solid blueprint for companies experiencing growing pains or dissatisfaction with their product development efforts.
From The Blog
If you missed it, my recent post on Consultants and the Illusion of Complexity argues that we’re not in an era of decade-long waterfall projects anymore. With AI, you can prototype in days rather than months.
The explosion of specialized AI tools I’ve found this week reinforces this point. We’re seeing rapid innovation in narrowly-focused applications that excel at specific tasks, making specialized AI capabilities accessible to more people and more use cases.
Next week I’ll share some thoughts on how I’m incorporating these tools into my own workflows and what I’ve learned in the process.
Until then
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