The AI tools people are actually using

ByteDance quietly released a free AI code editor last week. Same features as Cursor—Claude and GPT-4o built in, inline edits, chat, the works—but without the $20/month or the rate limits that have been frustrating Cursor users lately.

The timing is interesting. Cursor just switched to usage-based pricing and their subreddit is full of people hitting limits mid-project. Trae doesn't have limits. You can also plug in your own API keys if you want to use a specific model.

Still early. The extension ecosystem isn't there yet, and some people are (understandably) cautious about ByteDance. But if you're frustrated with Cursor's pricing, worth a look.

If you've ever tried to use Midjourney for actual design work, you know the pain: upscale, download, trace in Illustrator, clean up the paths, fix the colors. Recraft skips all of that.

It generates vectors directly. Real .svg files with clean paths. Set your brand colors upfront and everything stays on-palette. There's an infinite canvas so you can generate variations and arrange them like you would in Figma.

Design Twitter has been quietly obsessed with this for a few weeks. The founder previously worked on computer vision at Yandex, which explains why it handles structured output so well.

There are a hundred AI meeting tools. Most of them add a bot to your call that makes everyone uncomfortable. Granola does something smarter.

You take notes during the meeting like normal—just keywords and bullet points. After the call, Granola matches your notes to the transcript and fills in the context. So you end up with your structure, their words.

Works with Meet, Zoom, Teams. No bot joins the call—it just listens through your system audio. Less creepy, more useful.

You've probably seen the demos. "Make me a website." "Research my competitors." "Find 100 leads and put them in a spreadsheet." Manus does it. Not perfectly, but well enough that it went viral.

The interesting part isn't the flashy demos—it's the mundane stuff. A recruiter used it to source candidates for 3 different roles in parallel. A founder used it to analyze 50 YC company landing pages and extract their positioning. An agency used it to build a client proposal deck while they slept.

Still on waitlist, but they're letting people in batches. If you're curious about what "agents" actually means in practice, this is the one to watch.

If you want to understand how AI coding agents work, install Cline. It's a VS Code extension that gives Claude the ability to create files, run terminal commands, and navigate your codebase autonomously.

Unlike Devin ($500/mo) or Cursor, you can watch exactly what it's doing, step by step. It uses your own API key, so you know exactly what each task costs. Most simple tasks run $0.10-0.50.

Good starting point: ask it to add a feature to one of your existing projects. Watch how it explores the codebase, figures out the architecture, then makes changes.

"Vibe coding" was Collins Dictionary's word of the year. The idea: describe what you want, AI builds it. These three tools are leading that wave:

The surprise of 2025: Chinese video models are beating Western ones on both quality and accessibility. Kling and Hailuo both have more monthly users than Sora, and you can actually use them without a $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription.