📌 TL;DR

• Seedance 2.0 → ByteDance dropped a new AI video model and the output is genuinely mind-blowing. Still in beta, but if you're making short-form content, start experimenting now.

• Gemini in Chrome → It's basically what Claude's browser extension already does, but baked into Chrome natively.

• Builder's notes → I built a Claude skill that creates an entire lead magnet funnel from a single Notion URL - landing page, thank-you page, n8n email workflow, Vercel routes, done in 5 minutes. Plus a /truncate skill that actually cuts text like a human editor, and 3 free upgrades that fixed my Clawdbot's memory.

Seedance 2.0 is mind blowing

If you've been on AI Twitter this week, you've seen the videos. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in a hyper-realistic rooftop fight. Walter white fighting saul. the INSANE AI UGC. All generated by Seedance 2.0, ByteDance's new AI video model.

The Brad Pitt clip was made by filmmaker Ruairi Robinson with a two-line prompt: "Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise put their differences aside to fight their common enemy, some robot or whatever."

Multimodal input. You can feed it up to 12 reference files at once: images, video clips, and audio, alongside your text prompt. It generates native audio in one pass. Not bolted on after. Add director-level camera controls and multi-shot character consistency, and you've got the closest thing to actually directing a scene instead of just describing one.

Specs: up to ~20 seconds at 1080p, 24fps, roughly 30% faster than Kling.

Still early though. It's in beta with limited access, and remember the viral demos are cherry-picked. You can try it on ByteDance's official site, but it's not on major platforms like Higgsfield or Artlist yet.

Worth experimenting with if you're making short-form video content. But "Hollywood is dead" is premature. The direction is clear though. AI video just got significantly more usable.

The council will decide your fate

Perplexity launched Model Council a feature that runs your query through three frontier models at once (Claude, GPT, Gemini) and gives you one synthesized answer showing where they agree and where they don't. It's locked behind Perplexity Max at $200/month, and web only for now.

I personally won't really use this but it's kind of cool - worth noting.

Gemini arrives in Chrome with Auto Browse

Google put Gemini directly into Chrome with a new side panel assistant and a feature called "auto browse" - an agent that handles multi-step tasks in your browser for you. Think booking appointments, filling out forms, researching flights, managing subscriptions. It works with Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Maps, and Google Shopping, and can use your saved passwords to handle tasks that require sign-in. It pauses before doing anything sensitive like making a purchase.

This is virtually identical to Claudes browser extension which I use regularly; I used it the other day to go on Alibaba and read through my conversations with 20+ suppliers and create a summary of each suppliers pricing and terms. pretty neat.

💡 Builder’s notes

I built 2 sick skills this week and continued going deeper on my Clawdbot setup.

The lead magnet launcher (this one is fucking nuts)

This one's probably my favourite skill I've built so far. I was spending hours every time I wanted to create a new lead magnet.

Build a landing page, build the thank-you page, set up the email delivery workflow in n8n, wire up the Vercel routes, set the environment variables... it's like 10 steps of the same thing every single time.

So I built a Claude skill that does the entire thing from a single Notion doc URL.

You give it the link to your Notion doc (the thing people actually receive), and it reads the page, builds the landing page, builds the access page, deploys the email delivery workflow to n8n via MCP, wires up the routes in Vercel, sets the env vars, and verifies everything works.

I get an entire lead magnet funnel built out and all I enter is this…

What used to take me a couple hours now takes about 5 minutes. And because it's a skill, it does it the same way every time, matching my exact brand, design system, and copy patterns.

Here’s the one I built today…

And it built and published the n8n workflow…

This is what encoding your processes into skills looks like. You do something twice, figure out the pattern, teach it to Claude, and never think about it again.

The truncate skill

I also built a /truncate skill that solves something that's been bugging me for ages.

You know when you ask an AI to "make this shorter" and it comes back sounding like a robot? LLMs don't actually know how to cut text properly. They compress everything. They merge sentences together, strip out the conversational bits, and flatten the whole thing into weird choppy fragments. It’s technically shorter, but reads like an Amazon product listing.

So I built a skill that teaches Claude to truncate the way a good editor would. Remove whole paragraphs that repeat a point. Trim filler phrases. But leave the personality, the asides, the rhythm alone. Never compress a natural sentence into a robotic one.

I use it on basically everything I write now. Reply back to this email if you want it.

The Clawdbot memory fix

I've been continuing to build out my Clawdbot empire and ran into something that was driving me nuts. I kept having to repeat myself. Context from earlier conversations just vanishes. Preferences I'd already explained, completely forgotten. Like working with someone who has amnesia.

So I dug into it and found 3 free upgrades that make an insane difference to your Clawdbot's memory.

I wrote up the full guide here: How I fixed my Clawdbot's memory with 3 free upgrades

🧰 Tools to try

• Grainrad → Upload any image or video and add dithering, ASCII art, halftone, pixel sorting, and VHS effects in real time. Free, runs in your browser.

• Variant → Basically lets you try on design styles before you start a project. Type an idea for an app or website and scroll through endless AI-generated design variations. The launch video alone is worth watching.

🥣 Brain food

• The Thinking Game → Google DeepMind's full documentary on Demis Hassabis, from chess prodigy to AlphaGo to winning the Nobel Prize. It's free on YouTube and it's one of the best things I've watched this year. Put it on this weekend.

• The only fonts you'll ever need → Solid font list if you're building anything right now. I bookmarked this one.

• Best Claude Code plugins I use daily → Good list of Claude Code plugins worth checking out if you're in the Claude Code world (you should be 🫵)