This AI Startup Just Hit $29B (And Your Boss Already Uses It

"Your AI coding assistant just got a valuation higher than your company's entire market cap, and somehow you're still debugging semicolons manually."

An AI coding startup just hit a $29.3B valuation while OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.1 to everyone this week. We're breaking down what this means for your workflow, plus the coolest new AI dev tools worth trying today.

Hello Builders! 👋

Cursor just hit a $29.3B valuation, and honestly? It's deserved. Tech CEOs are actually using this thing to ship faster.

Why this matters: We're watching the coding assistant market consolidate in real-time. While GitHub Copilot coasts on Microsoft's distribution, Cursor won by obsessing over the actual developer experience. The composer mode, codebase-aware suggestions, and that buttery-smooth diff interface actually make you faster.

The valuation feels wild until you realize every dev team is about to have this conversation: "Why are we paying $X per seat when Cursor costs $20/month and 10x's our junior devs?" That's a massive market, and they're just getting started.

ChatGPT Gets 8 Personality Modes - OpenAI adds chat styles from Professional to Quirky, because apparently Default wasn't cutting it anymore.

GPT-5.1 Rolling Out Now - Smarter, more reliable, more conversational—the usual upgrade adjectives, but hey, it's free for everyone this week.

Gemini Live Gets Expressive - Google's voice assistant now has accents and more personality, joining the "make AI sound human" arms race.

NotebookLM Adds Deep Research - Google's note-taking tool now automates complex research tasks and supports more file types for source material.

World Labs Opens to Public - Generate persistent 3D worlds from images, video, or text—Fei-Fei Li's startup is finally letting everyone play.

Google's SIMA 2 Agent - Gemini-powered agent completes complex tasks in unseen virtual environments, self-improves, and apparently we're calling this AGI-adjacent now.

Teach Claude Better Frontend Design - Instagram's Mike Krieger shares how his team used Skills to level up Claude's design chops, complete with a Claude Code plugin.

Build a Prayer Quilt App in 5 Minutes - Google's Paige Bailey stitches together AI Studio, Sheets, Forms, and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite for a surprisingly heartfelt project.

Scale Data Processing on Potato Hardware - Dask lets you crunch massive datasets without selling a kidney for cloud credits or fancy GPUs.

ChatGPT Personalities Actually Matter - Olivia Moore runs the same prompt through different ChatGPT presets and finds they genuinely change how the model thinks and prioritizes information.

Claude Meets Life Coaching - Mega-prompt that turns Claude into your personal productivity system using the Assess-Decide-Do framework for decision-making.

AWS Agent Squad Explained - Deep dive into AWS Labs' multi-agent orchestration framework that actually handles the messy coordination problems everyone else ignores.

The Real AI Stack - Tianyi breaks down why "just calling an API" isn't building AI and shares the seven actual pieces you need.

48 Hours to $20K MRR - Pat Walls shares a wild strategy: build MVP in two days with Cursor, pitch to service business, split equity 50/50.

Replace Dinosaurs Not Workflows - Ayush Agarwal calls out an RFS urging builders to replace entire companies with AI, not just make better tools.

Deep Work Solves Everything - Pat Walls goes all-in on the controversial take that deep work is the only advice that actually matters for builders.

AI's Real Design Problem - Hriday Checker argues the machine is getting smarter but the interface guiding it is becoming the biggest bottleneck.

Cursor Raises $2.3B Round - Five months after their last raise, the vibe coding darling doubles down on Composer development.

Anthropic Partners with Maryland - Claude is going full bureaucrat, helping residents apply for benefits and caseworkers process paperwork efficiently.

Code Metal Raises $36M - Startup promises to move beyond "vibe coding" with serious engineering tooling for AI-assisted development.

Milestone Scores $10M Seed - Israeli startup tackles the hard question: does your AI coding assistant actually improve code quality and engineering metrics?

Teen Founders Raise $6M - Bindwell applies AI drug discovery techniques to pesticides, somehow convincing Paul Graham to join the cap table.

Google Shopping Goes Full Agent - AI will call stores, browse products, and checkout for you—because talking to humans is so 2023.

Spotify's Audiobook Recaps - AI-generated "previously on" summaries for audiobooks you abandoned three months ago and forgot the plot.

LinkedIn's AI People Search - Premium users get AI-powered search to find people, because LinkedIn's regular search was apparently too functional.

Video Fact-Checker, Zero Backend - Drop a video URL, get verified claims with sources—built entirely on Nova agents with no traditional backend code.

AI Agents for HVAC - Someone finally automated mechanical systems maintenance tracking, turning manual spreadsheet hell into real-time insights for climate control operations.

Vibe Coding Risks Model Collapse - Crunchbase warns that coding without understanding the fundamentals could tank AI model quality over time.

Anthropic AI Update - New development from Anthropic

Google AI Developers - Google AI tooling announcement

a16z Insights - AI investment and trends perspective

Game Development Update - AI in game development news

Wild that Cursor just raised $2.3B while we're all still figuring out how to vibe code without completely losing track of what our apps actually do.

What are you shipping this week—and are you letting the AI write it, or actually understanding what it's doing?

Keep shipping,

P.S. If GPT-5.1 is writing your code this week, at least read the diffs before you merge. Trust me on this one.