Your "Private" AI Chats Just Got Sold to 8M Strangers

"Installing a 'privacy-focused' browser extension is just giving your data to a startup instead of Big Tech – at least Big Tech has a business model that doesn't require selling your chat logs."

Hello Builders! 👋

Turns out that free VPN you installed to "protect your privacy" has been selling 8 million users' AI conversations to the highest bidder. Urban VPN's browser extension was caught scraping ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations, then packaging them up as training data for sale.

The takeaway? If something's free and closed-source, you're probably the product. Especially when AI conversations might contain your API keys, proprietary code, or that embarrassing prompt where you asked Claude to explain async/await for the fifth time.

ChatGPT Gets Branched Conversations - OpenAI brings branched chats to mobile so you can finally explore alternate conversation paths without losing your thread.

v0 Connects to Notion - Build UI components using your team's Notion docs and databases as context, because why manually explain your design system again.

v0 Imports shadcn Themes - Drop your custom shadcn theme into v0 and watch it generate components that actually match your design system.

HeyEzra Launches AI Influencer Styles - Create consistent AI-generated UGC creators across different scenes and settings, no more janky avatar inconsistencies.

Mascot Maker v2 Drops - Video background removal lands in this mascot creator, free tier available for making those cursed brand characters everyone secretly loves.

Capsule Updates Mobile Vibe Coding - Choose your Claude model, upload assets, and toggle between native mobile and desktop web views while building apps.

Adobe Firefly Does Prompt-Based Video Editing - Text-to-edit video is here plus third-party model integrations, Adobe playing catch-up with the scrappy AI video startups.

AppSafe Scans AI-Generated Apps - DAST platform with AI agents that find vulnerabilities in Lovable, Replit, and v0 projects then generate fix prompts.

BurnoutRadar Launches for Builders - Two-minute assessment across ten dimensions because "I'm fine" at 9 PM is usually a lie we tell ourselves.

The Prompt That Rewires ChatGPT - Yu Lin shares a single prompt that apparently changes how ChatGPT thinks through problems entirely.

Turn Photos Into Ink Art - Drop an image into Gemini or ChatGPT with this prompt to generate ultra-realistic ink spill portraits.

20K Projects Use This Markdown Trick - A simple .cursorrules file stops AI coding agents from asking the same setup questions over and over again.

Vibe Coding's Reality Check - Claude Code's creator breaks down where AI-assisted coding actually works and where it falls apart hard.

iPhone App Lessons From Claude - Ten hard-earned insights from actually shipping an iOS app with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting.

AI Debugs Your Exceptions - Decorator that sends your Python crashes to an LLM for instant analysis, because reading stack traces at 2am is nobody's idea of fun.

Medical Records to Snowflake Pipeline - Scans messy patient PDFs in S3, extracts structured data with AI, dumps it clean into Snowflake using cocoindex.

Vibe Coding's Hidden Cost - @zraonx warns that not understanding your codebase means AI rereads 1,000 lines just to add one feature.

The Vibe Coding Loop - @vianarafael shares his workflow: vibecode a micro feature, read it, refactor it with AI help, repeat forever.

Keep AI Prompts Minimal - @hyericlee's design tip: tell your agent to only implement what's absolutely necessary for cleaner, more intuitive results.

Two Week Prototype Trap - @Wren_AI on the classic exec move: you're planning real architecture, then someone asks for a demo in two weeks.

Pre-Cursor Life Was Hard - @thepatwalls shares a June 2024 photo back when he was handcrafting controllers in VS Code, thinking Copilot autocomplete was peak efficiency.

Databricks Raises $4B at $134B - Valuation jumps 34% in three months as data intelligence company's AI business prints money faster than their Spark jobs.

a16z Leads $41M for Mirelo - Foundation model for AI-generated sound in video because apparently we've solved images and text, now it's audio's turn.

Chai Discovery Hits Unicorn Status - OpenAI-backed biotech raises $130M to build foundation models predicting molecular interactions for drug discovery, which is genuinely cool.

Nvidia Acquires Slurm Developer SchedMD - Plus launches Nemotron 3 open models, because when you print GPUs you can afford to play nice with open source.

Disney's OpenAI Exclusivity Expires Soon - One-year exclusive deal means Mickey Mouse will be shopping around for AI partners by next December, Anthropic sales team salivating.

OpenAI Hires App Platform Lead - Pushing to turn ChatGPT into an operating system, which sounds ambitious until you remember browsers basically already are.

GNOME Bans AI-Generated Extensions - Linux desktop environment draws a hard line against AI slop in their extension store, finally someone with standards.

Wild that we're talking about privacy extensions selling 8M users' AI conversations while ChatGPT just shipped branched chats so we can all generate even more data. The irony is not lost on me.

What are you shipping this week? (And please tell me you're reading those extension permissions...)

Keep shipping,

P.S. If you're "vibe coding" without understanding the code, at least make sure your browser extensions aren't vibing away your chat history to the highest bidder.