Hey, AI Enthusiast!

Welcome back to the #1 AI newsletter on the planet!

Here’s what we have today:

AI Habits

Your AI’s Plan = The Problem

Ask AI to help you get started, and it hands back a plan. Usually a long one, with sub-steps tucked under every step.

The task you were avoiding now looks even bigger. So you close the tab.

A long plan looks helpful. Mostly, it’s a longer to-do list with your name on every line.

There’s a simple fix. Skip the plan and ask for one move instead.

Tell your AI to name the task you’ve been avoiding longest, give you one step to finish in five minutes, then stop.

“Avoiding longest” makes the AI pick the task, so you don’t have to admit it.

“Then stop” keeps it from writing another plan.

Ask for a short answer, too. A couple of lines leaves no room for a fresh plan to sneak back in.

It works best when the AI sees your real list, like a notes file or a project folder. Then it picks from tasks you wrote down instead of guessing.

Save the instruction somewhere handy, and use it the next time a task keeps sliding.

Will it make you more productive?

Not exactly. It gets you started, and on a task you’ve been dodging for weeks, starting is usually the hard part.

That’s all the trick promises, though. Once those five minutes are up, the rest of the list is still sitting there, and you’re still the one working through it.

Our take: The most useful thing AI hands you might be the smallest. Ask it for less, and see how much more gets done.

Together with MacPaw

Skip the Plan. Let AI Do It.

AI gave you the plan. Now you’re the one opening app after app to get it done.

Eney takes the plan and does the steps for you.

It works across dozens of apps you already use, with new skills added every week.

“Trim the birthday video, crop the photos, and turn the party invite into a PDF.”

Eney does all three, without you opening another app.

Say what you need, and it keeps going, step after step, until the job’s done.

It only touches the apps you allow.

(Free credits come with every account)

Reddit

Reddit Cuts Off Free Access for AI

Which laptop to buy. How to fix a leaky faucet. Whether the new phone is worth it.

Some AI assistants answer questions like these by reading Reddit.

That changes come March 2027 because any tool that wants those threads will need a deal with Reddit.

Reddit is shutting down the free route apps use to read the site. All new requests will stop Oct 31.

The feeds go first.

On Nov 13, the feeds people use to follow subreddits in reader apps will stop working.

Moderators get a workaround for their alerts. Everyone else gets a deadline.

But it isn’t only about bots.

Reddit blames bots copying posts in bulk, but it already licenses those posts to Google and OpenAI for AI training. Several outlets noted free access undercuts deals like those.

Reddit itself stays open to you. The side door for apps is what’s closing.

The tools with a deal keep the real-people answers. The rest lose them.

Our take: The open web is getting a price tag. Move the subreddits you follow into your Reddit home feed before Nov 13. And when a question needs people who’ve tried the thing, read the thread, not an AI’s summary of it.

Space

Google’s AI Chips Made It Into Orbit

A fridge-size satellite carrying Google’s AI chips is now circling Earth.

It’s the first real test of Project Suncatcher, Google’s long shot at running AI data centers on sunlight.

Its orbit keeps the solar panels in the sun almost all the time, so it skips the heavy batteries.

The hard part is heat.

On Earth, air and water carry it away. In a vacuum, there’s neither.

So the chips run Google’s open AI model in 15-minute shifts, answering simple questions, then cool off.

Google’s own project lead calls it a minimal test.

On the ground, data centers keep hitting the same two walls. Power, and neighbors who don’t want them.

In orbit, the power is close to free, and there’s nobody to protest.

Every problem gets harder and pricier up there, though, and Google doesn’t expect orbit to replace Earth’s data centers anytime soon.

Next, two more satellites go up to test the lasers that link them.

Our take: Fifteen minutes on, then a break. That’s not a data center yet. It’s a chip proving it can survive up there, which is the step that had to come first.

MongoDB In Focus

Your App Got Slow. Why?

The app was fast last week.

Now pages hang, and nobody knows which query is dragging.

So you dig through your logs for an afternoon, and the fix waits.

MongoDB lets your coding agent find it.

Connect the MongoDB MCP Server, then ask, "Show me the slowest queries on my Atlas cluster."

It pulls them and suggests the indexes and schema fixes to speed them up.

It works inside Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini.

Stop digging. Start asking.

Research

AI Flooded arXiv. Now There’s a Limit.

Plenty of the AI research behind the headlines lands first on one free site, arXiv.

Volunteers check every paper before it goes up.

Now there are too many to check.

September brought arXiv twice as many submissions as the same month two years earlier.

AI is part of the reason why.

AI tools speed up real research, arXiv says, but many of the new submissions don’t meet its standards.

One of its leaders says some authors were sending in dozens of papers.

Now they’re drawing the line.

Two submissions per person each month, and no more than three waiting at once.

Rejected papers count as well.

A paper that gets turned down still burns one of your two slots.

And the cap doesn’t sort good papers from bad. It applies to everyone.

Our take: AI made papers cheap to write. Checking them still takes a person. Expect more of the places that vet info to start rationing it.

Coming in Hot

AI Tools of the Day

Interesting AI

Atlas Has New Hands Without Pinkies

Boston Dynamics has given its Atlas robot a new pair of hands.

But not just any hands. These hands drop the pinkies and only keep four fingers.

The team decided to tape down their own pinkies to see what they'd miss.

Turns out not much.

In the demo video on their site, Atlas fits a thin drill bit into a power drill, bores a hole in wood, spins a nut tight with its fingers, and moves two golf balls in one hand.

Each hand is about the size of a large human hand, and a little stronger.

For now, Atlas only reaches companies through small pilot programs, with factory work first in line.

Local AI

PewDiePie Built His Own AI Model

PewDiePie thinks it makes no sense to wake up a giant AI model to check one email.

So he trained his own.

Ajax is a small AI model built to run on your own computer, inside Odysseus, the free, open-source AI workspace he released earlier this year.

It searches the web, browses, and handles everyday tasks on its own. He says it gets tasks right about nine times out of ten.

Building it got messy.

He says OpenAI banned him twice along the way. The only account of the bans is his own.

He wanted Ajax to learn from the step-by-step reasoning of OpenAI’s model, which OpenAI’s terms forbid.

He also made Ajax refuse less, using an open-source tool called Heretic to strip refusals out of the model.

Not every limit came off. He kept refusals for anything that harms other people or yourself.

Ajax goes live on Oct 2 at 7:25 PM ET, with no public benchmarks yet.

Our take: Not every chore needs the biggest model. Fewer refusals cut both ways, though, so Ajax will also follow a bad instruction without pushing back.

Prompt of the Day

Test the System

Important Note: You’ll need to click the button to get the complete prompt.

That’s all for Friday!

Thanks for reading,

— There’s An AI For That