Public tidbits and discoveries that aren't worth a full blog post but that I still wanted to write about. Some posts here may be written with AI assistance. If you want the handwritten versions, head to the Blog. No guarantees of accuracy, utility, sanity, or anything else provided. Also cross-posted to nik.tw.
All Notes
Software Isn't Dying, but it's certainly changing
Software isn’t going to die anytime soon. But “static” software might. When AI can generate a custom tool for a specific workflow in minutes, nobody’s going to pay a monthly subscription for a one-size-fits-all version of the same thing. The SaaS model depended on the fact that writing, deploying, and maintaining code was hard. That’s becoming less true by the day.
All your AIs in one place with OpenWebUI and LiteLLM
If you’ve been exploring different AI models, you might have noticed that each major provider (like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) uses its own incompatible API specification. This makes it tricky to have a single, organized place to chat with all these different models. I ran into this too, and after some experimentation, I found a pretty nifty setup that solves the problem.
How to use OpenAI’s o3 for free (for now)
OpenAI has been somewhat quietly running a promotion where you can get a very generous daily allotment of free tokens (like more than most people would ever hope to use in a day) for most of their models (o1, o3, gpt4o, gpt4.1 and others). There are some caveats though:
SQL IDEs that support DuckDB
I’ve been hacking on a project with DuckDB, and was shocked to discover that DBGate (my usual goto app for working with SQL dbs) doesn’t yet have support for it (though there’s a PR out for it, so hopefully there will be soon)
How to setup MacWhisper so you can talk to your computer for free
MacOS has had dictation features for a long time now, but the built-in dictation functionality is absolutely terrible. Luckily these days it’s pretty easy to set up a fast and easy decent dictation flow, and it doesn’t even cost anything (if you’re on a mac).
Get the latest Cursor right now (even if the update is still rolling)
tl;dr
brew install --cask cursor
Slightly longer version
brew install --cask cursor
Cursor does rolling software updates, which means that it can take anywhere from 1 hour to many days for your version of Cursor to update itself to the latest version. Not a problem normally, but if you got sucked into the latest hype wave and want to try out a new feature but it hasn’t rolled out to yet what do you do?