virtualuncle

I test & review AI tools so you don't waste $20. News, tutorials, automation, side hustles. Just what actually matters.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

Three weeks ago "decision model" was not a category. It was one product with a strange pitch.

It is now eight separate repositories holding 52,135 stars between them. The oldest of those is nineteen days old. Fresh Commits 05 ranks nine new repos by how fast they are actually gaining stars rather than by the total sitting at the top of the page. Every figure came out of the GitHub API during the scan.

The one that stands out is Zai's ZCode at a 30.5% fork ratio, which is almost triple what a popular repo normally sees. Last issue's leader has added 2,461 stars without a single commit in sixteen days. And if you are running more than one coding agent at a time, there is a small thing that lives in your notch and watches them for you.

@browser_use @FederCr @louis_raille @Zai_org @mizorewww @yetone @jaredpalmer
https://t.co/DHma9U4y5R

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

Eleven free Claude skills that take an app apart and rebuild it. Recon maps the screens and the flows. Build writes it, test clicks through every path, then one called diff scores your copy against the original and tells you what's missing.

3,973 stars in 18 days under an MIT licence, plus 685 forks. That's a 17.2% fork ratio, the highest on anything I've tracked this month, so people are actually running it rather than starring it and moving on.

The guardrails are in the tool itself, which I didn't expect. No paywall bypass. It respects account terms that forbid building a competitor. And deploy flat out refuses to ship until the rebrand sweep comes back clean.

Here's the part that made me laugh though.. while checking who else had written about it I found four accounts that re-uploaded the whole repo under their own names, same readme word for word. The app cloning tool is getting cloned by people who couldn't be bothered to use it.

I kinda feel like the best skill in there has nothing to do with cloning. /replica-entrepreneur reads real reviews of a product, counts the complaints, links every quote, then hands you a fix plan. That's just competitive research done properly.. works on your own product too.

@AnthropicAI
https://t.co/WW3JzpKhEd

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@ollama @Recursive_SI 125 tps on an m4 pro is wild for a 40b moe rn. a 40b moe thats actually usable for agentic loops on a laptop changes what you can run offline, curious how it holds up past short contexts tho

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@MrTacticalX the cost flip is the useful part here. 10 sonnet agents at 73 dollars against one opus at 21 for a similar result.. the solo run only took 10 more minutes. parallel agents feel faster until you price the duplicated work

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

read the support doc before the launch posts if anyone wants the honest version. mobile only, us accounts, pro or max, invites in waves. the cant do list is unusually blunt too. no calls or texts, no moving money between accounts. it cant change your claude work either, only read it

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@danshipper @AnthropicAI the quota detail is the one Id want flagged louder tbh. anthropics own doc says duet uses the same 5 hour session and weekly limits at the same rate as chats.. the morning brief plus the check ins count too. free during the preview but it eats the plan you already have

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

Everybody is arguing about which model is best. A team at Google Research spent their time somewhere else and got a bigger number out of it.

They froze the model and rebuilt the scaffolding around it. Up to 11.5 points on one benchmark, with weights that never moved. The repo took 11,020 stars in 12 days and not one of the 216 posts I read this morning mentioned it.

The useful part is the list. They treat eight things as editable. System prompt. Guardrails. Memory. Tool guidance. Subagents. Skills. Scripts. Plugins. For Claude Code that maps almost exactly onto your CLAUDE.md and permission rules and skills folder and MCP servers.

Most of us tune one or two of those and leave the rest on whatever default they came with. I kinda feel like that's the whole finding right there. It doesn't need a benchmark suite to act on either. Worth reading the limits section first though.. the executor has unrestricted network access and Codex runs with its sandbox off.

@GoogleResearch
https://t.co/kCnTBv97b4

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@shivanipod the cheapest version of this I've found is a $7 esp32 board. it plugs into an iphone over usb and presents as a plain mouse and keyboard. the screen comes back over airplay as frames for a vision model. 3,268 stars in a week. physical control is getting weirdly accessible rn.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

worth watching the open side of this while the benchmarks land. solidcraft is parametric cad written in rust under apache 2.0. its taken 3,937 stars in the last three days alone.

different approach entirely since its a real cad kernel rather than a model guessing geometry, but thats the thing a 150x cheaper claim has to beat on output quality rather than on price.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

Most projects that let an AI use your phone need a Mac, a paid developer account or a jailbreak. This one needs a circuit board that costs about seven dollars.

It took 2,819 stars in five days and nobody has tweeted about it yet, which is why I went digging. The board plugs into your iPhone and the phone treats it as an ordinary mouse and keyboard. The screen comes back to your computer over AirPlay as plain picture frames. A vision model looks at the frames and decides where to tap. That's the whole trick.. both halves have existed for years tbh.

The limits are where it gets good though. Passcode screens, Apple Pay and DRM video don't mirror at all, so the agent literally can't see them. Keyboard input is ASCII only. And the phone has to stay unlocked the entire time, which should prob tell you which phone to run this on.

One more thing.. every frame is a picture of your phone screen, notifications included, then it goes to whatever vision model you point it at. It takes local models too. I kinda feel like that choice is the whole privacy story here.
https://t.co/3tjwYj4irI

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

A repo for pulling software apart took 38,418 GitHub stars yesterday. One day. It's been sitting there since April with nobody paying much attention and then 19.7% of its entire star count showed up in 24 hours.

So I read the README this morning instead of the posts about it. REA is one MCP server that lets Claude Code or Codex or Cursor inspect a binary nobody has source for. Android apps and .NET assemblies. Firmware. EVM bytecode. Websites and Flutter apps. MIT licensed, no paid tier, nothing hosted.

The odd bit is what the project says about itself. The disclaimer scopes it to lawful research and software you own or are authorized to examine, then says in plain words that cracked copies, stolen keys and bypassing license restrictions aren't authorized. That's a clearer line than most projects bother drawing.

The post that carried it to 76,000 people says the author replaced a $24,000 a year terminal for free. Nobody has put those two documents side by side yet, so I did. Also worth prob knowing.. 58,307 of those stars came with a fork, which means a quarter of the people who found it yesterday pulled it down to actually run.

@morluto
https://t.co/PXiWt3oncn

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

the self hosting argument is stronger than the post makes it. went through one of the popular free gateway plugins line by line last week and it ships a literal "bearer public" header to a third party while the model cards say prompts may be used to improve their services. people hand over code and context without knowing a gateway is in the path at all.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@TimSuchanek fwiw the incumbent here is stalling out. jev-ultrafast sits at 22,896 stars and hasnt had a push since sept 30, down to 87 stars a day from the launch spike. the lane is wide open right now.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

counted this morning and youre the fifth one in 30 hours. agent-native, agentplay, agent tray, coucou in the mac notch and a reddit post doing agents as characters in a pixel office. all shipped since yesterday. something is clearly broken about not being able to see what they're doing and five teams hit it the same week.

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

The X Subscription landed yesterday and every writeup led with the same number. Three separate subscriptions used to cost around $90 together. The new entry tier is $8. That's accurate. It's also not the part that will show up on your card.

I read the pricing page instead of the announcement. Cursor's own page now says third-party model usage "is not included in the monthly prices shown and must be purchased separately." Claude and GPT stay available at API list price, billed on top of whatever tier you're on, including the $200 one. The $20 Pro plan that used to include $20 of third-party usage isn't listed anywhere on that page anymore.

If you were paying $20 and spending your full $20 allowance on Claude, the nearest plan that still lets you use Claude is Premium at $30. The usage is no longer included, so that $20 sits on top. You're at $50 for the month doing exactly what you did before.

A developer who lives on Grok models gets a much better deal out of this. Bigger shared pool, lower entry price, cheaper team seats. That's real.

The announcement wasn't dishonest. The sentence that matters is published in plain English on a public page. It just sits under a heading about third-party models, below the comparison grid, where nobody writing a news post was ever going to look.

@cursor_ai @spacexai
https://t.co/tsuU5OkSBM

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@midudev counted every vendor skill bundle a while back, unity shipped 59,870 words across 31 skills under a restricted licence while google maps shipped 3,297 under apache. 28 of unity's 31 declare scope with no permissions attached

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

the part nobody's quoting.. third party models aren't covered by the sub anymore, they're billed at api rates from the first request. pro was $20 with $20 of model usage included. same usage now is $30 for the tier plus $20 in credits. cursor support says existing plans continue "for now" with migration "with advance notice" and no timeline

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

A plugin called dsh-our-free-model took 11,502 stars in 17 days, 7,081 of them in the last four, by promising frontier models with no login, no API key and no usage cap. It works. The models answer.

What the app never shows you is whose servers answer them. I read the whole README this morning and then checked the gateways' own docs against it.

The free lane posts to OpenCode's Zen gateway with the literal header "Authorization: Bearer public." OpenCode's own setup instructions ask you to sign in, add billing details and paste an API key and they document no keyless allowance anywhere. The second lane uses Kilo AI's free pool, whose model cards say in plain words that prompts may be logged by the upstream and used to improve their services. A third lane unlocks when you sign into GitHub and star the repo, which is also part of why that star count moved so fast.

Here's the strange part.. none of this is hidden. The README names every endpoint, quotes the logging notice, publishes its own worst latency numbers and admits that any local process can read its forwarding keys in some setups. It's one of the more honest documents I've read on a trending repo. The disclosure just lives 13,000 words deep while the picker shows a clean list with no vendor names on it.

Free models work fine. They're not free of consequences and the consequences are written down where almost nobody looks.

@opencode @kilocode
https://t.co/YCKwSslGkW

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@soupsranjan @nvidia the 27b on a spark is the easy part.. the thing that bites people is the vram floor on the bigger local builds, strata says "any consumer hardware" and the readme asks for 12gb vram plus 32gb ram. what are you seeing for tokens/sec on that setup

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

fwiw if you're adding vendor skills to that stack, worth reading the licences first.. counted them and unity's bundle is 59,870 words across 31 skills under a restricted licence, google maps ships 3,297 words under apache. 28 of the 31 unity skills declare scope with no permissions attached

[virtualuncle @virtualunc]

@HowThingsWork_ their github org is two repos, both just desktop download and update feeds, 1 star and 0 stars, no licence on either.. "open harness" in their copy means bring your own model keys, not open source. it's free to download then $19 to $500/mo on credits