[Dev Catch Up # 86] - Claude for Excel, gpt-oss-safeguard, Cursor's Composer, Tinker's free credits, Grokipedia, olm OCR, Surf AI Notebook, Oxdraw, MiniMax-M2, langsmith-agent-builder and more!
Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles
Welcome to the 86th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!
For those who joined recently or are reading Dev Catch Up for the first time, I write about developer stories and open source, partly based on my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.
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Must Read
Anthropic has announced Claude for Excel. It sits as a sidebar inside Excel, letting you perform spreadsheet operations just by prompting. It also connects to external data sources for real-time insights. Check Anthropic’s announcement on Claude for Excel for more details.
OpenAI has released gpt-oss-safeguard, new open safety reasoning models. They let developers define custom safety policies during inference, and the model classifies the content based on the policy. Check OpenAI’s announcement on gpt-oss-safeguard for more details.
Windsurf and Cursor have both released their own coding models. Cursor launched Composer, its in-house model built for speed and multi-agent workflows. Windsurf released SWE-1.5, for coding with high speed. Check the posts on Cursor Composer and Windsurf SWE-1.5 for more details.
We know passwords live in a database. If it leaks, they shouldn’t be readable. Learn how to secure them with hashing, and other techniques. Check this Substack post to learn more about How to Securely Store Passwords in a Database.
OSS Highlight of the Week
This week we’re featuring Surf, an open-source Personal AI notebook. It brings your files, notes, and the web into one place for focused thinking and research. You can open multiple applications and interact with them side by side. Surf runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It stores everything locally in open formats for full privacy. Check the Surf GitHub repo to explore more.
Good to know
OpenAI is giving ChatGPT Go free for one year to users in India who sign up during a promotional period starting November 4. It includes 10X higher limits for message, image generation and file uploads. The offer aims to bring more people in India to use ChatGPT. Check the post on free ChatGPT Go for Indian users to know more details.
If you use Claude Code, this podcast is a must-listen. Anthropic’s engineers talk about how they use it internally. They share tips like using plan mode, making subagents argue for cleaner code, and automating commits with slash commands. Check the podcast “How to Use Claude Code Like the People Who Built It” to know more.
OxDraw bridges the gap between Mermaid and visual editors. It lets you edit diagrams visually through a web interface, and every change is automatically updated in the code. Check the OxDraw GitHub repo to explore and try it out.
SQL anti patterns are something you will learn to spot with experience. This post covers five common ones and how to fix them to keep your app fast and clean. Read SQL Anti Patterns You Should Avoid on Data Methods.
Every week, we cover articles and posts that explain APIs and related concepts. Here’s another one that talks about the top 6 API architecture styles like SOAP, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, and Webhook. Check this post to know more about API Architecture styles.
Notable FYIs
Mistral has launched AI Studio. It helps teams move from AI demos to real production by testing, tracking, and improving model performance. Check Mistral AI Studio to learn how it supports flexible and reliable AI deployment.
A few weeks ago, Thinking Machines Lab announced Tinker, their fine-tuning API. Now they’re offering free credits, $250 for students and $5,000 for researchers. If your work involves fine-tuning models, check their post on Tinker Free Credits to learn how to apply.
MiniMax AI has released MiniMax M2, a compact, fast, and cost-effective MoE model built for coding and agentic tasks. It is also available in Ollama Cloud. Check the MiniMax M2 GitHub repo for more details.
We are seeing the rise of no-code frameworks for agents. LangSmith has joined the race with its new Agent Builder. It’s a visual workflow tool that lets anyone design and deploy agents without coding. If you want to see how it works, check the LangSmith Agent Builder post.
Allen AI has released OLM-OCR. It is a toolkit for converting PDF and image documents into plain text. It supports PDF, PNG, and handles equations, tables, and complex layouts. If you are looking for an OCR model to use in your app, check the OLM-OCR GitHub repo.
Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia. Entries are created and updated by the Grok language model in real time. Check Grokipedia to explore more.
That’s it from us with this edition. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable. A subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading it for the first time.