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AI Video Tools for Ads and Content: A Comprehensive Review
Been experimenting with a few AI video tools recently to speed up content + ad creation, figured I’d share what actually stood out These tools are getting pretty good, especially if you don’t have a full editing setup or team Here’s a quick breakdown of what I tried: Runway What it does: Text/image to video + editing tools Cool stuff: Good quality outputs, lots of features Best for: Creative experiments, short clips My take: Powerful, but took me a bit to get consistent results Pika What it does: Generates short videos from prompts Cool stuff: Fast and easy to try ideas Best for: Quick social clips My take: Fun to use, but hard to control exact outcomes Synthesia What it does: AI avatar videos with voice Cool stuff: Clean talking head style content Best for: Tutorials, explainers My take: Solid for info content, less useful for ads InVideo AI What it does: Script to full video Cool stuff: Templates + automation Best for: Beginners, quick drafts My take: Easy, but everything started to feel templated Luma Dream Machine What it does: Realistic AI generated scenes Cool stuff: Visually impressive outputs Best for: Cinematic style clips My take: Looks great, but hit or miss depending on prompt Higgsfield What it does: AI video with more control over shots + motion Cool stuff: Can guide camera movement, pacing, structure Best for: Ads or anything that needs to feel intentional My take: Feels closer to actually building a video vs just generating one Biggest takeaways: most tools are great for ideas, not final ads control > randomness if you’re making anything performance focused you’ll probably end up combining tools instead of relying on one A lot of these have free tiers, so worth testing yourself If I had to pick one I’d keep experimenting with, probably higgsfield just because the extra control makes it feel a bit more usable for actual ad work Curious what others are sticking with rn 👀
Caliber: Open-Source Proxy for Enforcing LLM Agent Rules
Cross-posting here because this problem affects everyone building with AI agents. Prompt-based guardrails fail. The model follows your system prompt in a demo, then ignores rules when context gets big or the agent chains multiple steps. We built Caliber - an open-source proxy that reads your rules from plain markdown and enforces them at the API layer, not in the prompt. Every call. Provider-agnostic. Just hit 700 GitHub stars ⭐ and nearly 100 forks - the reception from devs building with AI has been amazing. Repo: [https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup](https://github.com/caliber-ai-org/ai-setup) Would love: \- Feedback on the approach \- Feature requests from people building AI agents \- Anyone who wants to contribute to the project Building this open-source for the community.
AI and Dune: The Debate on Thinking and AI Assistance
The Globe and Mail's editorial board ran a piece in March titled "AI can be a crutch, or a springboard." To illustrate the crutch half, they offered this: someone asked AI to explain a passage from Dune that warns against delegating thinking to machines. Instead of reading the book. That anecdote is doing more work than the studies the editorial cites. But the studies are real. Researchers at MIT published a paper in June 2025 titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task" (Kosmyna et al., arXiv 2506.08872). The study tracked brain activity across three groups: people writing with ChatGPT, people using search engines, and people working unaided. The LLM group showed the weakest neural connectivity. Over four months, "LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." The most striking finding: LLM users struggled to accurately quote their own work. They couldn't recall what they had just written. The Globe cites this and similar research to make a point about dependency. The implicit argument: hand enough of your thinking to a machine and you stop doing it yourself. That finding is probably accurate for the way most people use these tools. The question is whether that's the only way they can be used. The Globe's own title contains the counter-argument. Crutch or springboard. They wrote both words. They just didn't develop the second one. Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton who has been writing about AI use since the tools became widely available, argued in 2023 that the real challenge AI poses to education isn't that students will stop thinking, it's that the old structures assumed thinking was hard enough to enforce. ("The Homework Apocalypse," [oneusefulthing.org](http://oneusefulthing.org), July 2023.) When AI can do the surface-level cognitive work, the only tasks left worth assigning are the ones that require actual judgment. The tool, in that framing, doesn't reduce the demand for thinking. It raises the floor under it. Nate B. Jones, who writes and consults on what it actually takes to work well with AI, has made a sharper version of this argument. His position: using AI effectively requires more cognitive skill, not less. Specifically, it requires the ability to translate ambiguous intent into a precise, edge-case-aware specification that an AI can execute correctly. It requires detecting errors in output that is fluent and confident-sounding but wrong. It requires recognizing when an AI has drifted from your intent, or is confirming a premise it should be challenging. These are not passive skills. They are harder versions of the same thinking the MIT study found LLM users weren't doing. The difference between the group that lost neural connectivity and the group that doesn't isn't the tool. It's what they decided to do with it. Here's my own evidence. In the past year I built a working web application. Python backend. JavaScript frontend. Deployed on two hosting platforms. Payment processing. User authentication. A full data model. I do not know how to code. Every product decision was mine. Every architectural call. Every tradeoff judgment. I defined what the system needed to do, why, and what done looked like. I reviewed every significant change before it was accepted. When something broke, I identified where the breakdown was and directed the fix. The implementation was handled by AI. The thinking was mine. This mode (call it AI-directed building) is the opposite of the Dune reader. The quality of what gets produced is entirely a function of how clearly you can think, how precisely you can specify, and how critically you can evaluate what comes back. There is no shortcut in that. A vague brief to an AI doesn't produce a confused output. It produces a confident, fluent, wrong one. The discipline that prevents that is yours to supply. Non-coders building functional software with AI is common enough now that it isn't a story. What's less visible is the specificity of judgment underneath the ones that actually work. The practices that force more thinking rather than less are not complicated, but they require a decision to use the tool differently. When I've formed a position on something, I give the AI full context and ask it to make the strongest possible case against me. Ask for the hardest opposing argument it can construct. Then I read it. Sometimes it changes nothing. Sometimes it surfaces something I had dismissed without fully examining. The AI doesn't form my view. It stress-tests one I've already formed. When I'm uncertain between options, I don't ask which is better. I ask: here are two approaches, here is my constraint, now what does each cost me, and what does each require me to give up? I make the call. The AI laid out the shape of the decision. The judgment was mine. The uncomfortable part of thinking is still yours in this mode. The tool makes the work more rigorous, not easier. The MIT researchers and the Globe editorial are almost certainly right about the majority of current use. Passive use produces passive outcomes. That's not a controversial claim. The crutch half and the springboard half use the same interface. The difference is whether the person in front of it decided to think. What are you doing with it that forces more thinking rather than less? Are you using it to skip a step, or to take a harder one? Genuinely asking.
Auroch Engine: Revolutionizing AI Memory for Personalization
Auroch Engine is an external memory layer for AI assistants — designed to give models better long-term recall, personalization, and context awareness across conversations. Instead of relying on scattered chat history or fragile built-in memory, Auroch Engine lets users store, retrieve, and organize important context through a dedicated memory API. The goal is simple: make AI feel less like a reset button every session, and more like a tool that actually learns your projects, preferences, workflows, and goals over time. Right now, it’s in early beta. We’re looking for first users who are interested in testing a lightweight developer-facing memory system for AI apps, agents, and personal productivity workflows. Ideal early users are people building with AI, experimenting with agents, or frustrated that their assistant keeps forgetting the important stuff. DM for more information or better visit our site: https://ai-recall-engine-q5viks70j-cartertbirchalls-projects.vercel.app
Struggling to Organize Claude AI Research Data
I have been using Claude for research for building my product. I have done user research, market research, competition analysis etc But the output of it all so much that although useful I am not able to dig through the chats and make use of it. I tried turning them into book chapters but still the data is too much to consume How do you guys do research so that it is useful ?
AI Golf Coach: FlushedAI Launches on App Store
I am a 9 handicap from LA who spent way too much money on lessons over the last few years. Every coach told me something different. One said my takeaway was flat, the next said I needed more hip turn, a third said my shoulders were fine but my hands were late. I stopped knowing what to believe, and my handicap stopped moving. About a year ago I started building what I actually wanted: an AI that watches my swing, pulls out one specific fault per session, and gives me a drill I can do on the range that night. Not a generic YouTube drill, a drill that matches what it saw in the video. I wanted it to remember what we worked on last time. I wanted it to know when I had actually improved. That project is now FlushedAI. It launched on the App Store this month and we filed a patent on the coaching system in March. What it does: 1. Upload a swing video. The AI pulls the key frames and breaks down contact, path, face, tempo, and body sequencing. 2. It writes you a short summary in plain English, plus 3 drills tied to whatever the top miss was. 3. You log sessions (speed, smash factor, miss patterns) and it updates your focus over time. 4. There is also a map with 24,000+ courses worldwide where you can log sightings with friends and a wagers system for golf bets with your crew (AI scans the scorecard, settles the bet). Things I got wrong along the way: 1. First version used a generic vision model. It was confidently wrong about everything. Lesson: general AI is not a golf coach. We had to fine tune on actual swing footage with a PGA pro labeling it. 2. Tried to replace the teacher. Bad idea. The tool is better as a daily practice partner between lessons, not instead of lessons. 3. Built too much at launch. Shipped the swing analyzer, course map, wagers, and drill library all at once. Should have shipped swing analyzer alone and let the rest follow. Ask me anything. Happy to run a free swing analysis on anyone who drops a video in the comments, no app download required. Also giving out free Premium codes to the first 50 people in this thread who want to actually use it. Not trying to sell anything here. Mostly curious what the crowd thinks is missing in the current crop of swing apps.
PostHog: AI-Powered Platform for Product Success
🦔 PostHog is an all-in-one developer platform for building successful products. We offer product analytics, web analytics, session replay, error tracking, feature flags, experimentation, surveys, data warehouse, a CDP, and an AI product assistant to help debug your code, ship features faster, and keep all your usage and customer data in one stack.
Tokyo 2026: AI and Tech Innovation Hub
SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 has four tightly defined technology domains, each backed by live demonstrations, dedicated exhibit floors, and sessions featuring the people actually building and funding these technologies globally.