January 15, 2026 AI-DIGEST BY MAURO SICARD
From Product Hunt
Product Hunt

AI dev tools and macOS utilities led today's launches. Cal.com released native apps, and several AI dictation tools competed for attention.

Cal.com Companion Apps — Native iOS, Android & Browser Extensions Free companion apps for Cal.com scheduling. Built with Expo/React Native for consistent UI across platforms. Real-time sync with calendar integrations. Open source.
▲ 478 · cal.com
AI Test Engineer — Playwright Code with Self-Healing AI generates real Playwright code stored in your Git repo. Self-healing tests that auto-adapt to UI changes. No vendor lock-in. CI/CD integrations for GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure.
▲ 246 · blinq.io
Kiki for Mac — Accountability Monster for Focus Pick ONE task, select only apps/websites you need, everything else is blocked. Focus tracking shows how focused you were per session. Strict Mode coming — can't quit until time is up.
▲ 238 · kiki.computer
Cursor AI Mobile — Control Cursor from iPhone Send prompts from phone that execute on your Mac through Cursor CLI. Menu bar agent receives via push notifications. Supports GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro.
▲ 131 · apps.apple.com
GitHub Space Shooter — Contribution Graph Game Transforms your GitHub contribution graph into an animated space shooter GIF. GitHub Action for daily auto-updates. CLI options for enemy strategies and frame rate.
▲ 129 · github.com
Notto — Invisible AI Overlay for Mac Floating transparent chat window works over your apps. Meeting transcription with summaries and to-do lists. Voice dictation 3x faster than typing. AI chat queries past meetings.
▲ 119 · usenotto.com
Manus Meeting Minutes — In-Person Meeting to Work Records real conversations, transcribes with speaker recognition, generates structured action items. Use notes as context to create deliverables directly. From Manus AI (acquired by Meta).
▲ 116 · manus.im
StackPatch — Patch Auth into Next.js in One Command CLI tool that patches Google + GitHub OAuth into existing Next.js apps. `npx stackpatch add auth` for existing projects. No SaaS, no lock-in — real files in your repo.
▲ 113 · github.com
AI Dictation by Snaply — 100% Local Whisper for Mac Uses Apple Silicon Neural Engine. Works offline. Better Japanese punctuation than macOS built-in. Free alternative to MacWhisper ($249 lifetime). Data never leaves your Mac.
▲ 102 · snaply.ai
AI Mode API — Programmatic Google AI Search Third-party API to query Google's AI Mode search. Returns AI-generated responses with cited sources, structured JSON. Alternative to SerpApi for AI Mode scraping.
▲ 73 · aimodeapi.com
From Reddit
r/openai r/singularity r/LocalLLaMA r/artificial

Major BCI funding from OpenAI, real-time video generation, and more AI math breakthroughs. China also proved it can train state-of-the-art models without US chips.

Sam Altman co-founds Merge Labs — $252M for non-invasive BCIs

OpenAI wrote the largest check in a $252M round at $850M valuation. Merge Labs uses ultrasound instead of electrodes to connect with neurons — no surgery required.

Competes with Musk's Neuralink but with a fundamentally different approach. Aims to create natural human-AI interaction. Co-founders include BCI researchers Mikhail Shapiro and Tyson Aflalo.

openai.com · r/singularity
PixVerse R1 — First real-time world model

Generates 1080P video instantly responding to user input. Alibaba-backed startup with 100M users and $40M ARR. Native multimodal foundation handles text/image/audio/video in single token stream.

Key innovation: consistency-aware autoregressive for infinite coherent video. Persistent worlds that evolve with intent. Invite-only beta now available.

realtime.pixverse.ai · r/singularity
TiinyAI Pocket Lab — 80GB RAM AI "supercomputer" in 300g Guinness-certified smallest AI computer. 12-core ARMv9.2 + custom NPU (190 TOPS). Runs 120B LLMs locally at 18-40 tok/s. 35W TDP. $1,399 on Kickstarter Feb 2026.
OpenAI Confessions — Models trained to admit misbehavior New alignment research. GPT-5 Thinking produces "confessions" when it cuts corners or violates policies. Separate channel caught 90% of rule violations in hacking tests. 4.4% false negative rate.
Grok 4.20 discovers new Bellman function Mathematician found a new Bellman function in harmonic analysis using Grok beta. Improved lower bound from √log to log — and it's sharp. Adds to 15 Erdős problems solved by AI since Christmas 2025.
Step3-VL-10B — Vision model matching 100B+ models StepFun's 10B vision-language model uses Parallel Coordinated Reasoning to scale test-time compute. Apache 2.0 license. Runs on bf16.
Zhipu proves China can train SOTA models without US chips GLM-Image trained entirely on Huawei Ascend Atlas 800T A2. 9B autoregressive + 7B diffusion decoder. Tops benchmarks for text rendering (0.91 word accuracy). Open source, API at $0.014/image.
MIT MechStyle — AI-designed 3D prints that actually work Lets users customize 3D-printable objects while maintaining structural integrity. Previously only 25% of AI-stylized models were viable — MechStyle achieves 100%. Uses FEA simulation during design.
From Reddit
r/StableDiffusion r/midjourney r/comfyui

FLUX.2 Klein dropped — fast local image generation is getting serious. LTX-2 continues iterating with official fixes.

FLUX.2 Klein 4B & 9B — Fast generation AND editing in one model

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2 [klein] in 4B and 9B sizes — fastest models in the Flux family. 4B under Apache 2.0, 9B open weights. Step-distilled to 4 steps, under 0.5 seconds.

9B matches models 5x its size. FP8/NVFP4 versions available. 9B needs ~29GB VRAM (RTX 4090+). Unifies generation and editing — no separate inpaint model needed.

bfl.ai · r/StableDiffusion
LTX-2 official updates — overbaking and audio fixes Dev team released latent normalization node for overbaking and audio clipping. Updated VAE for distilled checkpoints. Low-VRAM training optimization. Countless community LoRAs in just two weeks.
360 Volumetric VR Generator — Holodeck-style local generation VR environment generator running locally. SD.cpp for equirectangular 360 images, Depth Anything V2 for depth, LaMa for inpainting. Creates real parallax — lean around and inspect scenes in VR.
Qwen Edit Line Effects LoRA Draw lines on an image, describe the effect, LoRA adds special effects following your lines. Works with Qwen 2509/2511.
From Reddit
r/macapps r/selfhosted r/opensource r/SideProject

Big day for macOS utilities. Multiple dictation tools, Finder customization, and an interesting multi-language runtime.

FreeVoice Reader — Local dictation + TTS + voice cloning Apple Silicon-native with 5 TTS engines including Kokoro (natural) and Orpheus (emotions). Meeting transcription with diarization. Metal GPU acceleration. One-time purchase, all local.
Kommand — Personal keyboard shortcut reference Native macOS app. Global hotkey brings up YOUR shortcuts, not 500 defaults. Categorize and favorite per app. Built with Swift. One-time purchase $3.99. Made by dev who switched to keyboard-only.
Elide — Multi-language runtime (JS, Python, Kotlin, Java) GraalVM-based runtime with true interop — no serialization, shared memory. Up to 75x performance gains. Run Kotlin like Python with no Gradle setup. MCP integration coming. Apache 2.0.
Drop in — Add features to any website in plain English Chrome extension that drops buttons, panels, shortcuts into pages without changing code. Quick reply buttons in chat, "analyze listing" on marketplaces. Starting API integrations for full features.

Quick hits — more tools and smaller releases.

YouTube distraction-free (TestFlight) Native macOS app. No Shorts, no comments, just the video. Requires macOS 26.
macUSB — Bootable macOS USB creator Fixes Intel installer failures on Apple Silicon. Supports OS X 10.4+. Apple Notarized.
SidebarFavorites — SF Symbol icons in Finder sidebar Replace generic folder icons with any SF Symbol. Swift 5.9, macOS 13+. MIT license.
NotifiCLI — CLI notifications with reply support Captures typed responses in stdout. Persistent alerts. Better than terminal-notifier v1.7.
Subtitle Forge — Whisper + LibreTranslate toolbox Extract/convert/translate subtitles. CoreML Whisper on macOS. Supports Gemini 3.0.
Surge — TUI download manager faster than aria2 Go-based with Bubbletea UI. Parallel connections, resumable. Benchmarked 1.38x faster.