Under-the-Radar AI Updates Worth Your Time

The only thing filling my inbox more than Black Friday sales with "surprise" extensions is new AI-powered feature releases. It is nearly impossible to keep track of everything being added, let alone test it all.

I eventually had to file for tab bankruptcy for my own sanity rather than keep everything open to try later. Just look at the code editor space. We have Cursor hitting billion-dollar valuations, Windsurf and Antigravity taking on VS Code, and Claude Code, OpenCode, GitHub CLI, and Codex CLI battling it out as terminal-based AI assistants.

We even have a good old-fashioned browser war happening with AI-centric browsers from OpenAI (Atlas), Perplexity (Comet), and The Browser Company / Atlassian (Dia) all going after Chrome’s crown. Google has been rolling AI features into Chrome as well.

Noticeably missing is Apple. They loom in the background. Google’s latest Gemini 3 release showed how fast the narrative can shift away from OpenAI’s first-mover advantage. If Apple gets its AI tooling together, they have the built-in user base to shake up the field instantly.

This week we will focus on some under-the-radar releases that did not break through the noisier announcements.

💼 Docs
Google Workspace Flows
Google
Buried in the larger Gemini 3 news was Google’s Workspace Flows. It took me a while to even find a solid write-up after seeing the Flows icon appear in Gmail. In the end I went with linking to the docs themselves. Workspace Flows is Google’s take on building custom agents to automate workflows across apps in the Google ecosystem.

📰 Article
Apple’s Most Overlooked App Just Got a Lot Better
Wired
Shortcuts is one of those Apple apps I have never taken the time to fully embrace. The newest under-the-radar update adds the ability to create shortcuts that run steps on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute models and OpenAI models via their partnership. It sets up for some private, AI-powered workflows directly on your Apple devices. Its going on my to-do list to try out.

📰 Article
Introduction to Todoist Assist
Todoist
Speaking of my to-do list, Todoist announced a set of AI-powered features. The initial release focuses on turning forwarded emails into tasks and helping create custom filters.

Pair this with their MCP, which I only discovered by accident in the GitHub MCP Registry.

🧠 New Model
Introducing Claude Opus 4.5
Claude
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which outperforms Sonnet 4.5 in most benchmarks, including agentic coding and novel problem solving. Anthropic also claims it is less susceptible to prompt-injection attacks compared to other top-tier models.

🔧 Tool
Replicate Image Editing Arena
Replicate
Replicate put together a tool that lets you test and compare the image-editing capabilities of several image models. It is fascinating to see how models like Nano Banana Pro, Flux 2 Pro, and others handle the same prompt and image input, and how easy it is to compare results side by side.

Thanks for reading,

Jason