Welcome to the fourteenth edition of AiOS Dispatch, your go-to newsletter for the latest in AI and iOS development!

It has been a while since the last dispatch, and a lot has happened in the AI world. A lot is always an understatement in the AI world.

I do not even remember the last time I wrote this one. I got overwhelmed by the amount of news and updates, and I focused on covering WWDC 2025 and working with the Foundation Models instead.

Let's start afresh.

Every word in this newsletter is typed by me, which is ironic for a newsletter about AI. I do have Cursor Tab enabled for the markdown, although I love the sound of the clicks on the keyboard.

Especially on this MacBook M5, that was graciously provided by Apple for me to test and review for everything related to on-device AI!

It is raining tokens this week, and we all have to thank the competition between the frontier labs, and IDEs.

Cursor and Composer 1

Cursor released their first model, and oh boy, it is a fast one. The speculations about Cheetah being an alpha version of it were true.

I have spent billions of tokens on it, and although it is not as good as Sonnet 4.5 and GPT 5 Codex models, it is a great one to quickly research codebase, do redundant code changes, and refactors that would not mess up your codebase.

Or grammar check this newsletter in ten seconds! I do not have to pay for a grammar checker anymore, hah.

I have used it to debug MLX Audio, lint all of my Swift packages, and fix warnings and errors in my codebase. It also helps me audit the codebase for potential issues, and I have to double-check how it found years-old unseen subtle issues that I missed, and that too in seconds!

I just updated the website and it took me less than a minute to set it up for the Black Friday sale, while adding the new book links and images. No way I could have done it this fast, without any errors, and with the quality of the code that I would have written myself.

I was not a fan of its price point at the same rate as GPT 5 Codex, but right now, it is free for everyone for a limited time, and it is a great way to test the model.

Another competitor is SWE 1.5 by Windsurf, which is much faster, but I have not had a chance to test it yet.

Claude Code and Web

Almost two weeks ago, I received a mail from Anthropic that they are offering a whole month of the Claude Max plan worth $100 for free to try it out. I assume they are reaching out to those who cancelled their subscriptions, and Codex has been gaining popularity as the CLI tool for coding agents.

Again, this week, they are offering $1000 worth of credits to the Max users to try out Claude Web, as Codex Cloud is also becoming popular. Codex also announced 50% more limits on the Pro plan, which is a great deal for those who are using it heavily.

Competition is fierce, and it has become a race to the bottom. What a great time to be a builder!

Polaris Alpha

A stealth model has appeared on OpenRouter, and it is called Polaris Alpha. It is available for free, and from my testing, it has OpenAI-ish vibe to it and is surprisingly fast, unlike Codex.

It is an amazing alternative if you do not have a subscription to any of the models, and still want to vibe-code in Cursor. Just override the OpenAI URL in the model settings, put in the OpenRouter endpoint with your API key, and you are good to go.

As I said, it is raining tokens this week!

What's Next

I have kept this newsletter short and sweet for this week so I can at least start writing again. Next week should be more interesting with so many rumors floating around.

Until next time, keep shipping and building!