Undercover Agents 🕵️‍♀️

AI You Didn't Know You Needed

Welcome back, agent.

This week's intelligence briefing features two tools I actually tested myself. One transforms your Mac into a productivity powerhouse. The other turns any website into your personal data source. Both are hiding in plain sight.

🚨 AI Intel Brief

This Week's Undercover Developments

🎵 AI Therapists Use Custom Music as Medicine

AI is generating personalized music designed specifically for stress and anxiety relief, with algorithms creating tunes that target brain patterns. Unlike Spotify playlists, these are therapeutic compositions tailored to individual brainwave responses. Early trials show significant mood improvements in patients who couldn't find relief through traditional therapy methods.

🔬 Stanford Creates "Virtual Scientists" That Design Their Own Experiments

Stanford researchers built AI "virtual scientists" that can design, run, and analyze biological experiments independently, already generating ideas for more effective COVID-19 vaccines in just days.

🏛️ Pentagon Quietly Awards $200M AI Contracts to Four Tech Companies

The Defense Department's AI office awarded individual contracts valued at up to $200 million each to four companies for advanced AI capabilities addressing national security challenges. While everyone focuses on consumer AI, military applications are getting massive, under-the-radar funding.

📊 Carnegie Mellon Launches AI Math Discovery Institute

Carnegie Mellon University is launching a new NSF-funded institute to accelerate mathematical discovery using AI tools that can conjecture, prove, and visualize complex theorems. This isn't just AI doing calculations—it's AI actually discovering new mathematical principles and proofs.

🚀Agent #1: Raycast AI

The Mac Productivity Sleeper Cell

Looks like a basic Mac launcher. Actually a productivity powerhouse hiding 4 game-changing tools.

What it does: Turns your Command+Space into a smart command center for calculations, text shortcuts, and clipboard management.

Pricing: Free (core features) | Pro ($8/month) for AI access

My Test Results: I thought this was just for developers. I was wrong. These 4 features hooked me in 48 hours:

• Clipboard History - Search everything you've copied. No more "I lost the link I copied"

• Text Snippets - Type ;dt get today's date. ;email expands to your signature. Saves tons of retyping.

• Smart Calculator - Currency conversion, timezones, percentages, text translation. All in one place.

• Screenshot Search - Finds screenshots by the text inside them. Game changer.

The AI Features (Premium Only): 

• Quick AI - Ask anything instantly without opening browsers. "Explain this error message" or "Convert this SQL to Python" - done in seconds.

• Chat with Documents - Chat with PDF documents, CSV files or anything you see on your screen - "What's the total?" or "Summarize the key points"

• AI Extensions - Turn speech into actions. "Email the team about tomorrow's meeting delay" actually drafts and sends it.

Reality Check: These AI features cost $8/month. Convenient if you're constantly asking AI questions. However, the free stuff alone is still worth it.

Who Benefits:

• Content creators who copy lots of links and text

• Anyone doing quick calculations throughout the day

• People with messy screenshot folders

• Mac users tired of tiny daily annoyances

Bottom Line: Fixes small frictions you didn't know were slowing you down.

🕷️ Agent #2: Browse.ai

The Web Scraping Spy

Looks like another complicated web scraping tool. Actually a point-and-click data extraction machine that turns any website into your personal API.

What it does: Watches you navigate a website once, then automatically repeats that process to grab data on schedule. No coding required.

Pricing: Free plan available | Starter ($19/month) | Professional ($99/month) | Team ($249/month)

My Test Results: I built a bot to monitor my local animal shelter for new dogs. Simple goal, but it taught me how powerful this tool really is.

The process was intuitive with a small learning curve:

• Paste Website Link - Drop in the animal shelter URL

• Interactive Recording - Browse.ai loads the site in their environment and records every click you make

• Highlight Data - Click and drag to select the info you want (dog names, photos, descriptions)

• Set Triggers - I set mine to notify me if there's even a 1% change from the previous scan

• Schedule Monitoring - Mine checks once daily for new furry friends

Who Benefits:

• Real estate investors monitoring property prices and new listings

• E-commerce sellers tracking competitor pricing

• Job seekers monitoring specific companies for new openings

• Researchers gathering data from public websites regularly

• Small businesses keeping tabs on industry trends

Bottom Line: Turns tedious manual data collection into set-it-and-forget-it automation. The dog shelter test convinced me - this actually works.

🎯 Mission Debrief

Both tools solve problems by eliminating repetitive manual work:

• Raycast removes the friction from everyday Mac tasks (copying, calculating, finding things)

• Browse.ai removes the tedium from data collection (checking websites manually)

The pattern? The best AI tools don't replace your brain—they handle the boring stuff so you can focus on what matters. Whether that's productivity shortcuts or automated dog alerts.

💭 Agent Check-In

If you got this far: Tell me a FUNKY word you really like, and I'll try to incorporate it into next week's issue!

Stay undercover, Ashna Jain

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