Second layer apps
Sep 21, 2025
The most interesting thing happening right now, in the first half of 2025, is Layer 2 applications built on top of the foundation model API products from the giants above. There are a lot of very cool things out there.
There are thousands of them, but I’ll just single out a couple that I use myself:
- ChatGPT or Claude: well, this one is obvious. Classic second layer products, since on top of their own basic API the teams bolted on a pile of logic that turns a not very human-friendly API into a product you use every day for different purposes.
- Perplexity: partly a competitor to ChatGPT, but more about finding information and research. Simplifying, they are rethinking Google’s entire product stack (from search to shopping) with AI. Successfully in some places, not in others. But their search has definitely found its niche and deserves attention.
- Cursor: an AI IDE based on VS Code. Writes code for you from your instructions. An autonomous agent is planned soon.
- Supermaven: a VS Code plugin that does roughly the same thing as Cursor, but inside VS Code. Its main strength is more in code autocompletion.
- Cline: another developer product. Also works as a VS Code plugin, but is better at working with the full project documentation, so it understands context better.
- Ollama: an SDK that lets you install open-source model weights locally and effectively run LLMs on your own GPU (essentially for free) for your own purposes on your laptop.
- OpenAI Operator: still closed, I think, but this is a move into agent territory.
- Browser Use: a framework that lets you automate work in the browser with a prompt. A top tool for scraping data, automating simple browser tasks, and so on.
- Browserbase: third-party infrastructure for browser automation. The next step compared to Browser Use, where you can run something similar on third-party servers and not deal with infrastructure problems.
- Replit Agent: they built an agent that creates a full project from your description (not a single code file, but all the files the project needs). You write what you need and get a working app. A very cool tool. Usually easier to pick up than Cursor.
- ElevenLabs: an API for working with voice, a super tool; we build a lot of things on it. For example, an AI sales rep that calls offices following our script and takes into account the real-time data we feed it.
- Claude Code: an agent that runs locally on your machine and writes code autonomously. In general it can be used for more than just code. I use it rarely so far, but it looks very promising.
Again, there is a sea of products; I’ve listed only a few here that I’ve used recently or see value in. The Valley is having a renaissance right now; the techies have come back from Texas to build AI applications. Keeping up with everything is impossible.
Right now most applications are around text GenAI. But very soon we will see mass-market products in image generation, video generation, and even 3D worlds.
Originally posted in Russian on my telegram. This is a translation.