Yesterday's Top Launches: 5 Tools from October 20, 2026

Five launches from October 20, 2026

Yesterday’s batch is unusually scattered. An AI presenter that runs one-on-one meetings for you, a CLI that masks secrets before your coding agent reads them, a paid Git client, a menu-bar meeting utility, and a controller small enough to lose in a hoodie pocket. Three of the five qualify as new developer tools in the strict sense; the other two are aimed at anyone who spends a working day in meetings or in games. What they share is a common target: work that ought to take one step currently takes five.

MyLens

The premise is refreshingly blunt. You can’t present one-on-one to everyone — 24 people at 30 minutes each is 12 hours of your week — so MyLens replaces you with an AI presenter that runs a private live session for every person on your list, in parallel.

Setup asks for sources rather than slides: PDFs, docs, recordings, YouTube links, ChatGPT output, spreadsheets. A separate Knowledge layer holds the goal, tone, audience description and a list of things the AI must never say. Each audience member opens a private link, enters a six-digit code, and gets a walkthrough they can interrupt mid-slide. The AI answers from your material and can generate a new visual on the spot — the site’s example is a drill-down infographic on repository access, built for the exact question someone asked.

What makes it feel considered rather than gimmicky is the permissioning. Before anyone joins, you decide whether the AI may create slides, drill deeper, or cite sources. Afterwards you get per-person reporting: time spent, questions asked, who needs a follow-up. Whether the grounding holds up on messy source material is the open question, and it’s the one the entire product rests on. Free, browser-based, with MCP connections to ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor.

shim-cli

This is the one I’d install today. shim-cli is an open-source command-line tool that sits next to Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI and VS Code, finds secrets and personal data in what your agent sends, and swaps them for placeholders like <SECRET_1> before the model reads the file. The detector covers API keys, database URIs, IBANs, credit cards, emails, phone numbers and several national ID formats, with checksum verification on IBANs so a mistyped number isn’t flagged.

Three commands carry the weight. shim watch -- claude proxies a single command and reports tokens, spend and every value that went past, writing nothing to disk. shim audit reads Claude Code history already on your machine and counts what previously reached the model, broken down by project and by entry route — an @.env, a failed Bash command, your own prompt. shim keys .env --json lists variable names without printing values.

The documentation is where the project earns trust. It states outright that prompts typed into Claude Code or Codex aren’t masked because neither client allows a hook to rewrite them, that Codex and Copilot CLI tool traffic isn’t inspected at all, that VS Code masks nothing, and that Windows isn’t supported and WSL isn’t verified. Median hook cost is 70 ms. Apache-2.0, v1.2.1, Python 3.10 or newer, no account and no telemetry.

Tower 18 for Mac

Tower has been around long enough that most people reading this have an opinion already. The paid Git client covers drag-and-drop branch merging, Command+Z undo, stacked branches, AI commit messages, single-line staging, interactive rebase, a Conflict Wizard, submodules, Git LFS, worktrees and quick open. The 18 release adds something narrower: a command-line tool that jumps you from a terminal straight to a view in the app, whether that’s History, Blame, the Working Copy or Branches Review.

That’s a sensible direction. The people who buy a GUI client are often the ones living in a shell, and bridging the two beats asking them to pick a side. It’s still a paid app in a category with capable free alternatives, so the justification comes down to how much you value the conflict and rebase handling. The 30-day Pro trial makes that easy to test.

MeetPaw

A tiny macOS menu-bar app, free under MIT, that creates a Google Meet, Zoom or Teams link from a paw icon. One click makes a meeting with your default provider, copies the link and opens it. Right-click reveals upcoming meetings, scheduling and accounts.

The timeline blends up to five accounts per provider into one list sorted by time, filterable per account, with a 15-minute warning and one-click join. Scheduling uses a native sheet with a live conflict check across every connected calendar before booking. Hotkeys are global: Cmd-Shift-M, Cmd-Shift-Z, Cmd-Shift-T. Tokens stay in the Keychain and the app talks only to the three providers.

One caveat worth knowing before you download: it isn’t notarized yet, so Gatekeeper complains on first launch and you’ll need to right-click Open once.

XBOX Nano Controller

The odd one out and arguably the most fun. Xbox’s smallest controller packs all 18 inputs into something pocket-sized, connecting to consoles over Xbox Wireless and to PCs, phones, tablets and select smart TVs over Bluetooth. The Action Button is programmable, remapping runs through the Xbox Accessories app, and the battery recharges over USB-C.

Entry-level positioning plus a smaller body makes it a genuinely good first controller; a full-size pad is unwieldy for small hands. Two annoyances, though. The USB-C cable is sold separately, and pricing isn’t published on the page at all beyond a note that it varies by retailer. As a second controller that lives in a bag, it still makes sense.

None of these had community rankings tallied by yesterday, so there’s no leaderboard to point at yet. If I had to pick, shim-cli is the one with the clearest daily payoff for developers, and MyLens is the one most likely to surprise people who dismissed AI presentation tools as slide generators.