Everyone can code

Goooood morning, legends! In today's edition of the Leaderboard, we continue to talk about some of our friends tools from 2024, including: Everyone's favorite AI IDE, an app for list addicts, and a tool to stop hackers in their tracks. Let's dive in.

Cursor: An AI powered code-editor

Before Cursor, I was copy and pasting a lot of my work into ChatGPT and then getting it's code suggestions from it. Manually uploading files, asking questions, putting in reference documentation. Cursor changed all of this over night. Having VSCode plugins, an actual IDE to work in, and AI models available right inside made my workflow immensely faster and has allowed me, someone who doesn't code, to build multiple chrome extensions, web apps, and MacOS apps. When I think of an era defining app, Cursor comes to mind.

Hypelist: Get personalized recommendations of everything you love

Hypelist lets you create, share, and discover AI-enhanced lists about basically anything. Top coffee spots in Barcelona, best 80s horror movies, tips for finding good flea markets in LA…the possibilities are endless. The goal here seems to be creating a central hub for recommendations that are currently scattered across lots of different apps like Letterboxd, Reddit, Yelp, TikTok and IG. Of course, apps like these live or die on the strength of their networks. My advice to Hypelist? Start by trying to corner the 18-21 year old market. Everyone else will follow.

Forta Firewall: An on-chain firewall that stops 99% of hacks in real-time.

On-chain hacks steal hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and Forta Firewall is here to change that. It blocks malicious transactions before they happen, using AI trained on smart contracts and historical data. They’re claiming 99.99% accuracy with almost zero false positives, which sounds insane—but if it’s legit, it could make a huge difference. If we want the on-chain economy to thrive, having preventative tools like this seems like the right move.