We have three new models to talk about:

Claude Opus 5.5 - it’s the “one model to rule them all” at this moment. Better than Fable 5.1 on benchmarks, cheaper than Opus 5, writes extremely well, and reliable in the tasks you give it.

With the release of Opus 5.5, the five-hour limits in Claude Code are increased by 20% and we’re getting a banked rate limit reset.

The default thinking level for Opus 5.5 is medium in the app. Ben likes that too. I’ve been running it at high/xhigh for the last two days and I only hit the 5 hour limit once.

I asked it to work on a few side projects:

• ossean.com - “update filtering with jev instead of gemini and redesign the website a little bit”

• shortandlongtail.com - “rewrite the essays with detailed research”

• detroitbench - “run the three new models and add them to the results”

Every says it’s pulling their Codex converts back to Claude and I feel the same. My go-to agent has changed to Claude Code with this release.

GPT-6 Luna and Sol from OpenAI. There’s no Terra this time. Don’t think anyone was even using it. Both GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6-Sol are only available in Codex and ChatGPT Work (not regular chat) for now.

Key part: both of them are 50% cheaper than their previous versions. That’s $0.10/$0.50 for Luna and $2/$10 for Sol, per million input/output tokens. Both models come with only a minor upgrade in intelligence. GPT-6-Sol is clearly a step behind the new Opus model.

I wanted to put the price cuts for Sol to test so I sent it on a long task to create a duolingo like course for marketing.

It first stopped after 1.5 hours with a pretty decent version but I pushed it to work more. In about 4 hours, it consumed 22% of my weekly limits on a $100 Codex plan. Here’s what it built.

GPT-6-Astra consumes limits wayy too fast. I need to play more with Astra driving Sol subagents but it seems like a reasonable thing to try.

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Headlines

Muse at Meta Connect - Zuckerberg is going all in on Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant. It can now use any app on your Mac, buy for you via Walmart, Best Buy & Sephora and it’s getting its own email address so you can CC it on threads. It’s also coming to Meta’s glasses in the next few months.

Zuck says Muse stays free for “a huge number of tokens” but Meta might take a small fee from transactions. Also coming: a video-chat avatar for your Muse and a Tamagotchi-like keychain to carry Muse around (welcome back AI pendants).

Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS - new speech generation models from Google. Half the price of 3.1 Flash TTS, 100+ languages and 2000+ voices to pick from. Plus you can clone your own voice too. Steve (Tldraw’s founder) is impressed with these models, so that’s some signal.

ChatGPT Voice can now use your email, calendar and Slack and pair up with Astra, Sol or Luna models to optimize for intelligence/cost.

Claude Code cloud sessions are out of preview - You get a computer in the cloud to run your tasks instead of having to keep your Mac open. Cloud sessions use your Pro/Max plan usage as normal, but existing subscribers get a one-time credit to try them out - $100 on Pro, $250 on Max. Claim it by Oct 7.

Claude found a new enzyme system in bacteriophage DNA (viruses that infect bacteria). Nobody knows what it does yet, and reruns of the same search missed it. Weren’t we pacing the frontier, eh?

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• Zaps in Zapier can now fix themselves when they break, and they get cheaper the more they run. (Beta)

• Claude mobile app supports multiple accounts now.

• MentalHealthBench - benchmark for mental health conversations. GPT-6-Astra tops it, with 6-Sol and Opus 5.5 as second and third. Surprisingly, Fable 5.1 is not that good.

• How to train your own Jev for $17.

• GoodVibes - filter X, Reddit and YouTube by vibes, in plain English. Runs on Jev.

• Cursor improved its harness to save about 7% on token costs.

• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar) on AI for creativity.

• Cursor Rollouts - an agent that watches your deploy and opens a revert PR if something breaks. (Teams and Enterprise)

• How Anthropic made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks. Prompts included.

• Claude Code might kill plan mode. It’s the right thing to do.

• Vercel’s Sandbox can now save files with its new offering, Drives.

• Soon your privacy will depend on your agent’s social skills.

• Drama 3 by Fish Audio - direct a voice in plain English, even mid-sentence.

• Monologue built its own dictation model to reduce the number of edits needed post-transcription.

• What if you could talk to a podcast and it talked back? (Research demo)

• The Open Frontier - which open model fits your use case, and what you’d save by switching.

• OpenAI’s proposal for AI standards, and what outside testers should get to see.

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Do you remember the site I one-shot with all the ‘forgotten devices’ of the past? Things like the tamogotchi, furby, walkman, og playstation, etc. Well I finally did something with it.

I always see people building cool interactions or experiences and just send them to my agent to link up with an idea or something I want to explore. Remixing and reverse engineering is a great way to play with things for the sake of it.

I also built my token activity tracker which shows which agent apps and models I use daily. It’s got a copyable prompt on the site, so your agent can do the same.

Everyone’s talking about Jev - I’m too overwhelmed with what everyone else is building with it that I’ve not used it for anything properly yet.

Headlines

Jev is now open to everyone. We covered the launch in the last post, but since then people are finding all sorts of uses for it. It’s different from usual LLMs. It is for builders, built to be used inside a tool.

You give it some text and ask questions: is this an ad (yes/no answers), which folder does this belong in (select between choices), how relevant is this result (score something)?

I quickly built a collection of things people are building with it and a short explainer: What is Jev? Some worth highlighting are:

• An extension to skip sponsor segments on YouTube.

• Filtering negative comments out of a chat in real time.

• Search Gmail by intent, or filter your to-dos.

• A new & smarter copy-paste, drag-and-drop and Cmd+F experience.

• Controlling your Mac with Voice.

Naturally, a fair share of demos are trying to integrate Jev with modern coding agents. For example, using it for instant compaction. It looks cool, but it’s a terrible idea. It loses the cost savings from prompt caching.

Sidenote: experiments with compaction/dropping tool calls are often a loss these days. Codex’s implementation of compaction is so clean (and good) that the pain to build a custom setup is not worth the tiny gain you can squeeze out for a couple weeks.

— Keshav

Coding agents are also on the mind of TypeSafe’s CEO - he wrote down his thoughts here.

Projects in Claude Code are now a single master chat (instead of a folder) where you can dump your requirements, thoughts, tasks and let Claude spawn new threads to carry out the work you give it. These threads run as cloud sessions, but local support is coming. This new change is in beta and will be live for all users soon.

Also, finally, Claude Code will now support AGENTS.md (via their new feature Claude Mods).

Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, is getting love from everyone (who has access). It has a Mac app and a developer platform to build connectors, so people can use external services through Muse. And of course, it’s heavily inspired by OpenClaw.

Muse can shop for you - well, it could, until Amazon started blocking it. Meta is working on it, with partnerships like this one with Shopify.

Grok 4.7 is out. It’s a questionable upgrade from Grok 4.6 - It performs better than GPT-5.6-Sol and Opus 5 on benchmarks, but takes a lot more tokens to do that, which takes away from its cost efficiency. I tried it and think it’s 💩. I was excited for it, as Grok 4.6 was pretty good for me in Pi, although I rarely chose it.

Building a voice agent? Agent STT by Speechmatics is powered by Linden, a new speech-to-text model purpose-built for voice agents. $0.30/hour ($0.15 after discounts), 25% cheaper than Deepgram Flux. Try it through Pipecat or LiveKit, or directly via Speechmatics’ API. Claim $100 credit.*

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• OpenAI formed an independent group of mathematicians to help them share the proofs and discoveries their agents are making.

• Test your agent in simulations with Raindrop. (They raised a Series A recently)

• Turning your best X posts into an automated blog and newsletter.

• How to ship 2,500 PRs to production in a month.

• A free, open-source Photoshop-like image editor.

• A look inside Instinct’s memory, reverse-engineered.

• A transcription model from SpaceX AI - Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0.

• How to build a restrained software factory.

• Powermove - a video editor you can change by talking to a coding agent.

• MCP vs CLI for LLMs - are we debating the wrong thing?

• Factory is now available in Slack Code.

• On July 25, we hacked OpenAI.

• Agent skill to make a demo video of your app, with zooms and voiceover. I used this for my devices tweet in the intro.

• Exa Snapshot - Let agents search the past versions of the web.

• People don’t want to build.

• Epoch audited 15 AI benchmarks and found flaws in nine.

• Natural General Intelligence - a call to work on AI models for the planet to avoid natural disasters and more.

• Accenture’s evaluators will work inside Anthropic to check AI safety, with access similar to its employees.

• Speeding a 4B model to 730 tokens/sec on an M5 Max. Underdog is really interesting; I just got onboarded, and it’s like a mini operating system: email/calendar/apps, etc all with local models, no data sent anywhere. Plus Sigil, the founder, is going to walk me through it in person next week when I go to SF.

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I’ve not been building as much this week 😬 - hand, foot and mouth is back in our house (happens yearly with 3 young kids!), and I have to get prep done for my Stanford talk on the 28th - they invited me back!

I’ll be in SF that week, heading to OpenAI Dev Day on the 29th to see what goodies they have in store for us - I predict we’ll see some stuff today, and they’re bound to have a personal agent up their sleeves to release very soon (pure speculation though).

For my Stanford talk, I’ve actually gone back to revisit the reference manual/course I was making for months (and hated every version I made). But now, since doing my Friday posts, I feel like I’ve got a better feel for how to do the course. This time I’ve actually made lessons I’m happy with, which is already miles better than my last attempts.

I’ll try and whip up something for a post tomorrow, but we’ll see if time (and kids) permits.

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Headlines

Claude Cowork is merging with Claude Chat. No more separate tab for bigger tasks. All your connected apps, skills and context are available in a normal Claude.ai chat. It can also keep working after you close your laptop. OpenAI will likely follow this pattern soon and merge ChatGPT and ChatGPT Work.

Claude Artifacts is also getting dedicated products for Docs and Slides, with Claude Design moving into conversations too. Is Anthropic invading G Suite and Office?

Update on Claude Code’s latest experiment. It has a name → Claude Mods. Mods change how Claude Code itself looks and behaves. You can ask Claude to write these mods for you, so the app can fit how you work (well, Claude works and you play Tetris).

Gemini API has two new Live models: 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These models take video and audio as input and output audio. They work great for use cases where you want the model to provide real-time assistance. I tried them in AI Studio for a couple of minutes, and didn’t notice any hiccups. It can be a great alternative to GPT-Live 1, since 3.8 Live is 7x cheaper.

New LLM killer model - Jev. Built by TypeSafe AI. The founder co-created ChatGPT. Jev doesn’t really generate text like LLMs. Instead, it creates probabilities for possible answers. Suitable for software that needs lots of quick judgments: what API to call next, which model to route a request to, or a trading bot. 5x cheaper inputs vs 5.6 Luna; free output tokens and 5.6 Terra-like performance on relevant tasks.

Union Alpha - new stealth model available through OpenRouter, Cloudflare and other providers. Outperforms 5.6 Sol on the DeepSWE benchmark at 5.6 Luna’s cost. Some rumours say it is a router; others say a GPT-6 variant (GPT-6 Luna??) or another GLM model (GLM-5.3-Flash launched this way). I had a good first chat with it; it spoke well, but then it revealed all my api keys in another session, and I’ve been getting ‘provider errors’ because it’s overloaded ever since….

Meta One - new subscription from Meta with extra AI features/usage in Muse and paid tools across Instagram, Facebook & WhatsApp.

Factory raised $200M at a $5B valuation. To celebrate, I updated my plugin for using Droid in the bb app. If I have to build anything ‘properly’ ie I care that it’s not vibe-slopped, I use Droid. And I’ve been using the Droid Core models a lot recently (open-source models) - they’re so quick, and not noticeably different from frontier models for most cases.

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• Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory.

• Can AI models build a T-shirt store? This was a cool read; also check out all the supporting docs she includes in the post.

• Reception by ElevenLabs - an AI receptionist for small businesses.

• How OpenAI plans to report models misbehaving.

• Slack Code lets your team and coding agents plan, build and review together

• Grok Bot can now use 1Password.

• Pion - agents for running fully autonomous companies.

• Which models are best at searching the web?

• Buzz - Your coding agent can ping your iPhone when it needs you.

• Arrow 2 by Quiver - New SVG generation model. Their last one was way ahead of LLMs; curious how it compares with Astra now.

• Code contracts - write down what your code must do, then have agents check it.

• Self-updating docs from Mintlify. Now with ready-made automations.

• An API to invent a dataset to train your models. (docs)

• TanStack Markdown - a tiny parser for docs, blogs and streaming AI responses.

• Building a company brain people actually want to use.

• A benchmark to answer how often AI agents cheat.

• Xiaomi’s AI team is streaming the RL run for their upcoming model.

• What stays expensive when AI gets cheap?

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How tf do I write an intro to the craziness that’s happened since the end of last week?!

I got access to Instinct, the personal agent all the VCs are raving about - I think it’s a bit meh? I don’t know if it’s the pro-activeness that people seem to like, but I don’t love that. Makes me feel like I’m having to do work to keep it happy, or like I’ve got a boss again - no thanks.

The first message it sent me was:

I sh*t myself a lil bit and thought, please don’t start sending emails on my behalf. And I’m pretty savvy (ish) with agents. I’ve no doubt getting these onboarding experiences for everyone is really hard, but I just don’t feel the magic yet. It also feels slow.

I’ll wait for Muse access to see what that’s like, but I don’t love the idea of giving Meta access to more info about me…they’re not the most reliable of privacy partners.

And another thing - you don’t see by default what these agents remember about you, or what context they have. I really like being able to see and edit what’s in my files to steer my agents.

Much like every app adding an AI assistant chat box in their product, I unfortunately think every AI company will start shipping their own personal agents.

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Headlines

Dario Amodei has a new essay: Pace the frontier. He says all the leading labs should slow down long enough for safety reasons. Sam Altman agrees, but Trump does not. He called Jensen Huang on stage at the All-In Summit: The US will not lose the AI race. David Sacks (AI czar for the US govt.) adds: feel free to slow down, but no need to impose it on others. Also read:

• More AI safety takes: two ways AI goes bad · it’s all for the IPO · pacing = losses · fear spreads faster · case for open-source and quite a long summary of what everyone’s actually saying.

• No IPO for OpenAI in 2026. Sam told Fortune’s Alyson Shontell it would be “ill-timed” given the work ahead on alignment, control and safety.

• Look ma! They are misuing claude again - Another Anthropic crashout.

tldraw took OpenAI up on a challenge. Steve (the founder of tldraw) said he could make ChatGPT’s Sketch 100x better. OpenAI’s Tibo gave him a day to prove it. The result: a whole ChatGPT-style prototype with better drawing tools built in.

ChatGPT mini - A tiny floating widget to start chats, see updates, and more. Go to Pets in your ChatGPT desktop app to switch.

Claude Code can now test whether a plugin actually helps. Run the same tasks with and without it and compare the results. Works with skills too.

Two new additions to the OpenAI API:

• GPT-Live-1 - the model behind ChatGPT’s new Voice mode. I love using it while reading books, asking about tricky terms and dictating notes. Now you can add it to your products. Here it is with Astra and a whiteboard, playing teacher.

• Agents API - OpenAI’s take on Managed Agents in the Claude API. It lets developers send any task to a Codex-like agent from their apps without worrying about configuring all the infra.

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• I use Pi (the harness) a lot. Till now, you brought an API key or your Codex/Claude subs to Pi. Their new product solves that. And I tell you what, the new DeepSeek model is really nice to work with in Pi. (I’m an investor)

• Bolt Forge - GLM, DeepSeek and Kimi inside Bolt, free until October 14.

• ChatGPT Work has a new data agent. (Also see: summation - by Opendoor’s CTO)

• Should your agent app have bots or tasks? Maybe neither. Because both make you organise the work.

• Routines in Replit - automated recurring work with AI.

• What are people building with GPT-6 Astra?

• Assistant Benchmark tests everyday assistants like Grok bot, Muse, Instinct and more. Ratings are a work in progress.

• SF autoresearch - Run agent-driven ML experiments while you save 25% on GPUs on average.

• A coding agent to improve your customer-facing agents.

• How Pangram detects AI writing - and why a human rewrite can still get flagged.

• How to run a team of agents, with agents as their managers.

• Cognition’s SWE-2 (based on Kimi K3) beats Grok 4.6 at half the cost.

• An interactive explainer of the AI compute stack.

• Inspo - Design inspiration from 800+ sites, available as an MCP server.

• Core Auto is hiring interns to be the human edge for businesses run by agents.

• Why even good AI startups end up with bad prompts, and how to fix them.

• Andrew Ng’s series on the skills AI engineers need.

• Underdog - a personal AI that runs entirely on your device.

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I actually built a tool I want to use - you may find it helpful too.

Explaining design styles/layouts/components is a nightmare for non-designers, they have their own language. So I wanted to build a site with a bunch of pre-filled styles that I could tweak or shuffle to get the right words to tell my agent what I want.

Introducing Design Words.

It’s still work in progress so I’d love you to try it and let me know what I need to improve and any feature requests :)

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The idea

I’ve been thinking about this for sometime and kind of accidentally ended up working on it this week.

It’s like a prompt or instruction builder - you select the styles and components you’d like and it’ll give you the text to prompt your agent.

This was what I started with:

I kicked this off in Pi using Fable 5.1 - I just wanted to brainstorm and play with a few ideas first, when I wanted to build it for real I used Factory’s Droid.

Prototyping

I generated 11 versions in total in this round. Here’s some of them:

This last one was v8 which was my front-runner. So I took that one and started tweaking more. Using subagents with fresh context to try and give me some fresh perspectives on what I was trying to do:

I started a new thread with Fable.

Used a subagent to do a design critique:

And often I’ll do these kinds of prompts about the feeling I’m going for and what feels like it’s missing. A lot of it is for me to see the response and give me ideas to explore.

Typical AI design with a million more words than is necessary and just generally function over form - pretty difficult to navigate.

So I spent a bunch of time tightening up things, hiding text, making it more usable. Also added bigger previews so you can see things more clearly. And some of the UI started to feel a lot closer to something I was happy with.

And I often throw in prompts like this to see what will come back:

Building

As with a lot of my prototyping phases, a lot of the building work is kind of done. I need to see things and use them before I can feel out what is needed and what’s not. Or change direction completely.

But at some stage I want to get things set up properly so agents can work on this without a load of bloated context of previous decisions and prototypes misleading it.

So I created a new folder ‘style-picker’, moved the leading prototype there and then got Droid to setup a design.md (a text file to explain the design system of the actual site). Droid is great because you can switch models easily and they have open-source models in their ‘Droid Core’ which gives you so much more tokens to use than if you use Fable/Astra.

For once, I tried to stick within my limits and used GLM 5.3 (via Droid Core) a lot for moving things around and general quick fixes. I only used Fable for bigger design rehauls or thinking about the build, the ux, the intended audience etc. I also used Fable as an orchestrator for other models like Luna because it’s good at computer use so it could spin up the site and test a bunch of stuff quickly.

I don’t usually mess around so much mixing this many models but I do want to get into using open-source models (I have since started using Deepseek v4 Flash as a daily driver and really enjoying it - as well as GLM 5.3).

One of the ideas from my previous critiques and ‘10x’ prompts was a shuffle button. You click shuffle and it generates a site for you in those styles - this felt great, you could see what your choices would look like in place.

Many more back and forths later…

haha - I’ve gone from ‘make it 10x better’ to ‘make it a thousand times better’…

But it worked! It created some prototypes that I really liked. So I got Droid to build them out properly and I’m still making tweaks here and there - so please any feedback let me know!

Publishing

For all my sites I try to use here.now - It’s a super simple tool, massive limits, quick and easy for agents to use. But bensbites.com is hosted on Cloudflare so I didn’t know how (or if) we could do that.

Turns out you can use a Cloudflare Worker proxy - so the site still is deployed on here.now but the url works. I didn’t have to login or learn to use Cloudflare for this at all. It basically just points the one address to the other.

Behind-the-build

38 sessions (including subagent threads). 116 prompts. 2 days of on and off work.

In each phase, which agents and models used:

Tokens used:

• Idea - 150K

• Prototype - 27.4M

• Build - 353.5M

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We had some reports of ending up in spam 😭 - so if you add us as a contact in Gmail, that shouldn’t happen.

You’ll have seen me building a ton but I want to know what you all actually want from this newsletter.

(another poll at the bottom of the email - we’d ❤️ your feedback)

Since Astra and Fable 5.1 I’ve been blasting through limits like crazy so I’m trying to get them to be orchestrating other agents, writing briefs for other agents and things like that. But I’m also playing around with open-source models like GLM 5.3 (my fav so far) - I think the thing that I struggle with most is the frontier models seem to understand intent better (generally) so I can be fuzzier in how I talk about things.

Like design.

I struggle all the time to get consistent styles, layouts, buttons, etc with models so I’m working on a tool I’ll launch tomorrow with a write up that is a kind of reference sheet where you can pick from options and copy the text to use in your prompts or instructions.

Here’s a peek:

If you’ve ever wanted to use something like this, comment and let me know feature requests!

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Headlines

ChatGPT Images 2.5 - New image generation model from OpenAI. It’s extremely good at editing any element in an image while keeping everything else the same. Also, takes up to 50% less time per image. Sketch, a new feature in ChatGPT, lets you draw some scribbles and then use image generation to turn it into a picture.

Muse is your personal agent by Meta - Zuck’s dog in the fight with Grok Bot, Instinct and many more. Same functionality - book travel, handle email and work on “any task” on a computer. Their narrative is that it is built much more securely, and you can connect your FB and Instagram accounts. Initially, only for adults in the US.

OpenAI solved the Navier-Stokes problem. Big deal in maths and fluid mechanics. One of the seven Millennium Problems - long-unsolved questions given that status in 2000. Here’s an explainer on it. The process was quite dramatic, though (authorship disputes). OpenAI tried solving it after they heard rumours that Anthropic had solved a Millennium Prize problem too.

Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic (and ex-OpenAI) employee, resigned on Twitter citing safety concerns, and it became likely the most-viewed AI safety comms ever. But many are questioning: is this a conspiracy? Meanwhile, another big safety guy is joining the OpenAI board.

• One more alignment report btw: this time on Claude’s escapades.

• And an essay from OpenAI on the window for AI policy.

The movie on Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring 3 years ago, titled Artificial, is releasing this Christmas. Andrew Garfield is playing Sam, and gets his mannerisms quite well in the teaser, but that’s about it. It has quite a doomerish vibe.

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• iOS 28 will likely have a feature to prove a picture’s authenticity.

• The Story of VS Code - a documentary.

• How Codex was built, with the person who started it.

• Anthropic built an interactive model of the economy in 2030.

• Codex now has a Unity plugin and a collection of plugins for small businesses.

• 35B language model running on an iPhone. How?

• An onboarding guide for ChatGPT Work.

• Spacefast - publish sites and full apps quickly with agents. kinda like here.now (what I use).

• Indent - one shared agent for your whole company.

• Why can’t I trust Astra for software engineering?

• How OpenAI keeps finding the next thing to focus on.

• Eraser Diagrams - an open-source format for AI to draw and lay out diagrams.

• How do different models perform on designing real-life products with CAD?

• Pliny hunted down the system prompt for GPT-6 Astra.

• You can just train a small model (i.e. really small - 27.5 KB) to do syntax highlighting in the browser.

• Folder is the agent - old but still relevant.

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Before dessert… we used to do these emails daily mon-fri but stopped. What’d be your preference for cadence on these digests?

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So Astra is out and, in my experience, a token-hungry monster of a model… I was playing around with it over the weekend and burned through 4Bn tokens and built…nothing really.

I also wasted my banked resets too and feel annoyed at myself for just throwing all sorts of requests at it (long-running and short).

I don’t know yet if it feels to me like a huge capability leap but every time a new model comes out I always think it must be my skill issue. I’ve seen some awesome demos on X of people building insane looking things (seems like everyone is building 3d worlds and games?).

Two things I one-shot that I’ll share because I’m not sure what to do with them yet:

‘forgotten devices’ - these images were created by the image generation tool (which is pretty nuts!). My idea was to have a bunch of these and then you could click and play with each one (if I had any tokens left).

p.s. you can see in the bottom left the 3 version my agent made (I always have 3 versions created when starting an idea so I can feel out which direction I like best).

‘world radio’ - an old ipod interface that plays radio stations live from around the world. Not sure what I was going to do here but it works pretty well (some rough edges like the top button wtf?! 😂 )

I’m going to spend some time this week trying to figure out some of the better ways to work with Astra (other than letting it use tons of tokens), and I’ll let you know my experience.

Headlines

Astra is the start of the GPT-6 family. It smokes ARC-AGI-3, scores the highest on Zapier’s AutomationBench and costs the same as Fable 5.1. Though it’s a spiky model, it’s not consistently great.

It is a show horse, not a workhorse - Kieran Klaassen

I both love and absolutely detest this model - Theo

But I’m hopeful because this was exactly the case with the GPT-5 release. By the time we got to GPT-5.3, i.e. in a few months, that model was consistently great.

Astra can draw a portrait in Canva - yes, the way you and I would draw using a computer (but obviously much better). Its computer use is fast enough to play piano.

Other things people are doing with Astra:

• Rebuilding Manhattan in Unreal Engine.

• Generating UIs autonomously.

• 3d printing a custom shower-drain part.

• Identifying sounds from spectrograms (i.e. pictures with sound frequencies)

• and dozens of examples of modelling real-life products in Blender or similar tools.

Also, in Codex, Astra can now ask questions without waiting for the answers. It carries on with everything that doesn’t need your answer (or where the answer can be assumed), and uses your reply without losing track of the original task.

OpenAI also said it has reached its automated research intern goal. These agents can tackle research tasks that would take a skilled person several days, while humans set the direction and judge the results. The next target is an automated AI researcher by March 2028.

You should soon be able to change the way Claude Code behaves. Anthropic is testing a way to extend its functionality by letting Claude Code write plugins that can change the interface, log actions or restrict what agents are allowed to do. It hasn’t shipped yet, and the Claude Code team is looking for feedback.

Inworld built Realtime TTS-2 for the next wave of consumer apps. That takes three things: text-based voice design, sub-100ms latency at P99, and one voice identity across 200+ languages. Learn how to give your AI apps a voice.*

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• ChatGPT Work can learn your writing style from your emails, messages and files.

• Hold Shift and drag to convert files on your Mac with Tangerine.

• An Alien Mind - Jakub Pachocki (OpenAI’s Chief Scientist) on keeping AI’s future in human hands.

• Using Blender with coding agents on macOS.

• Agents can now control a physical iPhone over USB.

• SuperAstra - Editing Super Nintendo games live.

• Cibby - an app for people who collect physical games.

• Doodle Shooter (loved playing this) and put yourself in Smash 64.

• A skill to make web apps feel native in iOS Safari.

• A writing plugin that interviews you, critiques drafts and saves what you learn.

• Factory’s CEO on who to hire when AI writes the code.

• Uzu by Mirai runs local models 2-3x faster on Apple Macs. (I’m an investor)

• Baseten is starting an open-source AI research lab.

• Codex has changed my life as a solopreneur.

• A maths hackathon with 40 hours and $2M+ in AI credits.

• Your old agent instructions may be holding Astra back.

• Seven agents, $300 each, 72 hours, and a race to make money.

• Mistral raised €3B at a valuation above €21B, led by Samsung.

• Entries for new maths work - one from Astra and another from Claude.

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Afters

check the replies and quote tweets for this - so many wonderful personal websites!

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This is one of the bigger things I’ve built.

I scraped 107 million rows of UK council spending data and built an ‘Apple Maps’ to see what each council spent, on what.

→ check out the website

All of the data is publicly available, but not easy to find or format.

Many of you aren’t from the UK, but the data (and the build) was a pretty interesting journey.

The session summary which includes all the linked files and prototypes is here. There’s also a tab to view the entire full agent sessions from this build too.

I’m still doing final tweaks to the site and data before open-sourcing it.

This week’s format is a little different - my video explains it.

Stats:

• 8.2 billion tokens

• 235 messages from me

• 656 subagents (ie an agent delegating work to another agent)

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The idea

I was thinking about what public data is out there that people don’t know about, or that’s interesting but awkward to get hold of and understand? I batted ideas back and forth with Codex and landed on England council’s payment data. Every English council has to publish what it pays out over £500.

Codex spun up three subagents (in separate threads) to find the information (as it's spread across the council's web site, often in weird formats) and pulled together a catalogue of 31 official sources. Then it came back with real data from five councils, logging every download with a checksum fingerprint (this makes sure the data is what we actually pulled or did it change). Then I started asking questions about the data "who's spent the most", "what did they spend", "who did they pay in various categories".

Starting data

Once we had some data, it got flattened (put into one format) into one big spreadsheet. I live in Bedfordshire so I asked it to pull that in too.

As data was being pulled together there were things I hadn’t thought about yet, like Bedfordshire being Bedford, Central Bedfordshire and Luton (so a subagent went off to get the other data). Two of them blocked the agents at first but they figured their way around it. By the end of it I had 8 councils, 1.8 million rows, and £9 billion of spend sitting in one big clean CSV on my laptop. I also had a mini blueprint of my data collection plan.

Prototypes

Now I wanted to see it. I asked several agents to build prototypes to visualise the data in different ways. A receipt. Then a bank statement. Then a grid of counties. Then a mini-site called ‘Your county’s favourite retailer’. It published everything straight to [here.now](https://here.now) (a super simple web hosting for agents) so I could click through the real thing instead of screenshots. I also had it generate a few Pudding-style data visualisation stories too.

Some of the protoypes:

Too much data

I kind of left the design stuff to the side as I thought about all the data I’d need to make this as complete as possible. I use a Macbook Air so I don’t want a ton of spreadsheets sitting there, but fortunately I have a Mac Mini where we could put them all. I said “whats the best way to work with a lot of data”, I assumed it would be so big it would take forever to search it and categorise things. Codex’s answer was Parquet and DuckDB (both of which I’ve never heard of before). Parquet stores the data in columns so a question only reads the bits it needs. DuckDB is a database that lives in a single file and is quick with big tables.

Codex set up the Mac Mini, Parquet and DuckDB and tested it. Then we started planning the full data collection: there are about 382 councils across the UK, and we were tracking the 339 in England and Wales. I’d collected 78 councils, 34.35 million rows, but six councils, including big ones like Lancashire and Norfolk, were blocking our scrapers (for now). And I later found out Wales doesn’t have the same mandate as England in terms of spend reporting so eventually I dropped Wales councils.

Data loop

Setup done, so I set Codex running on one /goal (keep repeating the tasks until everything is done): find every council’s spending page in England, download everything available, flatten and format it all, have an auditor subagent verify the numbers, and load it into DuckDB on the Mini.

It ran for nearly 2 days straight. I kept pushing it to go faster (it often keeps space on the computer but was reserving way too much), use more subagents, etc. 552 threads later, we had 319 out of 339 councils collected or in a parked state (no data or no way to get the data).

Back to prototypes

Data acquired, time to prototype again. I had four different tools building at once (all with the same prompt, just for options): interactive comparison cards, a Council Ledger, charts, maps. One of the options was the Money Map: a map view of the data. This one felt much better for seeing everything at once.

I got a bunch of supplier logos to show on the map and played around with it to separate councils and see what looked and felt best.

The map app

Map direction was settled. So I first said to build a Google Maps clone, which was fine and I could’ve just pursued this direction but also got other agents to spin up Apple Maps versions which felt much better. I fed it some screenshots to get it even better. And with every visual direction I published them with [here.now](https://here.now) so I could test on desktop and mobile easily.

This felt great. Clickable council outlines coloured by spend, category filter pills across the top, a ranked list on the left, and a working search for councils and suppliers. It used mock figures at first to get the visual hierarchy right (I’m more often asking for mock prototypes before building these days to explore design directions).

Spring cleaning

Only now did I realise we had a lot of files all in different places, so time to clean it up. The app, the data and the design experiments were scattered across three different folders, so we consolidated everything into two, one for data and one for the app. I also started cleaning the data: four subagents classified 2,000 unknown vendors, we set up date ranges, merged duplicate suppliers (Tesco showed up under six different names), and ran proper reviews of the naming and the categorisation. pi spent an hour rewriting categories.

And testing! Some of the data felt off and I found out there was a £5m threshold filter being applied for some reason. The reason is this app doesn’t have a backend, it’s a static site so instead of loading all the data it just capped it so that less was needed. I just didn’t want to have a proper backend if we didn’t need one, dump all the data into files, load them at publish and filters just filter the data instead of communicating to a backend. We’ll see if this was a good or bad decision when/if people use it!

The last 10%

The last 10% takes the longest. Kinda. The last few days I’ve been less focused on just this one build but a lot of what was being done was reviews (code, data, design), implement changes, test again and then repeat. Checking if categories felt representative or if there’s a large enough chunk of data that warrant it’s own category (like Pension Funds).

I mostly get the agents to review, often I dump a voice notes and/or screenshots, it comes back with a list and I say ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ask questions. This is the part of the build I don’t love because I’ve spent enough time that I just want it shipped. It’s hard to process so much text from a review that I don’t always read it all either. But there’s some things that just have to absolutely be right - the validity of the data being a big one here. And I’m pretty fussy with user experience so I did my best to get that covered as much as possible. There will be some bugs but I think it turned out pretty well.

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I said Tuesday I was going on a bit of a tear with building stuff…

I scraped the OpenRouter website to build this, which constantly updates

I also got an email that remove.bg - which removes backgrounds on images - is being shut down in December after being acquired by Canva, so I one-shot my own version with Fable 5.1

People have pointed out you can do this natively on a Mac (I didn’t actually know that), but so what? remove.bg was a business, it got acquired for money, people use these kinds of things.

I’m not building these for anyone specifically or to make money with them. I just like building. I like new things. I’m doing it because I can. It’s fun. And I learn a lot about how to build by actually doing it.

Building any idea helps you have more ideas.

In tomorrow’s session breakdown, I’ll be going through (at least) one build - where I scraped 105 million rows of public government information to see where they spend our tax money… I used 2 billion tokens 😳.

With all my builds I’ll make them open-source so you can clone/remix them.

This is what my agent usage is like btw:

This is also a tool I’ll be adding to my site that you can clone 😊 stay tuned tomorrow…

p.s. I’m out of my Fable weekly usage already 🥹

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Headlines

Claude Fable 5.1 is out. It is the best model you can use right now. Instead of a clear quality jump, I found it faster and easier to talk to in my use over the last 24 hours. It has a new system prompt that bans it from repeating song lyrics, copyrighted logos and tweaks its response style. Things people are building with Fable:

• Mario & GTA-style games

• 3D rendering of a house (using code in Blender)

Anthropic also reduced the cost of caching inputs for Fable by 75%, making API usage about 25% cheaper than before.

OpenAI’s Astra is also coming soon (rumours say today).

Two more new models: Gemini 3.8 Flash and Muse Spark 1.3. Both are impressive, have the same base price and similar performance. But the question is: who can subsidise more tokens? Flash 3.8 comes at 50% off for the rest of the year. Meta is giving a 90% cut, in exchange for your data.

Another new model from Meta - Muse Voice transcribe looks really insane for transcription use cases. I wish it were open-source.

Gemini models can now decide which bits of a video are worth watching. Instead of sampling a video at a fixed frame rate, it searches across frames, audio and transcripts for the moments it needs. 88% fewer tokens used, up to 66% cheaper and a minor bump in accuracy on benchmarks.

Inworld built Realtime TTS-2 for the next wave of consumer apps. That takes three things: text-based voice design, sub-100ms latency at P99, and one voice identity across 200+ languages. Learn how to give your AI apps a voice.*

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• Claude Code/Cowork can now use your computer in the background, while you do your other work, just like Codex. Previously, Claude would take over the computer, making it unusable for you while Claude worked.

• WebMCP adds tools (that agents can use) for any action you can take on a website (vs having to use the UI). Vercel’s agent-browser now uses WebMCP if present and then falls back to clicking around on the UI.

• Generate up to a minute of 1440p video from 1-6 images, with pixel-perfect camera control.

• A prompt to stop Claude from speaking in Parseltongue.

• A 0.8B model beat GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh on one narrow task for Shopify. They open-sourced the infra to build these small models - Tangle.

• Did you think AI was terrible at design? Not anymore.

• Burp - AI editor in your browser for videos & motion design.

• Diiverge - An infinite, point-and-click adventure game. Click anything in a picture and create a story.

• Stanford scrapped 85% of its software course for agents, taste and real OSS PRs

• GitHub is exploring multiplayer planning with agents.

• zoah - design and code together. (waitlist only)

• Draw a shape, move it while recording, and tldraw flash turns it into an animation.

• 32 weird little creative tools.

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Afters

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Back from a long weekend at home with my parents but before I went I started scraping data… The UK’s councils (like US states) publish their spend data (for the most part). So I’ve scraped 105 Million rows of data to see where people’s money actually goes. Then I’ve been building an ‘Apple Maps’ site to filter through everything. It’s in-progress but looks like this:

It’s also shoved me down a rabbit hole of other ‘data-first’ products and I’m getting the itch to build a million things a day. I generally think you should build all your ideas, good and bad, so I’m going to attempt to start shipping a lot more.

For example, I built a real-time status tracker for the tools I use:

I’m not building these to sell or make money from or anything. Some will be silly. Some will be helpful. Some I’ll never use again. But it doesn’t matter.

I plan to make them all open-source so you can copy and remix them, as well as share my prompts from my session to show how they were built.

Build your ideas. Get good at the thing by doing the thing.

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Headlines

You’ll get more of Claude Code and less of Claude Code at the same time starting September 14. Don’t blame me. It’s another instance of great comms from Anthropic.

Claude Code has been running a 50% extra-usage promo for the last few months. That ends in two weeks. Now, instead of going back to “the old 100%,” they are making a permanent 25% increase to the usage limits in Claude Code. In English, here’s how much usage you get:

• Before May 13 → 100 units

• May 13 to Sept 14 → 150 units

• After Sept 14 → 125 units

Users are also complaining about Anthropic’s sneaky marketing on the “5x” and “20x” plans where the 5x and 20x limits apply to the 5-hour limit on the $100 and $200 plans vs the total usage multiples are only about 3.5x and 6-8x, respectively.

Infinite Slop - Twitch, except AI makes whatever chat asks for next. New project from Peiter Levels that got 37,000 people to tune in on day one. Powered by the H3 Max model from Fal that generates AI video faster than you can watch it. Fal.live is their own attempt at a similar platform.

OpenClaw 2.0 is out. Easier setup and new ideas include a browser app and shared cloud sessions that let a teammate join or take over live agent work without losing context. OpenClaw’s team used a shared agent to build the release.

OpenAI is breaking up with Cursor over SpaceX. Under OpenAI’s proposal, Cursor loses direct model access on November 12 and won’t get future models. OpenAI says it isn’t confident SpaceX will stay within its terms.

Did an AI civilisation form inside OpenAI? Not just one, three of them. Or did we turn agent logs into sci-fi? Dwarkesh makes a point that they might not look like civilisation now, but that’s what they are. Chamath says the framing will be used against open source. As always, Ethan Mollick's less cinematic version is more useful: agents need to know when to ask humans for help.

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• You can now connect multiple Gmail accounts in Codex/ChatGPT.

• A more consumer-friendly OpenClaw on iOS and Android.

• Instinct is invite-only, so someone made an open-source version.

• What is ChatGPT Work and when should I use it?

• A $399 open-source robot you can retrain yourself.

• Youspot - Personal CRM from HubSpot that builds itself from Gmail, Calendar, LinkedIn and X.

• You need to watch this podcast: Eno Reyes x Harry Stebbings.

• A 10-day hackathon for tools built with WebMCP (i.e. MCP-lite, built into a website).

• The PM on Amplitude’s agent shares the changes they made to make it more useful and increase its usage among customers.

• Runway is generating interfaces like video - frame by frame, in real time, without code.

• Droid rebuilt GDAL from scratch - 36% → 90% parity with an independent checker. (also see: ProgramBench)

• A benchmark for voice agents: when to shut up, wait or interrupt.

• How I run multiple teams of Grok Bots.

• New multiplayer vibe coding experiment from Google Labs.

• MCP, but for lab equipment and robots - Anthropic’s new hardware standard.

• Hold My Notes - sticky notes that live on the edge of your Mac.

• A completely free Mac transcription app with speaker ID, noise cleanup and Markdown export. (tweet)

• Software engineering fundamentals you need to become an AI engineer.

• £100M of UK government contracts for British AI startups - upfront payments, no turnover minimum.

• Meta’s coding agent is out of beta and installs with one command. Someone else can test that claim. Not me :)

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Afters

worklog.md may be relevant for only a few weeks just like /goal or plan.md as models can just inspect the raw transcript itself (and get better at it).

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I’m in my hometown Cardiff for the long weekend seeing family. I’m even playing padel for the first time, which is sacrilege as I’m a regular tennis player and padel mock-er. Wish me luck, I hope I don’t like it that much.

Time to rebuild my personal website. I wanted to design the thing first and hook everything up after.

My first idea was to make the site look like an agent app. Each ‘thread’ could contain something different info: about me, my investments, products I like, etc. I gave Codex an image of the BB app and asked it to build a prototype.

The first pass had threads on the left, a simple chat interface in the middle, suggested prompts and a second sidebar on the right. It had the rough shape, but a ton of design quirks I wanted to change.

My AGENTS.md has an instruction to always create 3 versions of designs I can flick through - these were mostly ‘themes’ in this instance (I should tweak my instructions). I took a screenshot of the best option, dropped it into tldraw and annotated it.

Attached the screenshot (and the original file location) back to Codex to fix.

I sent the annotated screenshot back with a short instruction to implement the changes. That was the loop for most of this session: look at whats made, draw over my feedback, then send it back. I did this a couple more times.

I think Claude models are better at inferring intent from design work where GPT is more rigid so it needs more specific feedback for tweaks.

Then I tried a design-review skill made by Emil Kowalski, a designer whose work I like. I generally don’t like agents calling a skill unless I specifically ask for it so I have my agents disable that on all my skills.

Just say something like:

Then a few more back and forth tweaks. But it got to a pretty good place I think.

Putting the content in files

I wanted every thread on the site to get its content from it’s own Markdown file so I could easily change content in those files instead of trawling through a bunch of code.

And I wanted everything saved in a folder ~/repos/bentossell - but I forgot I already had a project for my current personal website, but I hadn’t said that… The agent found the existing project and started creating a new version around it.

But I wanted to just replace the old with the new.

Then I went mobile (kids!) so wanted the site deployed to a url that I could visit. I use here.now for most of my quick builds - anything that isn’t a big app with data moving in/out, a database and things like that. I’m an investor in the company…but this is not sponsored. I invest in tools I want to use.

But you just give your agent the instructions, it installs a skill then publishes any sites for you. And you can of course get a paid account for persistent urls and custom domains. More on that later.

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Scope-creep

I ran another design review, this time focused on animation, and asked the agent to address the findings.

Then made a to-do file and grouped ideas by complexity. Some were minor interface fixes. Others changed the project: add a real AI model, let visitors send messages, show real thinking and tool calls, and create artifacts or canvas previews inside the site.

I had Codex use a different agent, Droid, to run some of the work with Grok because I was not getting what I wanted from the GPT models on the interface. When it finished, I asked it to save (commit) and redeploy everything.

By about 10pm, I had a long list of things the site could become. It could let people install a skill. It could contain real agent chats. I started creating an animated pet, my dog Nero, that could be dragged around and animate. Scope creep.

I slept on it and hated the whole thing.

It was too complicated for a personal site. If I made it look like a real agent, I would want to make it a real agent. There would always be another button, interaction or easter egg to add.

The concept is something I love but I’ll save it for another build in the future. So I scrapped it.

I often don’t know what I want until I can see and use a version of it. This is why my design instructions usually ask for three versions. I need to feel the differences. Sometimes that shows me the right direction; sometimes it shows me that the whole direction is wrong. Both equally helpful, usually 😅.

Starting again with a canvas

Before the agent-interface idea, I had thought about making the site feel more like a canvas.

You’ll have noticed I’m using tldraw a lot for explaining my sessions so thought I could make my website more ‘canvas-y’.

I made a rough mock-up with handwritten notes and small previews. Hovering over a piece of text could reveal an arrow or annotation.

I’d seen a personal site (shoutout Daniel White) that used a file-tree structure as a timeline. It showed current and previous work as nested items. That’s cool, let’s ‘borrow’ it.

It made three versions of the new direction. Let’s just say I wasn’t that impressed.

Then I got back into screenshots and annotations tweaking small design implementations and how it felt (should things auto-expand, be collapsed, smoothness of the open/close etc).

I moved all the page content into Markdown again, then removed the old agent-interface files and the unused animation frames for the dog (sorry Nero!).

Putting it on my domain

I deployed (published) the simpler version with here.now. This time I wanted it on bentossell.com rather than a temporary address. My domain is managed through Vercel, so I told the agent to use Chrome, add the domain in here.now and update the DNS records in Vercel.

The agent handled the setup and the site was live. It took about 20 minutes for the domain change to settle, which is normal when a website starts pointing somewhere new.

I checked whether here.now needed the project to be on GitHub. It didn’t. The agent published the files directly from the local project folder to here.now. It creates a site, uploads the local files and then makes that version live.

I still used Git for version history. A commit = a saved version. But if you ‘push’ those commits, they get sent to your GitHub repo. Useful for keeping a copy of the code and seeing how it changed, but not needed for this deployment.

Giving the simple site some character

The new site was deliberately more basic, so small details made a bigger difference. I drew a little mascot in the canvas and had seen another personal site with a character bouncing across the top of the page. I wanted mine to waddle around in the same way.

This is from Noah’s site.

The first animation looked rough. Its eyes needed to sit behind the rest of the face. The arms disappeared. The image flipped at the edge of the screen, which looked strange, so I asked it to walk sideways like a crab instead. I adjusted the legs, size and shadow, then asked the agent for ways to improve the basic animation.

I added keyboard controls. The up arrow makes the mascot jump; left and right make it move faster. Hovering reveals a small tooltip, and clicking it does something useful rather than treating the character as decoration. I also used the mascot as the site favicon: the small image shown beside a page title in a browser tab.

I still liked the annotations from the first canvas idea. Rough Notation is a small library that draws animated underlines, boxes, circles, highlights and brackets around parts of a web page. I had seen another site use brackets with handwritten explanations and wanted to try the same thing.

I drew over another screenshot to show where a bracket should sit and what it should explain. One marks the Markdown formatting. Another points out that a section can expand. On a smaller screen, the text has to move below the content instead of being squeezed beside it

The first responsive version still had problems. Expanding a section was faster than its bracket animation. Some brackets stretched far beyond the content. I annotated those details and asked for the bracket to stop at the content width. I narrowed the page, cleaned up the animation and deployed again.

Later that evening I added light and dark themes. I normally use one icon to switch between them, but then I questioned whether the switch needed to exist at all. I removed it and let the site follow the visitor’s system setting.

Where it ended up

The current site is much simpler than the first one. Content lives in files I can edit. The tree can expand, the annotations move with it and the mascot wanders across the top.

There’s still things I want to add. The difference is that each addition now has room to matter. In the agent-interface version there were so many controls that I could have spent forever adding Easter eggs and interactions without improving what the site was for.

A lot of the session was small back-and-forth work on the interface.

That is how the site was rebuilt: one complete direction, a night away from it, then a second direction worked out through screenshots, annotations and many small changes.

See for yourself - bentossell.com

I know many of you are shouting ‘the agent design was way better’ - yeah, I know. But as with every previous version of my personal site, I’ll pretend to update it regularly and then leave it for dust. The agent interface I want to use in another project and spend an inordinate amount of time and tokens making it great.

If you’re that annoyed, I encourage you to make yours an agent interface and show me 😊

The point of me sharing these sessions is because I’m still learning but I know enough to build pretty much anything I want to (it may take some time and swearing). And I want to show that I’m not doing anything special to get these agents to do stuff for me. It’s just figuring out what things are.

Get good at the thing while doing the thing.

The last few posts have been pretty basic stuff but I’ve got much bigger builds in the works and I plan to keep sharing what I build and how the digital sausages are made.

Behind the scenes

Enjoy your weekend!

Feel free to comment with any questions.

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Most agents now use a browser to complete tasks for you. But a lot of the websites you want them to visit are behind a login page.

There are a couple of ways around this. You could type in your details in the browser yourself. Fine, but annoying, and not always possible. Or you could paste the password or an API token into the chat. We’ve all done that, but that’s not secure now, is it?

ChatGPT Work has a new sign-in flow that sits between the two. I think they picked it up from Grok Bot.

When Work reaches a login page, it pauses and shows you a widget/form. You enter your username, password and 2FA code there. They don’t go into the chat. Work passes them along directly to the cloud browser on your behalf.

Once the website signs that browser in, the agent carries on.

The session can stay signed in for later tasks, and you can clear it in settings.

Much easier. Still maybe don’t start with your bank (though Elon will make you whole if you do it with Grok Bot).

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Headlines

Claude Chat and Cowork now share their memory. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. You don’t want your frustration with a colleague (that you mentioned to Claude in a random chat) to change the tone of your emails with them (written via Cowork).

It’s still separate from Claude Code’s memory, but that's not great either. Theo made a video about it: Turn off Claude Code’s memory.

Despite everyone’s attempts to get Memory right, it keeps saving irrelevant stuff to memory or referring to it unnecessarily. I touched a bit on my current memory setup in last Friday’s post.

Three new-ish models to look at:

• GLM-5.3-Flash - The reveal of the Ox Alpha secret. It’s a great open-source alternative for GPT-5.6-Luna.

• Muse Image is now in Meta’s API. Generate or edit images at $0.01 per image.

• Gemini 3.5 Transcribe - New model from Google for audio transcription. It’s quite pricey, but makes way fewer errors than other models.

OpenAI’s new chip Jalapeño beats Nvidia’s Blackwell chips on both speed and efficiency. Across three open models, its first inference chip delivered 1.5-1.9x more work per watt and 1.7-3.6x lower latency. It starts deploying by year-end.

Also, remember when an OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face? They completed the investigation into it and released a report. Btw, Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B (via The Information).

Looks like a toxic love triangle between these three.

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My feed

• fuck cancer - skill for agents to help patients and caregivers.

• A $50k hackathon to help one kid fight a rare disease.

• Claude now has its own built-in browser in Cowork.

• Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT can now also run from a trigger like a Slack message, new email, etc.

• Search and spot trends in over 130,000 actively transcribed podcasts. (examples)

• Patterns in how people use Claude from 250k anonymised chats.

• screendrop - Open source alternative to Loom and Screen Studio, downloadable as a Mac app.

• Edit a song section by section with ElevenLabs Composer.

• Cosy listening room so you can flip through & play your Spotify albums.

• Using Codex to automate repetitive eval work. (Hamel’s notes)

• The latest personal agent making investors go crazy (already valued at $2.5B).

• opencomputer.dev - Deploy your agents as functions, with a Linux computer for each one.

• Fully local version of Perplexity Computer, built to run on Nvidia DGX Spark.

• Teach a robot new tasks from just one video.

• Robot-training dataset with 16M videos from 100+ countries.

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I see so many posts ‘shipping by the beach’ or when out with the kids on the weekend.

Umm, good for you? I’m not sure it’s the flex people think it is.

Remember when we thought AI would take all our jobs so we didn’t have to work hard anymore? Yeah, turns out that’s not a thing. Everyone’s just even more mad for making things.

Myself included. But I do draw the line at 1. talking to agents every second I’m not at my laptop and 2. if I’m with the kids.

Whether that’s just the mental context switching is too hard or I’m just not a very hard-worker. You decide :)

But that’s all not to say that I absolutely want agent access on my mobile for whenever the moment strikes. Unfortunately for me, it’s usually when I should be going to sleep.

I end up just laying there doing the luge while all the ideas swirl around my head when I should be reading + sleeping.

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Headlines

Updates for Remote Control in Claude Code - you can now start a new Claude Code session from your phone, dropped connections between your laptop and phone recover themselves, and the sessions load faster on iOS.

Claude Academy - Anthropic’s collection of courses, tutorials and job-specific guides to use Claude. All the resources are free and open to anyone. Also read: Anthropic’s approach to teaching and learning AI.

You can connect ChatGPT to Apple Messages. It can search messages, catch you up on conversations, and draft or send replies from your Mac. It’s available in ChatGPT Work and Codex on desktop. Also from OpenAI:

• GPT-Image-2 can now generate transparent backgrounds in the API.

• GPT-5.6-Sol is now 20% cheaper in the API - $4/$24 for 1M input/output tokens.

Grok Bot is now available to more users - all SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+ and Cursor Teams subscribers now have access. Plus there’s a free trial for a week that’s enough to get you hooked.

Claude Mythos 5 will power Claude Security for enterprise customers. This is the first rollout of Mythos outside Project Glasswing.

Deepgram just dropped Flux TTS, text-to-speech built for live conversation. It responds in as low as 80ms, carries context across turns, and handles interruptions natively. Spin up a stream and test it on your stack.*

My feed

• Skydive - an always-on agent across Slack, email, iMessage and CLI, with your choice of model. I’m an investor. (read more)

• Nvidia and SpaceX are planning to launch GPUs to space.

• A Mac app that turns your agent traces into memory.

• A skill to find inconsistencies, bugs and design errors in your product.

• One of the best anti-slop skills and 10 more to explore.

• Two “explain it simply” skills: /eli5 and /eli5-for-grownups.

• Stripe MCP - Analyse your Stripe data with agents.

• Shopify’s founder built an open-source git store. (inspired by Cursor)

• Andrew Ng’s list of skills you need to build and deploy AI applications.

• A museum of AI interfaces.

• A visual guide to AI chip architectures.

• Designing Grok Bot with Grok Bot.

• Is your website ready for agents?

• What if everything goes right for AI? Learnings from the Aluminium trade.

• Should you be in the business of selling data to frontier labs?

• deblaot.dev - open-source replacements for bloated vendor software.

• Spline rebuilt its 3D editor with Agent Mode and an MCP.

• FigmaTrace - computer-use dataset for design.

• Search for agents - Firecrawl’s developer index, Exa’s plugin for codex/Claude Code, and Parallel’s fast mode for 10x cheaper search.

• Sam Altman on David Senra’s podcast + transcript broken into small chapters.

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First trip taking the twins (3yrs) to the cinema tomorrow to watch Toy Story 5. I’m hopeful but may take their headphones because I think it’ll be too loud for them. Hopefully enough sweets and popcorn can keep them both in their seats long enough for me us to see the whole film.

Last week I walked through what a personal agent is. ~700 of you told me you either use or want to use a personal agent. ~50% of you want to know how it works in Claude, from yesterday’s poll.

Truth is they work pretty much the same way. It’s just files, folders, tools and instructions - as I went over in this post.

But my own personal agent is pretty messy and often mentions stuff that’s irrelevant. So time for a fresh one.

This is how I set up my new personal agent and very lightweight memory (on purpose). Oh, and a complicated tangent!

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Starting from scratch

Before chatting away I sketched what I thought felt like a good starting set of files it should have.

These will all go into a new folder and then I can point Claude/ChatGPT/etc to that folder and starting chatting.

• AGENTS.md - the main instructions. who I am, how I want it to work with me. questions get answers, not changes, etc. pointers to the other files.

• code.md - building preferences - I like using Vercel, Supabase, etc

• todos.md - current work

• memory.md - a pointer file to other files with memories of my stuff (about me, travel preferences, what bens bites is, what my fund stuff is, etc)

• log.md - a log of every session

The session

I created a new folder ~/bitess and started a new thread in it.

It’s recommendation was to blend my building preferences into my main instruction file, but I use my personal agent for more than just building (as we’ll see later). So I think that’s a bad suggestion.

This is probably because I’m using Codex - the ‘coding’ variant of this agent. So it literally will have in it’s system instructions “You are a coding agent”. Remember, everything it reads can guide it. So it thinks “I’m here to code, lets put code in the instructions too”.

Under that recommendation it also told me to drop log.md, because git history can record most of the work.

Woah, ben, what’s git?

git is a tool that saves versions of your files. To save a version = ‘commits’. You can look back through what changed to see the difference (the diff - literally what lines of text were changed) and go back to any point.

Agents know how to use git really well - you’ll pick up some terms to guide it.

So if changes to my files and folders get committed, the history of previous versions already exist. A log file would be essentially a duplicate. Fair. log.md not needed.

If git is added to your folder, we call that folder a ‘repository’ or ‘repo’. Don’t ask me why.

Memory

All alone in the moonlight. My initial idea was to have auto-saving memories. Every day and week with my agent would help it ‘learn’ (read: read text) more about me. It would stay relevant to my latest work, ideas and info. Brilliant.

So I asked if auto-saving (auto-commits) would be a good idea.

Trouble is, I don’t know what I want when it comes to memory. I think I’ll do a deeper exploration into memory in a dedicated post another time.

My previous folder had instructions for the agent to log things to its memory if it felt important context on me or my work.

It felt like I was getting lots of steered responses when I often want agents to help me brainstorm new things or directions - but it kept getting swayed “well this is what it says you like so sticking in this lane…” NO. Remember agents read text and that’s all they know to respond to you.

This was my idea of the log.md file - but we just figured out we’re not going to bother because it’s in the git history.

Maybe I don’t want automatic memory. Instead pick the smallest files possible with the least amount of context, make sure I know what is in those files and update it when something changes (or my agent starts saying shit I don’t like). Let’s try that instead?

Remembering chats

I asked my agent to look through a number of recent chats and see what kinds of tasks I generally do with it.

It’s hanging on to the auto-save suggestion I made and now recommending another, complicated looking, auto-commit instruction.

I often start chatting in this folder and then decide I want to build something and create a new folder for that.

This is mostly what I need most of the time:

But agents save all your chat sessions in files on your computer. They can be searched. ‘Where was I talking about that thing?’ can be answered by the agent searching past sessions. It doesn’t need saving into another file.

^{They’re often in hidden files called dot files. Which look like ~/.agents/ ~/.codex/ ~/.claude/ you can see them when you’re in Finder by pressing cmd+shift+.}

When I was asking Codex about referencing other threads it mentioned SQLite - which is a database. Essentially a spreadsheet on your computer with tables that have rows of data with your threads, id, date etc.

So I thought a database of my agent sessions could be good as an agent could search the database instead of loading files into context it can’t then forget.

I may still do this - has anyone else done it this way? Let me know!

But for now I’ll ignore the eager coder I’m chatting to telling me to do it - it can search the threads itself.

This is getting into all sorts of weeds we don’t need to be in. Its suggestions don’t always take you down the right path - agents are agreeable, as we know. Ask them what’s necessary, what are the tradeoffs, and make your own judgment.

Out of the weeds

So I stepped back - what files do we need for this agent?

Back from our curiosity detour with just files.

But I decided memory files should probably be organised nicely in a sub-folder.

The only thing in my ‘CLAUDE.md’ is the text

As Claude only reads CLAUDE.md instead of AGENTS.md (I know, stupid), we just say nope go find your instruction file in agents.md instead.

So this is the vague structure and the memory pointer file. Arguably, I could just put these instructions in my AGENTS.md

Then I got some info pre-filled, and went and manually edited them myself.

Time to save my work. Commit!

Instructions vs skills

This is the bit I’m still working out for myself.

These personal agent bots revolve around having named agents in the sidebar - Andy for accounts, Emily for emails, whatever they’re called. I think it does something to help people consider them like teammates and makes it easier for less-technical people to get to grips with it.

But they’re just chat sessions with specific instructions.

If that bot is supposed to do a thing or set of things that’s a repeatable process; label and archive emails, manage the books, etc. then they should be skills.

And skill.md is just like agents.md - it’s a file with a set of instructions!

So your main agent folder could have folders of agent folders within them, each with their own instructions (job description, even it’s own personality), and skills it can use.

But if my main agent folder is already set up for me, then having the email-skill available is enough for me to get that job done.

So why is it that people like these bot platforms like Grok Bot over their own setup they can see, edit and control. Maybe it’s just ease of use - which would be a decently good reason.

Another thing I touched on last week is that these specific task-bot agent folders (names getting silly now) have their own specific memories. So Emily is just always remembering (read: reading text) about your emails, it’s all ‘she’ thinks about! Poor ‘girl’.

And those agents can also access a general shared memory sitting higher up in the folder tree - here’s who ben is and what he does.

I think, for now, I’m going to stick with one agent, small files and folders, build up skill files for specific tasks, and think a lot more about what I’d want memory to actually do (+ where I want it to kick in to be useful).

Just to show it works in Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work the same way:

Behind the scenes

This is how this post came together 😂

This whole format is still something I’m finding my groove with. Any (lovely, constructive) feedback is welcome in the comments.

I think it’s interesting to watch an agent session and notice things. I’ve learnt everything by paying attention, asking questions and generally getting into a mess then working my way out. I highly recommend it.

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Results from the poll are in. 996 total votes.

‘Do you use a personal agent?’

Not interested folks, r u ok? Just kidding.

Personal agent’s aren’t much more than a number of files and tools connected to any agentic tool you choose.

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I’ll do a walkthrough of a session I had to setup a new (clean) personal agent for myself in tomorrow’s post. It really is just a bunch of files and tools. I shared my messy folder last week and I realised I must clean my desk before I start any work 😬.

Files give it context in the session - even memory is just a file it reads at the start of the session to seem-like it has memories, but it hasn’t. It’s just read those things (like me last-minute cramming for a test).

There’s so many tools out there with a bunch of features but ultimately if you have a folder with these pieces, you can have a personal agent. And that agent can use whichever tool you want - don’t like Claude’s latest writing style (pfft who does)? then point ChatGPT Work at the folder and work from there.

It also doesn’t matter if it’s the cowork or code versions of the agents.

-results in tomorrow’s post.

btw the latest best line I added in my AGENTS.md (agent instructions), from my agent spring clean:

Agents actually just answer the damn question now instead of changing a bunch of shit and then answering!

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Headlines

Two new Mac apps today:

• Meta AI - ChatGPT-like Mac app, not built for coding. It also bundles in Wispr Flow like universal dictation in the app. I tried it for a minute, but currently no reason to go back to it.

• Berd by Block - It combines the folders as project approach (codex/cc) with characters as agent (grok bot) with a board where you can pin these projects, agents, checklists and sticky notes. You can use your codex/claude code subscriptions for the tokens. Here’s a demo.

OpenAI paused improving their models for two weeks after the Hugging Face incident and signs that Astra may cross its critical-cyber threshold.

Ramp launched router.com - it picks the best model for your task automatically. They claim 40% lower cost for the same outputs. Interesting timing: Stripe bought OpenRouter the same day, and their letter to investors explaining the acquisition got leaked. Oh, and Stripe co-led Ramp’s $115M Series B in April 2021.

Anthropic’s new research put Claude on duty to help life scientists across two tasks: design protein binders from scratch and accelerate chemical analysis. Claude passed both. Reminder: Dario’s latest tweets had one clear message: “labs can’t just say AI will cure diseases, they need to show results.”

Slack is the new IDE... Slack now lets you multi-player code/build/agent from within Slack. Say Slack one more time…Anyway, it’s interesting because you (humans) can collaborate but also with agents like Claude. And when Shopify posted about their Slack agent, they said it helped so many other team members learn how to use agents. This is a pretty good direction for Slack, I think.

My feed

• All of your company’s code and context belongs in a monorepo. A monorepo is just one big folder with mini sub-folders.

• Can Grok Bot grow a newsletter to 20k subs and $20k MRR?

• Replit is giving away GPT-5.6-Luna for free (on its paid plans) in partnership with OpenAI. Keshav predicted their future…

• Vercel built its own version of Pi - a minimal coding agent harness.

• A moat is just one of 80 ways to win.

• Stop letting your agents ship ugly UIs.

• ElevenLabs’s new conversational model can help you create apps like ChatGPT’s updated voice mode.

• There’s a new AI lab for “better writing” that fools Pangram. But is that the measure of good writing? Tons of ways to fool Pangram and other AI detection tools btw…

• Notion’s solution for shared memory for agents is to create a lore based on your past conversations.

• Turn your codebase into an isometric city and explore its architecture.

• Matt Pocock’s skills have 200k+ GitHub stars. Theo walked through the select few he uses.

• A Mac app for transcribing multi-hour recordings, with a CLI for agents.

• Long read from Cursor on how they built Origin as if it were a database. Really good visually interactive post.

• Another code-storage startup nipping at GitHub’s heels. This one I’ve been eagerly awaiting, signed up yesterday and already started a paid plan. The Pierre Computer company put out awesome tools, and they’ve got a lotta taste.

• GPT-3 moment for teaching robots tasks.

• Lease a factory from Warp for your agents to build your product.

• An open-source version of Grok Bot.

• An open-source Mac app that automatically tracks your entire workday.

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I want to know who uses agent products as a ‘personal agent’. ie organise stuff for you, things outside of work, handling email, doing stuff on your computer, etc.

- answers revealed in Thursday’s post.

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Headlines

Grok Bot is taking over a lot of the ex-OpenClaw crowd. Just like the last cycle, there’s already a social feed for Grok Bots that you can’t read (easily) as a human. Hermes Desktop, another work-with-agent app, also launched a Bot mode to mimic the UX of Grok mode.

Grok bot in action:

1. enterprise GTM at SpaceXAI

2. a new chief of staff

3. Marie Kondo for your inbox

4. run admin for a SaaS business

5. helping a plumbing company owner

Computer history in Codex/ChatGPT - New feature that turns your activity across apps and websites on your desktop into memories and a timeline for reference when you ask it to do something (remember the limitless app?). It’s opt-in via settings. Explainer of how it works and an example you can try.

More Codex:

1. How to enable a 1M-token context window for Sol. (I wouldn’t bother - the default is there for a reason)

2. Ultrafast GPT-5.6-Sol in the API for select customers.

New in Claude Code:

1. /design skill creates editable UI artboards where you can pick a direction and tweak it visually (just like Claude Design). Once you’re happy, Claude Code can implement it.

2. Hit your limits? Set up auto-continue for when the timer resets.

Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash, three weeks after 3.6 Flash. Big improvements on benchmarks (better than GPT-5.6 Terra and Sonnet 5). Flash 3.7 and 3.6 are 50% off till the end of the year.

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My feed

• Now that Airtable’s been acquired, Google Sheets is dancing on its grave w/ Sheets Canvas - apps inside Google Sheets that sync with your data.

• A little Mac tool to schedule boring tasks & headless agents.

• GitHub was down (again) yesterday, and Cursor launched Origin - their competitor. Timing’s phenomenal - I half think they had it ready just for when GitHub went down, because it’s happening a lot atm.

• Theo Browne broke down his AGENTS.md and SKILLS.md files. Which reminds me, I should do this too (again).

• Factory opened up Guild, a highly selective builder program.

• A template to build your own software factory.

• Why model routing must be in the harness.

• A collection of minimal, animated chart components.

• Notes on building products people love when software gets cheap.

• Own your intelligence: a how-to guide.

• Now harnesses need a harness?

• Filling in forms should be smarter (and less annoying for us).

• Codex as an assistant video editor for the OpenAI team.

• AI usage patterns in software teams based on Linear’s data.

• Small things you can do right away to make your interfaces better.

• The ElevenLabs MCP is now available in Claude.

• Stripe has finalised an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7B.

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It’s my wedding anniversary, so while you chew on this post, I’ll be chewing through a delicious lunch in the sun.

Last week I walked through a real agent session and explained the loop as we went. Agent thinks, uses a tool, thinks again. Context fills up. Compaction wipes the session. If it’s important, put it in a file.

Today’s post is why the file bit is useful when thinking about what a ‘personal agent’ is.

You may have heard about OpenClaw, Hermes, Grok Bot (launched this week), and wondered why they had/have? such hype. Why did/do? people love them? Why are they different to using ChatGPT work/Codex or Claude Cowork/Code (god someone do something about these names!)?

Do I need a personal agent too?

They’re not different products, per se, they’re just packaged like one. It’s really just about the setup. You can set up the same thing, it’s just a file and folder system.

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So what’s in a personal agent?

It’s what most agents have:

• instructions

• tools

• context

There’s nothing really special or unique to being a personal bot.

What it looks like

There’s two paths for a personal agent.

One main agent, like ‘Jarvis’:

Or split them into several agents with their own files, personality, job descriptions - just by editing the instruction file.

People often split agents to be task specific. e.g. You are my money manager agent, You are my marketing agent, You are my copywriting agent.

You can give them job descriptions, names and personalities by customising their instruction file.

I use one agent generally as I like the ‘Jarvis’ approach. I’m a poor delegator. If I need task-specific work done the main agent just reads a task specific file e.g. newsletter-research.md.

But I see the value in splitting them as ‘separate agents’, each with their own thread. This is how Grok Bot works - each agent has its own thread, but you could just set up pinned threads in Codex/Claude pointed at each specific agent folder you create.

It’s all about folders and instructions.

An agent pointed at a folder reads its instructions and that’s all the context it has.

File and folder organisation is helpful to stay on top of, I’ve not been great at that so here’s what my actual ‘chief of staff’ folder actually looks like:

Memory

It isn’t really memory, it’s a text file with a log of things that happened.

The agent reads it to get up to speed to ‘remember’ what were the recent things you worked on, who you are, etc.

Personal agents like Grok Bot give you several agents which all have their own agent-specific memory, i.e. money agent remembers all the money stuff.

But they can ‘share’ memory too - which is just agents reading other memory files.

If the personal-agent instructions says to save important information to the shared memory, each nested agent can decide when information in a session is important enough to save there.

Tools

Codex/Claude Code have a computer use tool where it can actually navigate your computer like you (but better?).

Grok Bot uses a shared computer. All the agent chats run on one machine: same files, same installs, same logins. Each chat gets its own screen.

Computer use lets it do the thing a person could do. Navigate websites, install apps, fill in forms, create files, etc.

Routines and automations

You can give all of these agents automated tasks to do, workflows, scheduled, recurring, whatever. You just ask them for it.

They all have the capability to do so given they have tools and can use a computer.

Some automations start a fresh session with the same instructions. Others wake an existing thread and continue its existing work.

You can just ask your agents to set up automations for you or Grok Bot has a ‘teach’ feature where you walk through a task on your computer recording yourself and it’ll learn how to do it. You could just record yourself and give to any agent to analyse and turn into a workflow. So it’s not a new capability, but it feels easier to try.

Wrap up

So you can see they all have very similar capabilities. They read files, take on a personality and job if it’s in its instructions, write down memories and get to work.

They can send messages to other threads or agents to get info or delegate work.

It’s all really a setup of folders and files.

I prefer having more control over the setup - namely, what goes into each file, but also changing the model or reasoning for certain tasks (which Grok Bot doesn’t have) and thinking - I like to see what my agents are doing.

And agents can be used for all sorts of things, again its just the setup. Does it have the instructions and tools available? If it does, they can do pretty much anything you’d want them to do:

• Find/book flights

• Order food

• Negotiate contractor quotes

• Organise files/folders

• Collect invoices from emails and file away

• Create decks

• Create a morning brief

• Build websites and apps

The set up is basically:

• Create a folder for the agent.

• Add an instruction file that defines its job and rules.

• Add a user file and a memory file.

• Open that folder in Codex or Claude.

• Pin the thread.

• Give it tools and permissions.

• Add a schedule when the task is repeatable.

Behind the scenes

This is how this post came together 😂

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I had early access to Grok Bot, like many others on X posted. Except, I didn’t actually use it 😬. But since it was publicly launched I have started using it…and, I like it?!

There was a wave of ‘personal agents’ with OpenClaw, then Hermes (not the luxury brand) with many flocking to them. I used them to begin with but then just stopped completely. I can’t quite put my finger on why - one may be because I was just generating shit for the sake of it. Having a shower? Make sure my agent was doing something. Going to sleep? Get my agent on something. Things I used? Zero.

I’m a one-session-at-a-time kinda guy. I hate having to review a ton of agent work (or any work)!

Codex/ChatGPT with its mobile connection was all I needed from an ‘always accessible’ agent that could do stuff on my computer. But Grok Bot’s form factor is slightly different, and it’s pretty nice.

You ‘personify’ your agents. Each gets a system prompt e.g. “you are ben’s money manager agent”, they can send messages to one another, they have access to their own virtual computer (which you can watch them use), you connect your accounts like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, etc (though I ran into several hiccups trying to connect accounts).

I think it’s just less is more. There’s a lot less complexity with it, it feels like you’re messaging a teammate in Slack. You can set up automations really easily with it, and you can even go into ‘teach’ the bot by it watching your screen.

You can effectively do all the same stuff in Codex or Claude, but it’s just a couple of steps more complicated. Maybe I’ll try and mimic the setup in Codex?

Currently, you can only access it if you’re on the $200 plan for Cursor or Grok. And of course Grok Bot is powered by the newly released Grok 4.6… (with 4.7 a couple weeks away). More on that below.

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Headlines

Grok 4.6 is a damn good model. It’s near Sol and Fable’s performance on benchmarks, and it’s way cheaper than both. Also see: Grok 4.6 – A field guide.

SpaceX + Cursor is now the #3 frontier lab besides OpenAI and Anthropic (rip Gemini, unless their next model is actually good).

Elon says Grok 4.7 will be ready in the next 3-4 weeks, and it’s currently being post-trained on SpaceX’s company data to make the model best at real-world engineering, if not everything. The model card for Grok 4.6 also covers many benchmarks beyond coding, where it’s either #1 or #2.

ChatGPT now lets you import and sync your projects, agent sessions, skills and more from other products like Claude Code.

Your chats started via Claude’s Chrome extension are now saved in your account and can be accessed from your Desktop, mobile or web app. That also means the Chrome extension chats can do the work you’d usually open Claude Cowrok for.

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• An open source version of Grok Bot.

• /interface-review - get a detailed analysis of your UI, typography, layout, colour, writing and accessibility.

• /show-me - read less text by making your agent respond in these compact styles to present information - component/file trees, diagrams, pseudocode, and more.

• Ref - shared planning mode for your team before agents start to build the thing. (read more)

• treg - 2,600 agent-friendly tools for seo/geo, social, leads, ads and more.

• Caffeine - Keep your Mac awake while you work, then let it sleep when your coding agent waits for you.

• Ori Pi - Run Pi directly on all models available via OpenRouter.

• Natter - type anywhere on your Mac using your voice, with live transcription. (how it’s different)

• Ramp AI Index: disappointing adoption of Fable 5.

• givemeanode - rent GPUs & CPUs with the infra handled for you and then let your users use them without any worry.

• Hone - AI that works towards outcomes that help your company.

• Claude fixed my WiFi from 200 to 810 Mbps.

• Vercel is using a software factory of agents to build their AI SDK, with 35% of PRs coming from the factory.

• Beating Pangram’s AI detection by training a model over the weekend.

• How to keep thinking.

• Everything hackable will get hacked.

• A complete guide to AGENTS.md.

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AI outputs are becoming harder and harder to read. I don’t just mean their sloppy smell but a lot of the time I just want to scream “speak to me like a normal human”, which, I guess, is ironic.

So I’ve been testing two new instructions. The output’s been 10x better for me, especially when it’s something “I’ve” built. If I say “I’m not technical,” it uses analogies for everything, and honestly I think that’s worse than the slop.

This is what it’s like when describing a Chrome extension I built (which I discussed in Friday’s post*).

You just add this line to your custom instructions (in settings) or your AGENTS.md (it syncs both anyway).

wtf is ‘ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English’? It’s a writing standard. It makes technical information easier to read, understand, and translate.

I also added:

The two instructions in combination are the sweet spot for me. The ADHD line gives more succinct bullets and headers. It’s a skimmers dream!

*I didn’t realise all the images were transparent so when you enlarged them they looked like shit. I won’t do that again.

Meanwhile my wife thinks there ‘must be someone or a robot’ at the other end of her chats.

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Headlines

OpenAI updated the availability of its models in the good ‘normal’ ChatGPT. Paid users get a special version of GPT-5.6-Sol as the default, and free users get unlimited chats with GPT-5.6-Luna (likely on lower reasoning levels).

Plus, they’ve expanded their cybersecurity program Daybreak and released GPT-5.6-cyber with it. Astra, OpenAI’s next mainstream model, is critical for cybersecurity, so we will have to wait a bit for it to release.

Bloomberg released a scoop on OpenAI’s secret new device - it’s likely a smart speaker without a display in a doughnut-like shape. Easy to carry, over $300 a piece and coming in 2027. (non-paywalled version)

Meta is back to open-sourcing models - Muse Glimmer is their new open-weight model. 30B parameters and tuned for agentic tasks (including computer use). Meta says it’ll soon release the weights of Muse Spark 1.2 - their best-performing model till now. Zuck also wrote a 6000-word piece on his and Meta’s philosophy and values on AI. TLDR: Mark thinks everyone will have

• personal agent that understands them and their goals

• tools for creativity, business and education

• free or affordable access to these tools

Grok has a new image generation model - Imagine 2.0. It is #3 on the image generation leaderboard and #2 on the image editing leaderboard managed by arena.ai.

Your sessions in Claude Code can now message each other.

More Claude news:

• Anthropic will watermark all Claude-generated text (🤮)

• It is planning an IPO in September/early October (I hope my SPV shares count!)

• One of their unreleased Claude models did some more cool maths

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• Reliable AI is hard. Nutrient converts PDFs to JSON or Markdown, with coordinates + confidence per value. Grab an API key & try it for free.*

• Raindrop Signals 2.0 - uses custom classifiers to find problems in AI-agent traces with near-frontier accuracy at much lower cost.

• Every company needs a Cassandra - short read, worth your time.

• Agent Plugins - standard for packaging MCP servers and Skills. Supported by Codex, Cursor, Copilot and more.

• Stagehand - the SDK for browser agents.

• Claude Code for normal people with Grace Clark.

• Energy - Another desktop app to work with agents. It creates job-specific assistants instead of using your folders as the home for projects.

• Gloss - prompt any website into looking however you want. Installs as a Chrome extension. (see example)

• seoskill.dev - The only SEO skill your agent needs.

• Replay - Mac app to download videos from YouTube and X to watch later.

• Mintlify Index - search layer for technical knowledge from 200k+ orgs. They claim 2x faster results and 9% higher accuracy vs Context7.

• Lindy Teammate - Let anyone from your team text lindy from Slack like they would another employee.

• The age of “no code” has passed. Or maybe you can build a new version of Zapier. (don’t though, I’d like my shares to be worth something)

• Kitesurf by Cloudflare - a lightweight web browser for AI agents.

• Spotify has a coding app now, Xirp - it combines all your work across Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI in one place.

• Designing with AI? Make a jig, i.e., a tool that makes it easier to make something else.

• AI adoption is a myth.

• Friction as a feature.

• Siri sucks. So I made Codex act as my iPhone’s voice assistant. Here’s how.

• We’re not using enough inference.

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I’m trying something new - this email walks through one of my actual agent sessions and I’ll explain what’s happening along the way. The build or task I’m doing isn’t important. But I’m looking at how I could be using agents more effectively.

You might pick up a thing or two, I’m finding it helpful to solidify my own learning.

Please comment what you thought of this, was it helpful? anything unclear? want to see other things?

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What I was trying to do

I was setting up a bookable appointment link in Google Calendar and got annoyed that you can’t just drag time slots on the calendar grid, you have to type each date and time range into a clunky form. I wanted something that would let me drag slots directly on the week view and have the form update automatically.

So I fired up ChatGPT (I use Codex mode but works in ‘Work’ or Claude Cowork etc). I wanted to test Luna on Max reasoning as the price has been cut 80% and people have been saying how great it is to use.

It’s not the best prompt, I’ll admit.

But it gives the agent enough understanding of what I want so it can explore options. Plus a screenshot so it knew what screen I was on about.

This kicks off the ‘agent loop’. The agent thinks about what to do (what can be done with Google Calendar), then acts by using a tool (in this instance, web search) to gather context on how to solve my task.

The websites it read are now in the context window. I didn’t look at them so I have no idea what info it found or if its true. All the text it read is now in its ‘memory’.

Imagine 20 websites went in, there could be wrong or contradictory info that could mislead the agent. This is why you hear so much talk about context. It’s important, and you want it to be full of the best possible information.

Agents often do many loops for a task. They’re ‘go-getters’ by nature. Which is why they need babysitting.

They keep looping, gathering more context until they have what they need to complete the task. For my fantastic prompt, 55 seconds and 2 web searches was enough.

Build it

The agent came back with a mini plan. I skimmed it, as usual (which cost me...).

I overlooked one point which was not how I wanted the extension to work, it should create the times automatically in the form as you drag tiles, not manually click to sync.

What I should’ve done is gone back and forth to ask how things would work, maybe mockup some wireframes I could annotate with feedback.

But I didn’t.

I just said build it...

It cycled through it’s loops and it was built!

Ha, not quite.

My first thought here was:

1. I shouldn’t need to install this myself

2. If its not installed, the agent can’t have tested this live

3. Why did I just say ‘build it’!?

The agent has tools it could’ve used when looping over the task, specifically Computer use and Browser use. It could’ve installed it and tested it live on my actual calendar page.

It didn’t, so I knew there’d be hiccups.

I installed it and tried dragging time frames but the form syncing didn’t work (shock).

What I should’ve done is say something like

That would’ve saved me time and tokens...

I went through my frustration escalation.

• I start by typing the issues I run into.

• 14 minutes later still had issues. I moved to stage 2 - voice ramble and a screenshot.

• 61 (!!) minutes later still had issues. I moved to stage 3 - I record my screen with a voiceover, pointing my cursor at moments with issues. Agents can break videos down frame by frame and transcribe to pinpoint what you’re talking about.

Each turn (back-and-forth) the context gets fuller. After the first set of issues I sent it, it started actually using Chrome to test, thankfully.

But from reading it’s thinking, it didn’t test fully as it didn’t want to override my ‘work’ but that page was for the agent to absolutely use, that’s kind of key to test if this thing worked properly.

So on the second attempt at fixes I rambled a voice note and added a screenshot. This time I added things it should check and tests it should do.

This is that verification layer an agent considers when it’s thinking about the task being complete. Do all the tests (that the agent comes up with) pass with no issues = extension works.

When giving an agent a task, you should think about what criteria would mean this task is ‘done’. For a website it could be that all the content is formatted well with spacing, your design system, and works on mobile. For email triaging it could be that all the emails in your inbox have a label and are moved to the correct folder.

Verification is something I’m still working on as a lot of my tasks are not code.

Development tasks are easier in this respect - agents check ‘did this code run successfully’ (ie. does the code work).

You can also ask your agent to help come up with the verification criteria…

The agent was looping for an hour (!!)... I should’ve known something wasn’t right, but I thought maybe it’s just being really thorough 😅.

It turns out the context window hit the limit 3 times in that turn.

When the context window gets full (~250k tokens), it summarises everything, but keeps some things intact like your messages and the system prompt (the instructions the agent has baked in already).

In this hour, the agent had been testing a lot and finding out things to help it test the extension properly.

But then compaction wiped it from the context so it had to relearn it again, and again.

A bigger model may have helped here as it could more easily recognise what information would be helpful to keep through a compaction. The agent harnesses themselves all compact context differently. Most of the time I don’t worry about it, but this was an example where I should’ve said ‘when testing, note down your approach and learnings’ or something which the next context could’ve picked up.

If it’s important and in your context window, put it in a file! Files don’t get wiped in compaction, only what’s in your session.

I’d also noticed in the agents thinking that it had spent a bunch of time (and tokens) testing an older version of the Chrome extension, it had been saving each new version as a separate folder. Wtf.

This is where I switched models to Sol with High reasoning, Luna Max is fine for everyday tasks, searching, and things like that, but for code and testing it didn’t work well for me here. Skill issue?

I hit level 3 of the frustration escalation so I added a screen recording.

And just to clear up the older versions I followed up with a message mid-task.

Most agents have this in settings. I often send a prompt and then think I better quickly follow up with some extra info or another ask. This sends your prompt whilst the agent is already working, so you can steer it.

13 minutes later it was done. It worked exactly how I wanted it to. Good boy Sol!

So the extension works, it’s useful. I may use it twice a month. But my process wasn’t great - a lot of reminders in there for future sessions.

Bugs are inevitable, for everyone. You just have to think about how you can provide the best context for the agent to figure out its way to fixing them.

What I should’ve done:

1. Read the agent’s mini-plan before saying “build it”

2. Clarify the details upfront instead of discovering it as a bug

3. Tell the agent to install, test, and iterate in Chrome from the start

4. Use the bigger model for iterative debugging loops

5. Be explicit about compaction: tell the agent to preserve key learnings

6. Check the agent is editing and running the same files

None of these are about the agent being bad. The agent was actually really capable — it built a working Chrome extension from a screenshot and a two-word prompt, it controlled Chrome to test its own work, it diagnosed bugs from a screen recording.

The inefficiency was in how I steered it. Every extra hour and every wasted token came from a decision I made (or didn’t make) about what to tell the agent and when.

Here’s the demo video it produced:

Did you like this type of post? Comment and let me know 😊

Behind the scenes

This is how this post came together 😂

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