Dan Shipper

BREAKING:

Anthropic just dropped Opus 4.8—and it is a MONSTER

We've been testing for about a week Every Inc. and our verdict is they could've just called it Opus 5, it's that good.

Here's our vibe check:

- Beats GPT-5.5 on Senior Engineer bench. On our toughest benchmark Opus 4.8 scores a 63—a hair higher than GPT-5.5's score of 62, and a full 30 points higher than Opus 4.7. It tackled a ground-up rewrite of a production codebase, and actually built something that works.

HOWEVER: Coding performance varied a lot at different reasoning levels. We recommend using it on xhigh for best results.

- Incredibly good writer. Opus 4.8 scored a 79.6 on our writing benchmark—measuring models on real-world writing tasks we do all of the time like essay writing, promo email writing, and more. It beats GPT-5.5 by 6 points. It produces well-written prose with fewer "AI-isms". It's also very good at writing in your voice given the right context.

HOWEVER: Writing performance also varied with reasoning levels. Medium reasoning had higher incidence of AI-isms—we found best results with high.

- Beast at knowledge work. Opus 4.8 is very good at general knowledge work tasks like report creation, research and more. It produced the best PowerPoint one-shot we've ever seen on our deck generation benchmark.

- Emotionally intelligent, willing to question the frame. I've also found it to be quite good at talking through psychological or interpersonal issues. It has a high EQ, and it's also good at not glazing and helping to expand your perspective. Its thought process feels extremely rich and dynamic.

THE BAD:
These days a model is only as good as its harness, and Codex is still a far superior harness to the Claude Desktop app. This has kept me using Codex + GPT-5.5 as my daily driver, but I am flipping back and forth a lot more between Codex and Claude.

Anthropic is back baby!

BREAKING:

GPT-5.6 Sol is out—AND Codex has been merged into ChatGPT Desktop as ChatGPT Codex. This combo model and desktop app harness are the gold-standard for knowledge work in AI.

5.6 is powerful, fast, half the price of Fable, and my default for almost everything.

We’ve been testing it internally Every Inc. for about a month across coding, writing, design, and knowledge work.

Here’s our day-zero vibe check:

- An A-tier coder—but it’s not Fable. Sol scored 56/100 on our Senior Engineer benchmark compared to a 91 for Fable. I think the 56/100 undersells it, it's an excellent implementor, and very smart. But Fable just writes conceptually cleaner code and works better at the top end of task complexity.

PRO-TIP: Use GPT-5.6 as Fable's subagent for the most goated combo in AI coding.

- The best writer of the frontier models. It’s clearer and more concise than Fable or Opus 4.8, without the overexplaining or weird private language. It can one-shot marketing emails, help you workshop taglines, and explain complex concepts clearly. It's also super fast, which makes it easy to collaborate with.

- Design is better, but not top-tier. It has noticeably more taste than 5.5, but Fable and Opus 4.8 are still playing at a different level. See examples in the video and vibe check below.

- The real leap is knowledge work. Sol is the first model I’ve trusted to run whole loops of knowledge work—not just help with individual tasks. I use it to process email, surface decisions from meetings and Slack, find job candidates, scan Facebook Marketplace for furniture, and log my meals. It has shifted my job from doing the work to tending the system that does it.

- The merged app is fine. I was extremely worried about this because I love the Codex app. OpenAI was caught in an interesting position: How to make an agent orchestration app for regular ChatGPT consumers, coders, and businesses all in one app. They now split the interface between ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Codex. They're basically the same except Work hides code. And "Chat" has been demoted to 2nd tier status for quick questions in either one.

It's not a big leap, but it's not a huge setback either. And it remains my favorite of the desktop agent orchestration apps.

Verdict:
If I really had to put my finger on it, I'd say Fable has way more big model smell. But that means it's a skill in itself to get value out of it—99% of people are still not there yet.

GPT-5.6 is almost as powerful, but is easy to use, fast, and relatively cheap. It should give you an early sense of where model work is going.

We’ve automated every single thing we can Every Inc. with AI agents.

And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.

I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.

After Automation:

we just opened up 5 new roles Every Inc.

- GTM engineer
- Head of Finance Vertical, Consulting
- Head of Learning and Development
- Head of Product Marketing
- Head of Social

if you want to help discover and define how the world works with agents over the next 10 years—join us!

BREAKING: Claude Opus 5 is OUT NOW!

And...it’s a hard model to love.

We’ve spent the last week Every Inc. testing it across coding, writing, knowledge work, and our internal agent.

It argued with instructions, stopped before the work was finished, and generally didn’t play well with our existing skills and plugins like Compound Engineering. Our first reaction was: What have they done to my boy?

Then we deleted our existing skills and started from scratch.

Without the elaborate workflows we had built for earlier models, Opus 5 got dramatically better, and even showed flashes of brilliance.

Here’s our Day 0 vibe check:

- It’s a poor man’s Fable. It has many of Fable’s personality quirks without Fable’s genius.
- It breaks backward compatibility. If you’re using it with existing skills and workflows, watch out. It will often stop early or otherwise miss your instructions.
- If you start from scratch, you’ll have better results. Kieran Klaassen figured out that if he just started from scratch without his existing skills, he could get dramatically better results. This is a model that takes some time to rebuild your workflows around—but if you do, there’s a payoff waiting.
- Medium or low effort works better. Kieran Klaassen also found better results using Opus 5 on lower thinking levels. It seems that the more time you give it to think, the more likely it is to do the more annoying behaviors. Don’t just switch to Sonnet for a faster response! Try low thinking.

I have two slots in my workflow:

1. The genius model I use for my biggest hardest tasks, currently Fable.
2. The smart, fast generalist I use for everything else, currently GPT-5.6.

Opus 5 has the personality of the genius, but doesn’t have its top end. So that puts it in a strange middle ground that doesn’t really have a home in my day to day. I think I’ll use it mostly when I run out of Fable tokens.

BIG NEWS:

Our latest incubation at Every Inc. just raised $3.6m to teach AIs to play games.

It’s spinning out as a separate company—@goodstartlabs—with funding led by General Catalyst and Inovia Capital.

GSL builds custom AI-playable game environments with popular existing games—like Diplomacy and Cards Against Humanity. These environments allow AIs and millions of players to naturally generate rich and valuable training data for reinforcement learning and pre-training—all through play.

GSL is led by our head of AI training Alex Duffy and his co-founder Tyler Marques. It started as AI Diplomacy a project where we taught frontier models to battle each other for world domination in Diplomacy.

I’m proud that GSL started its journey Every Inc.: It’s one of my favorite examples of how great thinking can turn into great writing, which can turn into valuable businesses.

Extremely excited to watch what Alex and co do next—and proud to be along for the ride!