Hey folks,

Anthropic extended access to Fable 5 via Claude subscriptions until July 12. Same deal as before: up to 50% of your weekly limits, and after July 12, use prepaid usage credits. But this dangling-a-carrot move doesn’t make me trust their deadlines anymore.

Otoh, OpenAI announced that GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra and Luna) will be live for all users later today. General feedback on X (from early testers) is that Sol is not smarter than Fable but is so much more reliable that you would not want to use anything else.

Well, let’s see.

Ben’s Bites is brought to you by Flodesk¹⁷³

Most AI tools generate emails for you. Flodesk Studio designs with you — describe what you want, get a beautiful on-brand email in seconds, then refine in chat or perfect by hand. Real designer foundations, AI-accelerated, finished by you. Try it.¹⁷³

Headlines

• We have a good Grok model - Grok 4.5²⁰⁷. SpaceXAI and Cursor trained it together, and it’s an Opus-class model. It should perform roughly in between Opus 4.7 and 4.8. But it’s much cheaper on a per-token basis and token-efficient—making it 6x cheaper than Opus models and 3x cheaper than GPT-5.5. It’s available in Cursor with increased limits and via API too¹¹¹.

• ChatGPT Voice is finally getting some new models - GPT-Live-1 and Live-1-mini¹⁹⁶. A new architecture lets these models a) talk while you’re still speaking without cutting your message off and b) use GPT-5.5 in the background. Results in much smoother conversations and a big jump in intelligence from the old advanced voice mode.

• A lighter version of Claude Cowork will work on web and mobile¹⁸⁸ - sessions will run remotely and save to your account, so you can kick off a task on the laptop, close it, and check in from your phone. Cowork on the desktop app remains the full deal. Beta rolls out over the coming weeks.

• Muse Image and Video¹³⁹ - New multimedia generation models from Meta. The images have more of an AI look, but the model seems good at image editing and text rendering, and can search the web to get facts right, etc. They also have a video model in preview that will be released soon.

My feed

• Render Workflows¹³⁷ - Define long-running tasks with a lightweight SDK that handles queuing, orchestration, & retries. Try it⁷⁶ - use code RENDER-BENSBITES for $50 in credits.*

• Cognition released SWE-1.7¹⁴⁰ - its strongest model yet, near the top frontier models at lower cost, and available at 1000 tok/s.

• Cloudflare Drop²⁷⁴ - drag a folder into the browser, get a live site, no account needed.

• Toya²⁷⁷ - Executive assistant that lives in iMessage, calls your phone, knows you and your work. (i’m an investor; check them out on Product Hunt⁸⁷ and Twitter⁶⁸)

• Ora Directory²¹⁶ - search the web for tools and resources agents can use.

• 64 Claudes rewrote Bun in Rust^206† in just 11 days.

• Spatial context¹²⁶ in Clicky - draw on your screen so the model knows exactly where to look.

• LoginWithChatGPT⁹⁶ - unofficial SDK to add “Sign in with ChatGPT” in your app.

• How to become an applied AI engineer³⁹⁹.

• Model vs effort³³¹ in Claude Code: “big model low thinking” or “small model high thinking”, what should you choose and when?

• How to turn raw Markdown notes into an LLM knowledge base³⁷².

• A collection of small workers¹⁴⁴ hosted on Notion to sync Twitter bookmarks, Readwise, read webpages in markdown and more. (repo⁶⁵)

• Perplexity Teammate¹³⁶ - reportedly an internal coding agent like Claude Code/Codex.

• Skills collections:

  • mattpocock/skills v1.1¹⁹¹ - /wayfinder, /research, /implement, /to-spec and /to-tickets.

  • Meng To’s Agent Skills²⁵⁴ - 75 design, motion, WebGL and landing-page skills for agents.

  ---

  Afters

That's the spine. Fair hit. That's something to sit with. A real observation. That’s the whole thing. Sharpen that: say the word. Notice the arc of what just happened. One honest caveat: the full amount, stated plainly. Genuinely. Quietly. Honestly. That’s doing real work.

@nabeelqu¹⁸⁰

Introducing AI Browser Games! Watch open & closed models build small browser games head to head. Open models like Kimi K2.7 were faster, cheaper, & produced games similar to Opus 4.8. In some cases, open models were ~20x cheaper than closed ones too!

@nutlope¹³⁹

Router has been in production for a few weeks and the savings have exceeded the original benchmarks. Measuring billed usage vs the same workload priced at Opus rates, we’ve found: 43% aggregate cost savings 61% of sessions are at least 80% cheaper

@FactoryAI¹¹⁶

If you have access to GPT Live, test out this prompt. "Hey, I want you to teach me about a concept. <insert concept> but every time I interrupt you, I want you to get progressively more angry at me and tell me to stop talking and let you finish" There is an amazing feeling

@jxnlco¹⁴¹

what app do you guys use to create context for ai? e.g. where do you share your links to articles you want to remember, thoughtful/fun images or memes, things you want to read, things you want to watch (youtube vids, tiktok’s, reels), things you want to listen to, interesting

@signulll²⁰²

I had Fable build another thing I always wanted, a full procedural fantasy kingdom generator with economics, trade routes, population growth, wars, lineages, and occasional dragons. First, I worked with it on a plan, then it made it. You can play it here: annals-kingdom.netlify.app

@emollick²⁵²

• Find me on X⁵³, Linkedin⁷⁰, or YouTube⁵³

• Read about me⁵⁴ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail via @keshavatearth⁵⁷

* sponsors who make this newsletter possible :)

Wanna partner with us for the next quarter?

Email us at shanice@bensbites.com⁴⁷ or k@bensbites.com⁴²