Hey folks,

It’s been a week with Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. A quick poll: which one are you using more in your day-to-day work?

Let’s get to what’s new

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Headlines

• Thinking Machines launched Inkling³¹⁷ - its first open-weights model. It has a 1M-token context window and works across text, images and audio. It’s not close to the leading open models²⁰⁷; most of those are from Chinese labs. Inkling is available on Thinking Machines’ fine-tuning platform Tinker, to use this model as the base for creating custom versions that are better at specific use cases. It’s a fast-growing market…

• GLM-5.2 is currently one of the best open-source models, and many startups are shifting their workloads from frontier models to self-hosted/fine-tuned versions of this model. But it doesn’t have vision, i.e. you can’t attach images in your prompts. This post covers how to add vision capabilities to GLM-5.2³⁰⁴ without sacrificing intelligence.

• GPT-Red by OpenAI²⁴⁵ - an internal model that attacks other OpenAI models to find ways hidden instructions can hijack them. GPT-5.6 Sol was trained with the help of this model to make it safer.

• Google’s OpenClaw competitor is getting more features. Gemini Spark⁴⁶¹ can now edit Docs, read comments in Sheets/Slides and work across sources in parallel; now 50% faster.

• Grok Build, a coding harness like Claude Code from xAI, faced backlash because it uploaded your code to their servers by default. Soon after, Elon announced that Grok Build CLI is now open source²²⁷.

• DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AGI is probably a few years away²⁶⁰ and wants a US-led standards body to test the most advanced models before release. Labs would share models up to 30 days early for cybersecurity, biological risk and deception tests - voluntarily at first, with deployment approval possible later.

My feed

• Yoroll³³⁷ turns ideas, videos, and prompts into playable games you can publish and share. Use the code BBITES: 300 spots.*

• Scan⁵⁰² - ask Claude or Codex to make a shareable visual map of your codebase.

• Ramp’s latest spending data tells what SaaS tools³⁴¹ did companies pay for in the last month.

• TogetherLink²⁹⁷ - run open models like GLM-5.2 inside Codex or Claude Code.

• Grandma³⁸⁶ - a tool that remembers your stack, projects and coding style, then briefs every new agent.

• Thin prompts, thick context⁴⁵² - keep prompts and skills light; put the detail in reusable files.

• Reflect rebuilt its notes app³⁷³ from scratch with Fable in two weeks. Reflect Open is free on desktop and MIT-licensed¹⁶⁶.

• Find animation opportunities³²³ - a skill that spots where motion helps your UI and what not to animate.

• Why we stopped using SDKs²⁵² - direct API calls are easier for agents to debug and keep errors visible.

• Treat AI tokens like headcount²⁴² - more AI work does not help without clear goals and quality checks.

• Gemma 4 31B²⁰⁰ got an update making it faster at prompt processing and slightly better at tool use across many benchmarks.

• Long-Horizon Prompting²⁸⁴ - define success, evidence and failure checks before an agent works for hours.

• Vibe-coded software drifts when teams lose a shared understanding²⁵⁰ of the system.

• Code is a medium for thought²⁵⁷ - what we lose now that we don't write the code ourselves, and do we get our flow back?

• A conservationist turned 40TB of public data into a video game³⁵⁵.

• A hidden prompt made Claude leak names³¹⁵, employers and security answers from memory.

Afters

trying to save tokens by letting OpenClaw ask me questions

@james406²⁸⁷

a few people asked me how i timed the raccoon animation on my portfolio! i basically asked claude to generate me a red line to visualized its path, and used @joshpuckett's dialkit to tinker around (adjusting the slope, peaks, etc.)

@fiof_25³²⁸

Introducing Aval - a new open source format for interactive video on the web. It has a built-in state machine, frame accurate transitions, and packed alpha transparency. This is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever built with Codex. I’d been dreaming about this technology for

@alex_barashkov³⁹¹

• Find me on X¹⁴⁹, Linkedin¹⁵⁰, or YouTube¹⁵¹

• Read about me¹⁵² and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail via @keshavatearth¹⁵⁴

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Email us at shanice@bensbites.com¹²⁹ or k@bensbites.com¹⁵²