Hi folks, Keshav here. Ben’s travelling today, so you’re stuck with me.

We have three new models to talk about:

Claude Opus 5.5¹³² - 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%⁸² and we’re getting a banked rate limit reset¹⁵⁷.

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.com³⁹³ - “update filtering with jev instead of gemini and redesign the website a little bit”

• shortandlongtail.com²⁹⁶ - “rewrite the essays with detailed research”

• detroitbench²²⁸ - “run the three new models and add them to the results”

Every says it’s pulling their Codex converts back to Claude⁹¹ and I feel the same. My go-to agent has changed to Claude Code with this release.

GPT-6 Luna and Sol from OpenAI⁷⁹. 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.

let's see what comes out on the other end.

@Keshavatearth¹³²

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 built⁶³³.

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.

Ben’s Bites is brought to you by Adobe Acrobat¹¹⁸

Adobe for Claude¹¹⁸ just got a major upgrade: Acrobat tools now join Adobe's creative tools in one plugin, unlocking 80+ pro-grade tools across imaging, design, video, and documents. New interactive editors let you hands-on edit PDFs and Adobe Express designs directly inside Claude¹¹⁸.

Headlines

Muse at Meta Connect¹⁰¹ - 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 avatar⁶⁹ for your Muse and a Tamagotchi-like keychain⁹⁸ to carry Muse around (welcome back AI pendants).

Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS⁹⁹ - 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 models⁷⁷, so that’s some signal.

ChatGPT Voice⁹⁹ 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 preview¹⁶⁸ - 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 it²¹⁵ by Oct 7.

Claude found a new enzyme system¹³³ in bacteriophage DNA (viruses that infect bacteria). Nobody knows what it does yet, and reruns of the same search missed it⁷⁹. Weren’t we pacing the frontier, eh?

My feed

• Zaps in Zapier can now fix themselves when they break⁹⁸, and they get cheaper the more they run. (Beta)

• Claude mobile app supports multiple accounts¹²² now.

• MentalHealthBench¹⁰⁸ - 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 Jev³⁶⁸ for $17.

• GoodVibes¹⁷⁴ - filter X, Reddit and YouTube by vibes, in plain English. Runs on Jev.

• Cursor improved its harness to save about 7% on token costs⁸⁰.

• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar) on AI for creativity¹⁶⁴.

• Cursor Rollouts⁷⁹ - 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 weeks²²⁹. Prompts included.

• Claude Code might kill plan mode²⁵⁶. It’s the right thing to do.

• Vercel’s Sandbox can now save files with its new offering, Drives⁷².

• Soon your privacy will depend on your agent’s social skills¹¹⁹.

• Drama 3⁸⁵ by Fish Audio - direct a voice in plain English, even mid-sentence.

• Monologue built its own dictation model⁷³ to reduce the number of edits needed post-transcription.

• What if you could talk to a podcast¹³⁰ and it talked back? (Research demo)

• The Open Frontier¹⁵² - which open model fits your use case, and what you’d save by switching.

• OpenAI’s proposal for AI standards⁶⁶, and what outside testers should get to see⁵¹.

Afters

i love prompting for a full walkthrough of a flow i.e here i had it show me all of the steps involved in oauth and found redundant steps, layout shift, and some weird ui state agents don't have to produce slop, they can also help you make great software

@RhysSullivan¹¹⁶

Your agent can handle significantly more than you are currently asking of it

@benjitaylor⁹⁸

for the past few months i've been asking our models to paint. opus 5.5 is very skilled at emulating different styles every image here is a python program generated pixel by pixel. there is no image model, and no off-the-shelf art software. instead, it's about 7,500 lines of code…

@jkeatn¹⁴⁵

What can us, engineers else learn from designers and design engineers? Turns out there’s lots, based on talking with one of the best design engineers in the industry, @Mappletons. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:24 From anthropology to tech 10:18 What does a designer do? 18:23 How …

@GergelyOrosz¹⁰³

holy shit, opus 5.5 is kind of insane at animation. i didn't write a single line of code. it wrote the story, drew every frame, and made the music. no image assets at all, it's all JS. the story is called "small print": claude gets a pile of requests every day. it circles the…

@Voxyz_ai¹⁴⁹

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