Builders
GPT-5.5 is a good model
Hey folks,
I spent most of last week in San Francisco, but mostly sat in my hotel obsessing over my Stanford talk while trying to work out where I’d find the specific colour presents my kids had requested. Arabella wanted purple. Max wanted green.
Jenni is the main reason I went to SF. She invited me to Stanford and it was such a privilege. Plus, she’s brilliant. Sharp, high-agency, but warm and very personable. She also runs an AI consultancy for CEOs and gets my highest recommendation. If you get the chance to work with her, take it.
SF has this energy - how do I go faster, grow bigger, become more successful?
I get it. I like that energy. But I also came home thinking that my own version of ambition looks a bit different.
Yesterday I finally read the profile of Lenny from Lenny’s Newsletter and a lot of it stuck with me. Because it was about building a life where you can care deeply about the work without letting the work eat everything else.
That felt so ‘me’ I had to text him and let him know!
I spent an unreasonable amount of time on my Stanford talk. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I cared about how it landed and was presented. And also because I was trying to make the course and the talk at the same time.
Working on it also made it clearer to me that I sit in this weird middle ground where non-technical people think I’m technical, and developers don’t. But I think a lot of you are somewhere in that messy middle too. Truth is, it’s all a bit messy - everyone is still figuring out agents and AI.
Working with agents isn’t about becoming a developer, but understanding the shape of things; files, tools, systems. With a thick dollop of taste on top.
If you can steer agents, you can get technical pretty quickly. I did. You just have to be realistic that you’ll hit tons of bumps in the road. Your job is to use your agent to figure it out - and you’ll probably learn something that’ll come up again and again.
That’s what I want Ben’s Bites to be more about. Taking you along my exploration: what I’m seeing, what I’m trying, how I’m thinking about it, what bumps I ran into, come along and try whatever sounds useful. Too much ‘education’ out there is just thirsty growth-hacks to sell you something.
I’ve sold a company. I’ve got three tiny kids at home. I want to do excellent work, make good money, back great companies, and build something useful without accidentally creating a job I don’t want.
There are big, valuable companies that want me to work with them. They’d give me clout, access, money. But I hesitate because I don’t know if I can give that kind of thing my all.
Even with my fund. I’m invested in funds who have more money, better process, bigger pipelines. And yet my funds are outperforming.
But I struggle to fundraise because my story isn’t presented cleanly and my process doesn’t look like a workflow. I tinker. I talk to developers. I try tools. I see what people click. I back founders building things I think will matter.
It’s all connected. The newsletter gives me a read on what builders care about. The fund lets me back the tools that might become important. The course/workshop stuff is me trying to teach the shift I’m living through myself.
Devtools built for developers today become the tools agents use. Humans steering, agents operating. They’ll pick up the tools, compose them, run the commands, change the files, connect the systems.
We just gotta understand enough of the shape of the work to direct it well.
A lot of what I do comes down to feel. Caring about the thing enough to make it good, but not needing to turn every good thing into a machine. And squeezing every last drop for growth’s sake.
So I came back from SF without a plan to scale. Mostly I came back thinking, I want to keep building for this new class of builders. People who are curious, increasingly technical, and trying to use AI to become more capable.
That feels like a good place to spend my time. Raising the floor, not the ceiling (h/t Jenni/Jen’s Bites).
Exploring, tinkering and teaching.
p.s. the kids got their toys, and I’ll continue working on the ‘course’ with care 😊
p.p.s. speaking of care, my brother Adam just launched Hono UI - a UI kit (like Shadcn) but for projects that use Hono. Proud of him! Do me a favour and blow up his launch post 🙏
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Headlines
OpenAI released GPT-5.5 - On paper, it’s a much better model than Opus 4.7 (minus frontend design - but using their new image gen model and asking 5.5 to turn that into code is a great workaround). This comes with a price increase making it 2x more expensive than GPT-5.4 and even slightly more than Opus 4.7 on a per-token basis. But claims it’s 40% more token efficient, so per-task cost doesn't change much (Ramp reported similar results).
It’s become my default model since Anthropic cracked down on usage outside of their own harness. I’m in ‘thinking:low’ camp, super smart and fast.
I’m also trying to use the codex desktop app over a terminal and there’s lots to like - but I’m just desperate for cloud/mobile use too.
One more thing… it’s clear OpenAI is focusing on builders, they’re shipping like crazy, are very vocal on X, responding to users and resetting rate limits. We love to see it.
Claude got worse. It’s official. Anthropic posted a breakdown of what and why it happened. Basically, changing the default thinking mode and system prompt changes led to a combined fall in the quality of Claude's responses, especially in Claude Code. They still clarify that they don’t switch to a quantised or “worse” model.
Memory on Claude Managed Agents is now in public beta. Context: Managed Agents is Claude’s API product for companies to easily plug in claude code-like agents into their products without managing the hassle of infrastructure.
Cursor needs compute and a model. XAI needs users. And competition is higher than ever for coding agents. Cursor was raising $2Bn at $50Bn but has been paused because they struck a deal with SpaceX/XAI that gives SpaceX the option to buy Cursor for $60B later in 2026, or instead pay $10B for the collaboration. It’s a weird structure I’ve not seen before - so we will see what happens. Never a dull day.
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My feed
QuickCompare helps you choose the right LLM for your use case. Compare 50+ models on your own data in minutes with Trismik. Try free now!*
Flipbook - every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. Another similar demo.
Clicky lets you talk to AI and spawn an agent on your Mac. Farza built and open-sourced a version of this a few days ago, but the new clicky is closed source. OpenAI already had a version of this which you can clone.
Things I learned working at OpenAI.
Exa for Claude - plugin to give your Claude access to websites, people, companies, and more.
Ora.run - scan and rank how well agents can find and use your business.
Tolaria is another app to read/write markdown files on your desktop with second-brain-esque features.
Reelful - from a camera roll to a finished reel in just 10 minutes.
trunks by layerbrain - turn your own storage into git remote with a minimal CLI.
webpull - instantly pull any website into a directory of clean, searchable markdown files.
slacrawl - cli terminal app for slack with sqlite backend.
When and how to use MCP for apps built for production.
create-agent-tui - skill for building your own agent harness + terminal UI.
Aman (ex-Harvey) built an offline AI app to track his skin’s response to different diets and products with local models. (testflight) (how he built it)
OpenAI is updating its partnership with Microsoft. Separately, Sam and Greg did an interview recently (their first one together?)
Afters
Read about me and Ben’s Bites
📷 thumbnail by @keshavatearth
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"Working with agents isn’t about becoming a developer, but understanding the shape of things; files, tools, systems. With a thick dollop of taste on top."
This resonated deeply. Speaks to what I believe was and continues to be the most underrated skill out there: systems thinking.
What's also interesting about your phrasing for me is that one can argue that "understanding the shape of things; files, tools, systems. With a thick dollop of taste on top." is exactly what being a (really good) developer has always been about. :)
I don't care if you stop being a tech guy (there are a few good ones), but please don't stop writing. (there is no one in tech who writes with this kind of vulnerability, honesty and warmth)