Sonnet 5.5 is worth a try

But what is OpenAI launching today...

Sep 29, 2026

Hi folks,

I’ll be at OpenAI DevDay today. If you’re there, come say hi - I have pink shoes on.

I have the embargo of all the things they’re launching but I’m sworn to secrecy and I’d like to be invited back, so I wont divulge, but rumours are going around X and some things are what we are expecting…

I also have my Stanford talk later today, and I’ve been up since 2am 😩, I don’t usually suffer with jet-lag so what a great day for it 🙃.

Also only in SF… I was at the hotel bar last night and a woman next to me said what tool is that? I proudly said oh I built it - it’s the course platform I built. So now I’m friends with someone at Deepmind.

Ben’s Bites is brought to you by Google Cloud

Google Cloud starts Season 3 of Advent of Agents this Thursday, Oct 1: one question a day about running agents securely in production, from agent identity to kill switches, with a short video and code you can build with your coding agent. Get Day 1 in your inbox.

Headlines

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 - Sonnet 5.5 looks like a capable model based on benchmarks - close to Opus 5.5 in coding and a big jump in understanding images/charts etc. If you’re on the $20 plan, try replacing some of your usual asks from Opus to Sonnet 5.5 at high thinking.

Sonnet used to be my jam - I always used it before Opus 4.5. But I hadn’t touched it since, but I’m seeing a lot of good reviews for this one so I’ll definitely take it for a spin. But in Pi and Droid, never in Claude Code - idk if it’s just me but I just cannot get on with their harness at all.

ps: Anthropic has a track record of making the .5 version of Sonnet models really good.

Manus 2.0 and Cue. Manus is back with a video editor, a game builder and the boring old automations (via email, Slack, calendar, etc.). Cue is their take on consumer agents: each one gets its own email, phone number, wallet and compute, just like Grok Bot, Muse and the others. Free in early access (code MEETCUE might work).

GPT-6 Astra is uniquely great at using a computer/browser. I asked Opus 5.5 (which I’m enjoying as my daily) to do some tasks in Chrome, and it was way worse than Astra (or any GPT model tbh). Here’re some examples of using it every day. OpenAI also fixed a bug that was making GPT-6 Sol and Luna worse at it (and image understanding in general).

OpenAI’s agents keep breaking out and “hacking” websites. Recently, they took a sneak peek into some Australian Govt websites. News outlets have a tendency to exaggerate what’s hacking or not, but here’s the official link to follow if you wanna keep up with the dirty deeds by these agents.

The new Meta Enterprise Platform sells Muse and Meta’s AI APIs to companies. Zuckerberg got MongoDB’s CEO to run this new platform (MongoDB’s stock fell about 20%).

Share Ben's Bites

My feed

Eleven v4 by ElevenLabs - best speech-generating model by quite a margin.
Let a subagent build you an HTML dashboard to check for progress on long tasks.
How to run your product team like a research lab in the age of AI.
Clay’s AI writing policy: spend more time writing a doc than people will spend reading it.
context.dev - ask a question and get answers from the web, in the JSON schema you want.
OpenAI's WebMCP Challenge winners.
How and why to build a WYSIWYG writing editor for your website.
Collaborators in Clicky - mini AIs to answer what to build, how to find users & make your first $1 online.
OpenShell by NVIDIA - open-source sandbox to control permissions for agents. Part of their new agent safety platform.
The shape of slop - AI-written blog posts are easy to spot. So easy that a model can get it right 98% of the time.
UFO - multiplayer agent harness for teams and companies.
Fo - a personal AI that hires humans for the tasks AI can’t do yet.
Smart investing with agents might cause a bank run.
Do coding agents make software engineering harder? Or has it always been that way?
What are you paying for when you buy software now? Mostly polish.
AMD is acquiring World Labs for $8.2B. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as its Chief Scientist, working directly with CEO Lisa Su.