A Tale of Two Models

Anthropic put out two models this week—one we’d been missing, and one we could skip. Fable 5 came back online on Thursday, and it couldn’t come back soon enough. Two days earlier, Sonnet 5 landed with a shrug: Katie Parrott’s Vibe Check finds a Goldilocks model pitched for everyone that impresses no one, with a cheaper, faster, or smarter option for nearly every job. Yet while Fable can spin up a working app from a single prompt (it rebuilt our document editor Proof in about three hours), AI still can’t reliably make a PowerPoint deck. Mike Taylor and the consulting team needed a 24-skill pipeline at $62 a deck to automate it, and still wouldn’t recommend it for most teams. Regardless, the Every team still can’t get enough of Codex. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“Vibe Check: Sonnet 5—A Model Pitched for Everyone Impresses No One” by Katie Parrott/Vibe Check: Katie and the Every team put Anthropic’s new Sonnet 5 through its paces and came away unconvinced. Pitched as the Goldilocks model—smart enough for hard work, cheap and fast enough for daily use—it lands as none of those next to Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and GPT-5.5. Read this for where Sonnet 5 fits, and why the team keeps reaching for other models.

“AI Could Do Anything. Then It Met PowerPoint.” by Mike Taylor/Also True for Humans: PowerPoint has been a fixture of work for decades, and AI still can’t conquer it in one shot. Mike and the consulting team found that Codex and Claude Code build slides from scratch well but falter against a company’s own templates. For most teams, the hardest part is figuring out what to say, and AI can’t do that for you. Read this for an honest account of what AI can and can’t do with slides.

“Codex in Practice” by Laura Entis/Context Window: Laura Entis rounds up how people across Every have built their own Codex workspaces—Dan Shipper’s long-running router threads, Katie’s file system, head of growth Austin Tedesco’s outcomes-based approach, and Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen’s portable setup, a synced context folder any agent can draw on—each with a copyable starter prompt. Read this for setups you can steal.

“Codex for Nontechnical Builders” by Dan Shipper/AI & I: Natalia Quintero, Every’s head of consulting, makes the case that Codex is the first agent a nontechnical person can operate the way engineers operate Claude Code. It builds its own folder structure and instructions instead of asking you to set them up first. She walks Dan through running it like a direct report: achieving inbox zero, managing a client pipeline in Attio, and coordinating her father’s medical care. Read this for a nontechnical builder’s Codex practice, end to end. 🎧 🖥 Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, watch on YouTube, or follow the discussion on X.