Agents Choose What You Read Now

Hello, and happy Sunday. It was a week of agents at Every: Evan Armstrong works out whether Anthropic is worth $2 trillion, head of evals Mike Taylor tested which titles get an agent to recommend your work, and new staff writer Grant Harvey spent his first week with the Every Agent. We’re off next week for Think Week, when our team flies in from around the world to spend time together in person, play, and explore the future. We’ll send some of the best of what we’ve published, plus a new podcast. And on Thursday, November 5, we’re hosting our first conference, Thesis: 2027. Anyone with a free Every subscription can watch all 27 sessions, and viewers get a shot at $20,000 in AI credits and benefits from partners including Notion, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Register for the livestream.—Kate Lee

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Overheard at Every

What the team couldn’t stop talking about this week

Turn your effort dial down. Kate’s reaction to a new paper from Johns Hopkins and Together AI: “Effort level!!” The researchers tested the reasoning-effort setting built into Claude Code, Codex, and ChatGPT. Maximum effort raised accuracy overall, but it often failed tasks that low effort had solved, and on easy tasks it cost up to 42 times as much. Their fix: Start at the lowest setting and raise it only after a checked failure.

The coding interview is dead, at least on one Anthropic team. Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, wrote this week that he stopped giving coding interviews because Claude now beats candidates at the small challenges they test. His bigger point is that newer engineers can now build a working prototype over a weekend instead of waiting years for permission. Engineer Lee Knowlton called it “another banger.” For now, Felix looks for small prototypes that show taste.

The Arc breakup continues. Head of social Becky Isjwara, a self-described “arc loyalist,” switched to Dia after it opened the FigJam from her call and grouped it with the Google Meet tab. Lee isn’t there yet: Dia is “like arc but uglier.” Customer support specialist Waqqas Mir moved to Brave instead: “cant go through another breakup with a browser.”—Grant Harvey