Copy Our Homework

Hello, and happy Sunday. We publish workflows, tips, and prompts nearly every day, and we know that at that pace things get lost. So this week we’re trying a different format: a section called “Steal these” that gathers everything from this week’s three Context Window editions. We also have two new Vibe Checks: Mike Taylor’s of Jev, an entirely new model from one of the OpenAI researchers who taught chatbots to follow instructions, and one from Cyrus Duff and Josh Lee of the creative studio Afterimage, who tested GPT-6 Astra on visual effects, a use case we hadn’t tried. Some housekeeping: We’re hosting three different kinds of events next week; upgrade to attend the second two. Details follow.—Kate Lee

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Steal these

Nine workflows and prompts from this week’s three editions.

Let an agent drive your computer

Codex handles errands. Seven staffers on the tasks they hand off to AI, including calendar upkeep, Verizon support chats, listing items for sale, troubleshooting a slow laptop, and transferring internet service. The list
A four-step deck workflow. Douglas Brundage designs two or three reference slides, hammers out copy with Codex, has it build the full deck in Google Slides, and saves his edits as rules for next time. The steps
A “don’t touch the mouse” signal. When Codex is controlling his computer, a stray click from Randy Counsman would derail the agent’s work, so he has Codex put a 🖥️ in the title of whichever task has the controls. How

Fix your folders

A prompt that audits your whole setup. Tell your agent to explain your folder setup and which files are the originals, have Compound Engineering’s ce-doc-review check that explanation, and don’t let your agent move anything without your approval. The prompt
Four rules from a working setup. Kieran Klaassen keeps one folder per job; stores what his agents know apart from the system that hands them tasks; keeps daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly memory files, and fits the system to how he already works. His setup

Spend tokens on purpose

What 4.5 billion tokens buys. Randy’s unbounded agent swarm ran for a day and a half on one Blender model; the rebuilt setup caps the orchestrator at five subagents and gives a judge agent a reference image. The fix
A prompt that audits your token spend. Paste it into your agent to review a session’s usage records, separate necessary work from repeated work and status checks, and recommend three changes. The prompt
Match the model to the task. Marcus Moretti uses Sonnet for basic checks, Opus for tightly scoped changes, and Fable 5.1 to plan large features; he tells it to delegate coding and check the work. His method
Three questions after any expensive experiment. Arielle Shipper asks what it cost, what it bought, and what the team learned. Her questions

Knowledge base

“Vibe Check: Is Astra a Breakthrough for Indie Filmmakers?” by Cyrus Duff and Josh Lee/Vibe Check: Cyrus Duff and Josh Lee, cofounders of the creative studio Afterimage, tested GPT-6 Astra on visual effects work they would normally outsource to a specialist—adding a wineglass to a table. It’s good at rigid objects like buildings and glassware and at running professional tools on its own, but it can’t yet make living things or anything that touches the scene look convincing. For a two-person studio, that’s work they used to outsource.

🖥 “Mini-Vibe Check: TypeSafe’s Jev Judged Everything I’ve Written in 0.7 Seconds” by Mike Taylor/Also True for Humans: TypeSafe’s new model, Jev, takes a yes-or-no question in plain English and returns a number indicating the likelihood of yes, so other software can use it without human review. Mike ran his whole Every archive through it in less than a second for a fraction of a cent. 🖥 Watch Jack Cheng draw and move shapes on a canvas by talking and pointing at his webcam, as Jev executes each command in less than half a second.

“13 Beliefs About AI Writing” by Mike Taylor/Also True for Humans: Mike drafts almost everything he publishes with AI, and his first rule is to make the prompt larger than the output. If ChatGPT could have written it, he doesn’t bother. He still writes his own tweets and Slack messages, because that’s where his essays start. Our How We Write Now series closes with a live write-along with Mike and Katie Parrott on Wednesday, September 23, at 1 p.m. ET on X.

“What Playing With AI Taught Me About My Work” by Katie Parrott/Working Overtime: Katie argues you can take something useful from an experiment without turning it into your next assignment. She had Astra turn her Compound Writing skills into creatures, and working out what each character wanted led her to add questions about fulfilling readers’ needs to her writing toolkit. Plus: Get “Is this anything?,” her skill for finding value in a single AI session.

“You’re Probably Sleeping On Computer Use” by Laura Entis/Context Window: Mike rated GPT-6 Astra a yellow in the September 3 Vibe Check. Less than two weeks later, it’s his daily driver, because computer use filled out school forms, built six course decks, and checked every link in his book proofs.

“Show Us Your Folders” by Katie Parrott/Context Window: Anthropic merged Chat and Cowork into one Claude that picks the tools for each task itself, which puts Anthropic and OpenAI on the path to the single desktop app for knowledge work we predicted in April. Also inside: Dario Amodei wants to slow the frontier, and Dan counters with a plan to make frontier AI widely available, starting with an antivirus for the AI age that makes defensive agents available to ordinary people.

“Why You Should Burn More Tokens” by Laura Entis/Context Window: Dan uses more than three times as many tokens as anyone else at Every and worries that low spend means thinking too small. With Willie Williams, he settled on a starting point: Find the engineering team’s biggest constraints and test whether AI can remove them.

Thesis Statements

Read six more predictions from frontier builders and thinkers in Thesis Statements, a collection of specific, contestable claims about the future of great human work with AI.

Good design will signal mediocrity by Douglas Brundage, head of marketing at Every
Technical competence will yield to people skills by Will England, CEO and CIO of Walleye Capital
The risk won’t be bad execution—it’ll be endless execution by Diana Palacio, senior engagement manager at Every
A faster version of average is still average by Prashanth Subramanian, cofounder of Quadra Systems
How to do something will stop being our identity by Arturo Tedeschi, architect and author
AI will make uncertainty cheap to explore without making it cheap to resolve by Graham Walker, emergency physician and cofounder of MDCalc

Join us at our inaugural Thesis: 2027 conference on November 5, 2026.

Log on

Get hands-on with how Every uses AI. At these live camps, workshops, and meetups, team members teach our workflows.

Upcoming events

How We Write Now write-along: Wednesday, September 23, 1 p.m. ET, live on X. To close our How We Write Now series, Katie Parrott and Mike Taylor will write with AI on camera, as Kate Lee moderates. Watch on X.
Every IRL—September 2026: Thursday, September 24, 6–8 p.m. ET at Every’s Brooklyn brownstone. Our Slack agent, Every, planned this month’s subscriber-only gathering end to end. Free for subscribers. RSVP.
Office Hours: A Sneak Peek at Every Agent: Friday, September 25, 12–1 p.m. ET on Zoom. Douglas Brundage and Brandon Gell, with host Micah Rich, show All Access members the Every Agent before its public launch. No coding experience needed. All Access membership required. Register.

That’s all for this week. Follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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