How We Work Now

Hello, and happy Sunday! This week was bookended by two guides: a 9,000-word power user’s guide to Codex—Dan Shipper’s “After Automation” essay put into practice the way the Every team has lately been working. And Kieran Klaassen published an updated guide to compound engineering, Every’s AI-native development workflow, expanded from four steps to seven. We’re running camps for both—a Compound Engineering Camp on June 5 and a Codex Camp on June 12.

Mid-week Anthropic dropped its latest model, Opus 4.8, and in the words of Dan and Katie Parrott, “Anthropic is so back.” The model tops our coding benchmark and writing tests, making it the company’s most complete model yet, though the app around it has some catching up to do. Anthropic and OpenAI have been volleying for the top of Every’s benchmarks for months. This week, Anthropic took the point.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

🔏 “Codex for Knowledge Work” by Katie Parrott/Guides: Katie Parrott’s 9,000-word guide turns Codex into an operating system for knowledge work, with five levels of use (from one-off tasks to compounding systems), 13 workflow templates, and the full setup for context files, rules, and review checklists that make agents reliable across a full workday. A companion essay covers the framing for readers new to Codex. Read this for the seven-day starter plan and the deeper templates.

“Compound Engineering” by Kieran Klaassen and Trevin Chow/Guides: The compound engineering loop has been expanded from four steps to seven. Ideate and plan move to the front, and polish to the end—now that AI handles the middle of the cycle. The updated plugin ships 43 subagents and 38 slash-command skills. In a companion essay, Kieran Klaassen explains the new paradigm of a sandwich: AI in the middle, with humans the bread on either end. Read this for the new loop and what each step demands of you.

“Vibe Check: Opus 4.8—Anthropic Should’ve Rounded Up to 5” by Dan Shipper and Katie Parrott/Vibe Check: Opus 4.8 is the first Anthropic release in a year Dan Shipper and Katie would reach for across coding, prose, and everyday work alike. It scored 63 on Every’s Senior Engineer Benchmark versus 62 for GPT-5.5 and 33.5 for Opus 4.7, and 79.6 on the writing tests—the highest score any model has hit, with fewer AI tells than any non-Claude model. Read this for the benchmark breakdowns and the case for why the model now outpaces the app built around it.