Sometimes You Have to Delete Everything

Hello, and happy Sunday! Vibe Checks are always a journey filled with unexpected twists and turns. As we worked with the Anthropic team to test what was Opus 5, deadlines shifted, release candidates changed, and the model kept fighting the setups we’d built for earlier versions of Claude. It’s exhausting and exhilarating. So when some of the Every New York team caught The Odyssey the morning before the model launch, the parallel wasn’t lost on us. Scroll down for the full Vibe Check and everything else we published this week.—Kate Lee

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

---

Knowledge base

“Claude Opus 5 Is Brilliant in Flashes, Frustrating in Practice” by Dan Shipper and Katie Parrott/Vibe Check: Claude Opus 5 is brilliant in flashes and frustrating in practice—it builds strong software and grinds through bugs for hours, but its best work often requires tearing down the systems you already rely on. It doesn’t reach Fable’s ceiling or match GPT-5.6 Sol’s day-to-day ease. Read this to decide whether Opus 5 is worth making room for—and what you’d have to change to use it well.

“How Every’s Team Used AI to Ship Its Biggest Launch Ever” by Laura Entis/Context Window: Our All Access launch drove the biggest revenue gain in company history—roughly $9,000 in two days. Every COO Brandon Gell hands the mic to three of our colleagues the builders behind the record-setting All Access launch—growth engineer Yash Poojary, head of growth Austin Tedesco, and head of marketing Douglas Brundage—to walk through the tools they build with and their advice for anyone starting out. Watch or listen to learn how an AI-native team turns ideas into shipped products. 🎧 🖥 Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, watch on YouTube, or follow the discussion on X. Also inside: OpenAI’s Romain Huet and Dominik Kundel share a playbook for getting started with Codex, Marcus Moretti cuts Fable’s token spend by delegating to a cheaper sub-agent, and “the daily driver,” a running list of the models the team is using this week, debuts.

“Why Some AI Workflows Stick—And Others Don’t” by Katie Parrott/Working Overtime: After abandoning an “Attention Desk” clone of Dan’s Tend, Katie stopped treating it as a personal failing and ran a post-mortem on why some AI workflows stick and others don’t. She found that a workflow survives or dies on what it asks of your time, energy, and sanity versus what it gives back. Read this to get the four questions she uses to decide which workflows to keep, redesign, revisit, or retire.

“Drowning in Demos? Here’s a Better Way to Prototype” by Hilary Gridley: AI let Hilary’s product team at Whoop build prototypes in an afternoon—so they built too many, with no way to sort the keepers from the noise. Her argument is that once building is cheap, a prototype’s job is to test whether the problem is worth solving, and the only honest verdict comes from people using it, not stakeholders reacting to a demo. Read this to see how Whoop put that to work with a 12,000-member beta group. 🧑‍🏫Sign up for Hilary’s self-paced Maven course, How to Become a Supermanager With AI, and receive a 15 percent discount. (This piece was produced in partnership with Maven.)