Close your laptop, claude keeps working

Good evening folks,

The AI course: six live sessions over two weeks, sold out on Tuesday 🍾

I havent been so excited for a project in a while!

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 today, but the story worth reading isn't the launch post. It's that Dan Shipper and his team at Every had it for about a month before the rest of us. They were one of ~20 early partners running it, and their verdict just dropped.

So I'll let them carry this one.

Dan's headline: "GPT-5.6 is like a Porsche, Fable is like a warp drive." (Fable being Anthropic's monster model, the one that leaves your plan on July 12.) The Porsche is what you drive every day, the best mix of power, speed and performance for normal knowledge work and coding.

Fable is the beast you save for getting across the galaxy. So GPT-5.6 is not a Fable killer, more a division of labour. Run the two together and, in his words, it's "goated."

A few things stood out to him:

It comes as a family of three:

Pricing per million tokens (in / out): Sol $5 / $30, Terra $2.50 / $15, Luna $1 / $6.

One important thing, and I don't want to overclaim here. OpenAI says it goes public today and is rolling out, but they haven't confirmed every ChatGPT plan gets it on day one (the preview was API and Codex only).

Expect a phased rollout: API and the higher tiers first, then Pro and Team, then Plus, then Free over the coming weeks. So check whether it's actually live on your plan rather than assuming. When it reaches you, Terra's the pragmatic everyday pick.

Cowork is Anthropic's agent that goes off and does work for you, their answer to the whole harness category.

They broke it all down here.

And here’s a quick teaser if you want to see it in action:

The update: hand it a task at your desk, then pick up the finished output from your phone. Close the laptop and it keeps working, because the sessions now run in the cloud instead of on your machine.

The bit that matters is that scheduled tasks now run with no device online at all.

Set client prep for 6am and Claude works through the threads and transcripts overnight, builds you the brief, and leaves the follow-up drafted but unsent, waiting for your nod. When something actually needs your judgment, the question lands on your phone.

Chat and Cowork are also moving into one home on web and desktop, so your projects and artifacts live in one place across both.

Just take into consideration, it's a beta, rolling out over the next several weeks. Max plan first, with other plans to follow.

(They've also doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5 to mark the launch.)

You've been able to build custom agents in Notion for a little while now.

It's the same idea as a Claude Code agent: a folder you hand an instruction file, telling it what it's responsible for, how to respond, and which tools and skills it's allowed to use. Just with a nice view inside Notion sitting on top.

What's new is the Agent Hub, an iOS app that lets you run and assign those agents from your phone.

If you're a heavy Notion user and your whole business already lives in there, it's worth a play.

The real edge over doing this in code comes down to two things. Notion agents are wired natively into your workspace, and they're multiplayer: build a marketing agent once and your whole team can use it. That's a lot harder to pull off with a code setup.

Here's where I file it. It's the work amplification vs work automation thing again.

Amplification is your personal cockpit, the setup you sit in all day directing agents through your own work (for me that's Claude Code and VS Code).

Automation is agents running real business processes that don't belong in your personal ecosystem, a customer support agent say, on something more hands-off.

Notion agents fit that second bucket, which makes them a genuine competitor to OpenClaw and Hermes rather than to Claude Code.

Another week, another model. And honestly, models matter less and less now, because they're all so good.

It reminds me of iPhones. The jump from the 3 to the 4 to the 5 was massive. The jump from the 15 to the 16 to the 17 is marginal. That's about where we are with frontier models. So I won't bury you in benchmarks.

I'd rather tell you where Grok 4.5 actually earns its place.

xAI (now folded into SpaceX, so technically SpaceXAI) shipped Grok 4.5, their first model trained specifically for coding and agents, built together with Cursor. It's pitched as a cost play, not a raw-intelligence flex. Elon's own comparison is roughly

Opus 4.7-level intelligence, but cheaper. $2 / $6 per million tokens.

And right now it's free for a limited time. You can pick it in Cursor (all plans), or in Grok Build, their Claude Code equivalent that runs plugins and skills.

The verdict worth reading is Theo Browne's (Elon reposted it, which tells you something). He calls it "a weirdly good default code model" and "a good alternative to Opus 4.8": the cheap daily driver you run everything through, only bringing a bigger model in to clean up.

A couple honest caveats: it doesn't catch everything Fable catches, and it can't orchestrate sub-agents like the newest models can.

Ay if you can fit it in your stack then give it a whirl, but I’m not too fussed.

I built Ledger, my own finance app, and folded my subscriptions into it.

This was a proper Fable 5-worthy job I'd been meaning to do for ages, and it nailed it. Ledger is my own finance app, revenue, expenses, the lot.

What i love most is that it now holds every one of my subscriptions.

My subscription-audit skill runs every Friday on a claude code schedule.

It reads my bank account and my email receipts, works out what's active, what's up for cancellation and what's new, and now it writes straight into Ledger.

Remember that subscriptions Notion database I showed you last week? I folded the whole thing into this app.

There's a subscriptions section with every detail I need, plus one-click links that drop me straight onto each service's billing page to cancel.

3 prompts to run before you lose Fable 5.

Promise this isn’t ‘click-bait’. Fable leaves your plan on July 12. Before you lose it, run these three prompts and squeeze the last bit of juice out of it while it's still included. I put them in a quick guide:

X bookmarks, synced into Notion.

Someone on X posted a screenshot of a setup that syncs their Twitter bookmarks into Notion. I literally handed Claude the tweet and said "build this for me." Now I've got a Notion database that syncs all my X bookmarks automatically.

It's kind of productivity porn. I don't actually know what I'll use it for yet, but it seems cool.