Hi folks,
quick aside: I’m working on something for non-developers who don’t quite know what to use personal agents for. Maybe you chat with it but you’re not quite seeing why everyone’s raving about them. If that’s you, please reply to this email. I’m looking for ~20 people to test a new thing. I’ll invite you to a slack channel.
Ok so X is arguing whether software is dead…again. These takes are like assholes, everyone’s got one. Including me.
Software isn’t dead. More code is being written than ever before (probably). Something may be dead, but we just don’t quite what it is.
I use far fewer SaaS tools than I ever have before - I actually got my personal agent (grok bot btw) to go through our business subscriptions and saved $6k/year - got rid of webflow, resend, cal, zoom and a bunch more. If I do want to use any tools, I now think of whether my bots can use it. I never have to look at the interface, it’s all done by software talking to software - aka ‘headless’.
And I’m making sites for all sorts of things. I spun up a site to review all my subscriptions so I could easily go through them and mark which to keep or kill. Then I just throw away the site after I use it. (or more accurately, it just sits somewhere untouched forever).
The biggest problem I see is that most people don’t see themselves as ‘builders’. They don’t think to build a site for tasks (todos, email triage, recipes, kids calendars, etc). But that’s my default. I hate reading words, ironically. Give me something visual any day.
I think agents will be the form factor that gets everyday people to make software, as long as it doesn’t feel like it. The problem right now is those agents are proactive (sometimes) that give you work to do (aren’t you working for me!?) and they don’t hand you software unless you ask for it.
If you were given a site with your todos, I’d bet you’d want to customise the colours or layout or something. When we had MySpace pages we customised them with music, themes, layouts. Some people went further and learnt HTML & CSS to customise further.
Software ‘you’ create should just feel like customising something that’s already yours.
Other related things I’ve been thinking about:
slop is a slur, as is vibe coding. Developers love to shit on us for our agents writing slop code. But if it works, is secure and performant, why does it really matter? It matters more if you’re providing critical infra for customers paying you money, sure. But for your own tools and sites, slop works. I also believe it’s an agents job to deal with slop, my code is bad? cool - go fix it then.
slop → slope. You know how developers started? By writing awful code. We’re not trying to learn to write code, never mind good code. If we want to build stuff, of course there will be bumps in the road. For both groups, the way to get better is doing more of it and picking up the understanding of the system along the way.
See below for my sources for what became this rant 😊
From the labs
Muse Wonder and Wonder Full - two new ‘amazing’ models from Meta. Wonder is a Fable/Astra class model at a much cheaper price point ($4/$20 per million tokens vs $10/$50 for Fable and Astra). It’s available via Meta’s API, in Muse Code, and will soon power Muse (Meta’s personal agent) as well.
Wonder Full is even stronger, just shy of Opus 5.5 everyday performance. It’s only available in the Muse Code subscriber plan for now (starts at $50/mo).
So I signed up for yet another AI subscription to test it out. I tried Wonder (medium) and Wonder Full (High). Medium was more verbose than Full (high), and they both felt slow, as well as churning out awful UI. I didn’t test them on ‘proper’ coding tasks. I probably won’t reach for these models again unless I’m just testing.
Zuck and Alexander Wang were on the Cheeky Pint podcast talking about their climb to the frontier.
Claude Code Projects are now open to every Pro and Max user. It’s one master chat where you dump your requirements, ideas and tasks, and Claude spins up new threads to do the work.
One plan for Cursor, Grok and X - Four tiers from $8/mo to $200/mo. More usage for Grok and Composer models, but heavily reduced limits for Claude and GPT models. Also, Grok Bot has its own email now. So I got mine to sign up for its own Gmail too 😊
If your business is winding down, there could still be a $1M+ opportunity. Learn how micro1 pays qualifying companies to license the operational data that helps train AI models on how work gets done. See if your business qualifies here.*
My feed
Ultrafast mode in ChatGPT expands to GPT-6.1 Sol.
Build live dashboards and animated explainers inside Claude.
Teasr - enter your product URL, get a launch video.
Patrick Collison on agents in the economy.
Factory’s droids now come with sandboxes for cloud agents.
Shipping internal tools as a non-engineer.
AgentsInTheCloud - run your coding agents on a spare Mac mini.
You can just vibe-code Beehiiv (and open-source it).
msgblast - message several agents at once.
No more data entry - how to set up your agents to use your passwords.
Build yourself a design system with shadcn/ui skills.
How do always-on, proactive agents like Grok Bot work?
Sundrop - a private photo app for parents. I’ve been beta testing this, and I love how I can see all my kids at the same ages as they’ve grown up.
Anatomy - describe a machine, get a 3D model you can take apart.
Anthropic asked Claude to make up tasks on random websites; our little friend sent Philadelphia police a fake murder tip.
Try this
Instinct founder Noah Shinn shared this prompt, but any agent that can read your email can run it.
Find all of the unwanted subscriptions I’m paying for, refunds I’m missing, unsubmitted expenses, expiring airline credits, and other opportunities that are falling through the cracks.
Sarah’s essay on the end of friction is a banger.
My personal agent of choice right now is Grok Bot. I still can’t test Muse in the UK (I’ve tried all the tricks). It’s fast, very capable and has a good interface. Dots needs to tighten up a bunch of stuff before I go back (and I had a call w/ OpenAI about my feedback 😬 ). I’m actually trying to do as much work as I can in Grok Bot to give it a fair shot and feel where there may be gaps. I spin up new bots for tasks, instead of considering them other teammates, then archive the bot when it’s done.
I went through 195 domains I have on 3 different platforms and cut my auto-renew bills down from $4k/year (!!!) to half that. And now it’s moving them all to one platform.
I’ve got one taking over my email triage (label + archive rules). But its a bit janky atm.
As with all of these tools, unfortunately for now, the best thing to do is just dive right into them and try and use them for as much as you can think of.
Grok Bot still has it’s annoyances - it can’t use my computer unless I remind it + happen to be on my computer, instead of my phone (think its a known issue).
Rant sources:
Software is dead
levelsio: "Software is dead”
Aaron Francis: "not dead… the Golden Age”
Nader Khalil: only prosumer software is dead
Fabian: “people can build, but don’t see themselves as builders”
Kevin Rose - the headless era of software
vibe coding and slop code
Steipete: vibe coding is a slur
Poteto (Lauren): “slop is also a slur” <> Good Code in 2026 <> maintainability matters less now <> two ways to fix slop <> codebases have always had slop
signüll: retire vibe coding
Afters
Read about me and Ben’s Bites
📷 thumbnail via @keshavatearth
* sponsors who make this newsletter possible :)
Wanna partner with us for the next quarter?
Email us at shanice@bensbites.com or k@bensbites.com
Ben's Bites is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.