(created with GPT-5...) We hit record three hours after OpenAI’s GPT‑5 live stream, with a shoutout to former PSL engineer Brian Fioca on stage, and dive straight into the big takeaway: daily‑driver frontier at a non‑frontier price. Benchmarks look great, but vibes and real‑world performance steal the show—agentic and MMLU jumps, faster tokens, a huge context window that keeps long tasks on track, and noticeably fewer hallucinations. The headline isn’t just capability; it’s capability per dollar. If ChatGPT’s ~700M users wake up to a default upgrade that’s cheaper than prior flagships, the experience gap for “most people” collapses overnight. We go hands‑on with coding flows that actually changed how we work this week. In Cursor, GPT‑5 felt stateful without much prompt fuss—scratchpads, self‑tracking, and fewer guard‑rail tangles. Kevin details a zero‑to‑working‑product sprint: queue a night’s worth of tasks, have the model generate an implementation guide, a to‑do plan, and a smoke‑test checklist per epic, then wake up to a massive PR across a Rust backend and React desktop app. The new loop is “send, sleep, review, retry”—and now it’s fast and cheap enough to do repeatedly. We also run a pragmatic face‑off. Opus 4.1 is impressive, but slow and pricey. GPT‑5 felt snappier, delivered stronger results on the same tasks, and hit a price point that makes “try again” affordable. That flips the calculus: unless a model is meaningfully better, cost drags utility, and “intelligence per dollar” becomes the metric that matters. For the first time in a while, a frontier model is both top‑tier and broadly economical. Beyond OpenAI, the release flood was real: a fresh wave of open‑source options you can run locally (pay once for hardware; inference becomes electricity), Google’s Jules CLI assistant hitting GA, and rumblings of a Cursor CLI. Plus a wow‑moment from Google’s Genie 3: real‑time, prompt‑to‑play worlds with minute‑scale coherence and persistence—paint stays on the wall when you return, water splashes look eerily physical, and the “inception” demo hints at interfaces well beyond chat. Then the Windsurf saga’s latest twist. After the OpenAI deal reportedly cratered over Microsoft data‑access sensitivities, Google scooped leadership and IP, Cognition acquired the remainder and accelerated equity—and then publicly set a “80 hours, six days” cultural bar, offering nine months’ severance for those opting out. We debate radical candor versus needless PR self‑owns, and what this roller coaster signals for employee expectations, acqui‑hire risk, option value, and term‑sheet protections in a tightening talent market.
