Things I Learned - 01 Nov 2026
This week, I learned: Enterprise software migration seems a massive medium term opportunity - Ethan Mollick. On the other hand, liquid software where anyone can tweak their own softare is emerging. “But I’m not working for my agent, it works for me. It’s a computer. It’s not a person I have to keep busy and keep managing (and checking it’s managing it’s own agents).” - Ben Tossell OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Chat (except Instant) will start getting metered from December 2026. This is a big deal for me because: I prefer ChatGPT Chat / Work to Codex because it can access my past conversations. Chat (in my ChatGPT $20 Plus) isn’t metered visibly and feels unlimited. By giving ChatGPT a plugin to control my computer, I get most of the benefits of Codex. But this free use will last only a month. I need to see how well GPT 6.1 Terra fills that gap - i.e. is it good enough to beat GPT 6 Sol and cheap enough that I can run my chats without worrying about exhausting limits? Clairic is an extraction model from Cloudflare. It’s a Decision model (or System One model) like Jev: fast and lightweight. But this focuses on extraction of text, numbers, dates, even forecasts. It provides the confidence as well as input position of the text for reference. Anthropic recommends using the main agent rather than subagents. Single agents on smart models work well unless you need independence #ForNow. Ruby chocolate is the fourth variety of chocolate - alongside dark, milk, and white. (Might be a marketing claim than verified.) I tasted it. It’s fruity, slightly sour, not bad. My order of preference among the melted chocolates I tasted in a spoon at Chocolate Nation, Antwerp: Gold. Caramel toffee butter cream . Delightful! White W2. White chocolate. Something I usually enjoy. I was surprised I liked Gold more. 823. Milk cocoa caramel chocolate. Slightly darker. Power 41. 41% cocoa Caramel with less sugar. Ruby. Fruity sour taste. Arriba. Strong cocoa flavor. 811. Bitter. The rest were too bitter I had no idea there was so much innovation in chocolates. Most of the ones I like are a century old. Good to see some revival in the last decade. ChatGPT 1880s: Truffles. chocolate that melts immediately in the mouth. 1907: Hershey’s Kisses. 1908: Toblerone. 1912: Pralines. chocolate shell with creamy filling. 1920: Chocolate-coated ice cream (like Magnum). 1923: Filled chocolate bars. 1923: Nougat-caramel chocolate bars (like Five Star, Mars). 1923: White chocolate. 1926: Chocolate syrup (Hershey’s). 1928: Peanut butter cups : Combined sweet chocolate with salty, savory peanut butter for a striking flavor and texture contrast. 1932: Chocolate oranges. 1935: Aerated chocolate with tiny air bubbles. 1935: Chocolate-coated wafers (KitKat). 1936: Malted chocolate balls (Maltesers) 1949: Soft-melting chocolate centers (Lindor) 1951: Chocolate-hazelnut spread (eventually Nutella) 1969: Spherical filled chocolates (Lindor) 1971: Chocolate eggs (Cadbury Creme Egg) 2012: Blond chocolate: white chocolate with biscuit and toffee notes. 2017: Ruby chocolate: pink, fruity, sour. 2021: Dubai chocolate: Pistachio cream, cruncy. Looks like GPT 6.1 Terra is mostly as good as Sol but cheaper. I haven’t tested it yet. On one hand, modern CSS has several new features. On the other hand, I’ve stopped writing code and delegated it to agents, so this is of no use to me. Instead, what I should be thinking about is: what new patterns does this enable, and what should I be asking for in prompts? Ethan Mollick: “Ask yourself: “how do I make what I am doing even more ambitious?” Something to practice actively, given the growing abilities of agents. Anthropic is comfortable that no single person has an architectural view of Claude Code. I guess architecture is also being taken over by agents. Addy Osmani: “No member of the team has a full mental model of Claude Code in their head, nor do we think anyone needs to. Rather, when anyone wants to learn about a piece of the codebase, they ask Claude to generate an explainer about that exact slice. It only takes a few minutes and the explainer is always up to date.” Good advice from Thornton Bell Humans write for humans. Agents for agents. Be more ambitious. Give it more eyes - logs, observability, … Code on remote machines. Ask for 5 variations. (I’m not doing enough of this yet.) Use schedules and triggers. (I’m not doing this at all, so far.) Codex introduced an experimental #ForNow --enable instant_interrupt flag that looks promising. It’s still steering, i.e. not instantly stopping any existing requests or tasks (hence wasting effort), but doesn’t wait for the entire response either. Not sure how it works but I just enabled it and will evaluate it. Code-mode yielding PR, model-response preemption PR. In Codex you can @-mention another Codex session. That’ll give it access to an earlier session’s context. In the past, I copy-pasted session transcripts, saved them in files, or pointed Codex at the session directory. This is more convenient. PixelBoard has pretty impressive cvoice typing. Google has a Gemini-powered “Rambler” voice recognition system (based on Gemini 3.5 Translate, with offline fallback) on Android phones, but not available via GBoard. PixelBoard enables that. ChatGPT Mistakes I made Week ending 01 Nov 2026 ...