Dan Shipper
As seen in:
Every,
Apple Podcasts,
Medium,
MSN,
Entrepreneur,
Fund/Build/Scale,
Lifehacker,
Substack,
Flipboard,
Quartz,
Product Hunt
and
ceo @every | the only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Dan Shipper
Vibe Check: Duet—Anthropic's Always-on Agent
Two weeks ago, I was mostly a ChatGPT person. What kept me in OpenAI’s ecosystem was the products around the models. I think it has the best harness in Codex (see my definitive history), the best computer use, and (until Gemini 4) the best writing models. And I’ve come to rely on my Dot, OpenAI’s always-on agent inside ChatGPT, to orchestrate much of my daily work—triaging my day, following up on conversations, and moving things forward without waiting for me to ask.
We Caught an AI Cheating by W atching It Play ‘StarCraft’
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. AI labs call agents “persistent” when they can carry their progress forward across sessions to keep working toward a goal.They can spend days attacking a problem from multiple angles, testing approaches and changing tactics when they fail. This persistence has produced breakthroughs in mathematics and physics. Sometimes, though, the “different approach” involves breaking the rules.
Codex’s C omeback Up Close
Hello, and happy Sunday. This week, Dan Shipper told the story of how a small OpenAI team transformed Codex from a failed launch into the app that took over ChatGPT, remaking the entire company in the process. On Friday, Dan joined senior editor Jack Cheng and me for a behind-the-scenes discussion of the story, including how he used Codex to structure it while keeping his own voice.
Context Engineering Is K nowing When to Start Over
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. The people I work with know I keep Claude’s memory turned off. The same goes for ChatGPT. I’ve written before about why: Memory can be useful, but it can also bring old preferences and irrelevant instructions into a conversation where they don’t belong. Turning memory off doesn’t entirely solve the problem.
The Best Founders Have S omething AI Canât Tell Them
Nearly every startup pivots eventually, says Matt Hartman, founder of Factorial Capital, so he backs founders with a technical edge and hard-earned insights who are best equipped to navigate a change in markets. On this weekâs episode of The Every Podcast, he tells Natalia Quintero how he finds those founders and why vibe coding his own app gave him new respect for paying for software.
How Codex Happened
I can remember exactly when I began to think that OpenAI would lose the mandate of heaven—the seemingly insurmountable lead they had built in AI coding since ChatGPT originally took off. I was in their Mission Bay office, in the summer of 2025, the night before the launch of GPT-5. There was a certain buzz to the building. The overhead lights burned like stage lights, and people seemed to walk the warm rusts and browns of its halls just a little faster than usual.
Vibe Check: Gemini 4 Argon Puts G oogle Back On the Frontier
A breakthrough for Google loyalists, and a great option for frontier hoppers—if they can deal with its outdated harness October 13, 2026 If you work at a traditional company, listening to AI power users rave about Claude Opus, Fable, or ChatGPT over the past year has probably felt a little like being gaslit.
One Agent for the W hole Company
Hello, and happy Sunday. We launched the Every Agent this week, an AI coworker in Slack that your whole company shares. Your team can give it work in a thread, and when a workflow is successful, you can ask it to save the workflow as a skill anyone on the team can run. Also: The Thesis: 2027 after-party on November 5 at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is free for Every subscribers—RSVP to reserve your spot.
You Already Signed T his Off (In the Simulation)
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. “Don’t freak out, I cloned you.” That’s what I told Natalia Quintero, my boss at the time, after I distilled a year of her Slack messages into a file called natalia.md and used it to simulate whether she’d sign off on an email I was about to send a client. She didn’t freak out—in fact, she said it was her favorite call of the day.
Why We Handed Our Agent’s I nfrastructure to Anthropic
Earlier this week, we launched the Every Agent, a coworker that lives in your company’s Slack. In her first piece for Every, engineer Paridhi Agarwal explains how we built it on Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents, why we stopped running our own fleet of agents, and the trade-offs we accepted along the way. If you want to see what a shared agent can do for your own team, join us tomorrow for our camp on working with agents in Slack.—Kate Lee Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
Building a More E fficient Agent
Yesterday we launched the Every Agent, an agentic coworker in Slack that helps your whole company go AI-native. Because we pass its token costs on to you with no markup, every token we save, you save. In today’s Context Window, engineer Paridhi Agarwalexplains how she made the Every Agent more token-efficient and shares a four-step workflow you can use to find token waste in your own software.
Introducing the Every A gent
TL;DR: Today we’re launching the Every Agent, an agentic coworker in Slack that helps you AI-pill your whole company. Delegate complex work, share your best AI experiments with your team, and get personalized Frontier Alerts that ping you when a new model or tool ships and tell you what might be useful for your specific workflows. And you get it all with zero percent markup on tokens: What we pay is what you pay. Try the Every Agent today: It’s our job to stay at the edge of AI.
When Trying to M ake AI Better Makes It Worse
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. It is a well-known fact that the Germans have a word for everything. Kummerspeck, literally “grief bacon,” is the weight you put on from emotional eating. Torschlusspanik, “gate-closing panic,” is the fear that time is running out to do the thing you’re supposed to do with your life.
ChatGPT Wants to Be Your O perating System
Hello, and happy Sunday. After nearly three years and 108 episodes, AI & I has a new name: The Every Podcast. (It’s the show’s second rename; it started life as How Do You Use ChatGPT?) Dan Shipper taped the first episode on site at OpenAI’s DevDay with Sam Altman. A reminder: Thesis: 2027 is down to its last tickets, and the price goes up on October 15.—Kate Lee Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.
How to Get B etter at AI by Asking AI
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. For most of my working life, the first step of any task began with a blank slate: an empty Google Doc, a fresh email, or a new Excel spreadsheet. From researching to writing formulas, the banalities of every stage of construction fell to me. AI made that process faster, but the way I accomplished it wasn’t all that different.
How Sam Altman Uses D ots to Take Back His Time
TL;DR: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits down with Dan Shipper for the first episode of The Every Podcast, the new name for AI & I. It’s still conversations with the people building and using AI, as well as a look behind the scenes at Every. Natalia Quintero joins Dan as co-host later this month. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. This week, Dan sits down with Sam Altman at OpenAI’s annual DevDay, where the company shipped , more than twice as many as last year.
Vibe Check: Dots—Always-on A gents in ChatGPT
Skip to content A proactive agent, by turns flashy and frustrating September 29, 2026 Last week, between back-to-back model reviews, company strategy calls, writing, and my never-ending hunt for apartment furniture on Facebook Marketplace, I tried to change a flight out of San Francisco. I used my Dot—OpenAI’s proactive, always-on agent, released today—to help me book.
Vibe Check: OpenAI D evDay 2026
OpenAI’s DevDay just kicked off, and we’ve got the rundown of the 20-plus(!) products and features the company announced. Here’s what matters, what it means, and what I learned from my hands-on testing. Read with ChatGPTRead with Claude The quick take OpenAI wants ChatGPT to become your operating system for work—documents, slides, and agents, all in one place on your computer. It also wants to let developers and startups build businesses on top of it.
Vibe Check: Sonnet 5.5 Finds Its P lace in Claude’s Crowded Family
We use analytics and advertising tools by default. You can update this anytime. Manage optional tracking categories. Necessary cookies stay on so the site can function. AnalyticsAdvertising and sharing Anthropic's new model is a more capable partner than Sonnet 5, so long as you keep a hand on the wheel and know when to call in Opus September 28, 2026 Sonnet 5.5 is out today, and as a fellow middle child, I feel for it—it has something to prove.
Opus 5.5 and Sol S plit the Team
Hello, and happy Sunday. Three new models dropped this week, and we Vibe Checked each: Opus 5.5 pulled several of our team members back to Claude, GPT-6 Sol is Dan Shipper’s new daily driver, and Grok 4.7 won back one power user (but no one else). Later, Steal these gathers the week’s workflows: Mike Taylor on benchmarks and writing, Jack Cheng and Douglas Brundage on Jev, and Becky Isjwara on video.
Copilot Gets a S eat in the Org Chart
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. In August, Mike Taylor counted 80 Microsoft products called “Copilot.” Among them, he said, were some of the best tools for building agents—if you could navigate onboarding and enterprise IT administration.
Why E vals Are So Hot Right Now
In today’s Context Window, we review Grok 4.7 (“a step backward”?) and explain why evals are suddenly everywhere. Elsewhere, head of social media Becky Isjwara breaks down her workflow for turning Every articles into viral short videos, head of platform Willie Williams argues that Slack agents are the new websites, and we share a fresh crop of Thesis Statements, including entries from Cmpnd’s Drew Breunig, Notion’s Geoffrey Litt, and MIT’s Daniela Rus, about what happens after automation.
How to Get the M ost Out of Jev
Jev is fast, cheap, and accurate enough to handle the judgment calls you’d never pay an LLM to make at scale—is this email urgent, does this paragraph sound like AI, should I escalate this customer service request—on everything, all the time. Today, head of evals Mike Taylor explains what that unlocks, head of marketing Douglas Brundage shares his shortcut for putting Jev to work, and senior editor Jack Cheng shows why Jev is so good at turning intent into action.
Good Writing With AI S tarts Before the Prompt
Last week, head of evals Mike Taylor told us about his 13 beliefs about writing with AI—from putting more into the prompt than you ask the model to produce to living a life worth writing about. His process starts with gathering that raw material: seeking out experiences, debating ideas, and noticing which topics make people’s eyes light up. Today, he shows you how he turns those beliefs into finished pieces, with a process you can adapt to make your own work worth a reader’s time.
Vibe Check: GPT-6 S ol vs. Opus 5.5
Vibe Check Two models, one clear tradeoff. Midjourney/Every illustration. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.
Vibe Check: Opus 5.5 Is Pulling Our C odex Converts Back to Claude
If we’re all being honest, Opus 5 had a bit of a personality problem. It could do impressive work, but asking for a change could turn into an argument, and its explanations needed explanations of their own. It also ran too long on simple tasks, as its ambition outpaced its intelligence. We called it a hard model to love. Most of us stopped trying. Opus 5.5 is different.
How to Create Your O wn Personal AI Benchmark
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Nobody hires a vice president based on their SAT scores. Yet every time a new model drops, AI researchers first check how well it does on a Math Olympiad and a set of multiple-choice trivia, then argue online about whether it’s the smartest model in the world.
Copy Our H omework
Hello, and happy Sunday. We publish workflows, tips, and prompts nearly every day, and we know that at that pace things get lost. So this week we’re trying a different format: a section called “Steal these” that gathers everything from this week’s three Context Window editions.
Vibe Check: Is Astra a B reakthrough for Indie Filmmakers?
At our Think Week in Panama in January, creative studio Afterimage filmed a series of six short films about Every’s work with AI. We’d seen what cofounders Cyrus Duff and Josh Lee could do with a camera, so we were curious when they began testing Astra on footage from real shoots. Could it handle the visual effects they’d normally make themselves?
Why You Should B urn More Tokens
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Every CEO Dan Shipper consumes more than three times as many tokens as the next-highest user at the company. That gap worries him: Are the rest of us keeping our AI bills low by thinking too small? A low token spend isn’t necessarily a problem, Dan says, “but it should be a smoke signal, especially on the engineering team, to be like, ‘Maybe there’s more we can be doing here.’” Every’s OpenAI token leaderboard.
Show Us Y our Folders
You probably know the person with an AI setup that everybody wants to snoop through. Their folders have names. Their agents have jobs. Their system knows where everything lives. Meanwhile, your system is still hoarding mystery screenshots and documents called final-final-2. We feel this at Every. So we let the team see how their colleagues organize their AI systems.
13 Beliefs About AI W riting
Writers in our How We Write Now series have drawn very different lines around AI. Some use it for research and editing but won’t let it write a sentence. Mike Taylor will. He uses models to draft almost everything he publishes. His test is whether he could defend the ideas if a reader showed up to argue. Mike shares the 13 beliefs behind that. He puts more of his own material into the prompt than he asks the model to write. He keeps social posts entirely his own.
Mini-Vibe Check: TypeSafe's Jev J udged Everything I’ve Written in 0.7 Seconds
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Not every language model is destined to be a chatbot. Companies need fast, cheap, reliable AI workflows for processes that run in the background: deciding where to route a customer service request, checking that invoices match a purchase order, or classifying transactions as potential fraud. Today, TypeSafe—a new AI lab—launched Jev, its new model designed to produce structured answers that your code can use directly.
You're Probably S leeping On Computer Use
Today, head of evals Mike Taylor published a Vibe Check of TypeSafe’s Jev, a new kind of model that responds to a fuzzy question with a probability rather than prose, letting your code act on the result directly. It can’t compete with a frontier model on capability but is fast and cheap enough to check work while it’s being done. Mike is also the reason today’s issue is focused on computer use: Astra’s ability to operate apps by clicking, typing, and scrolling changed his mind about the model.
What Playing With AI T aught Me About My Work
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. My childhood make-believe involved quite a bit of multitasking. I’d rollerblade in my front driveway for hours, bouncing a tennis ball on a racket and muttering dialogue for an elaborate storyline in which I was a Jane Austen heroine, or a 10th female member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Yes, I was incredibly cool. That habit faded in my late teens, sort of like my religious faith did.
What to Make of the Anthropic W arning
Hello, and happy Sunday. After a former Anthropic engineer left the company with a public warning about AI risk, I raised the question at a team meeting, and Kaushik Viswanath reports on what his new colleagues made of the question. Some housekeeping: Tickets to the Thesis: 2027 After Party are now on sale for Every subscribers, and conference ticket prices go up next week.—Kate Lee Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.
What I Learn When I Run O ut of AI
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. I keep running out of access to the most capable AI models before the workweek is finished. Lately, I’ve come to realize that may be useful. Anthropic’s limits on both my work and personal Claude subscriptions reset at the start of the week. When they do, I gorge on the newly available capacity, running Fable on its highest effort levels and watching agents orchestrate subagents and dynamic workflows on multiple projects.
Evals for E veryone
Astra and Fable 5.1 can ace a graduate-level science exam, but no public benchmark will tell you whether a model knows where you’d put a comma or how many ideas belong on a slide.
What Writers Who Use AI W ant You to Know
Last week we launched How We Write Now, a series about how writers are using AI, starting with Katie Parrott’s guide to Compound Writing—her framework for developing ideas, shaping drafts, and carrying what you learn into the next piece.
To Read—Or N ot to Read the Code?
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. I’m shipping more than I ever have, but I think my brain has gotten softer. For the last year, I’ve hunted for the parts of coding that still needed me, then replaced myself with something that could do it, whether that’s a skill, a framework, a data source, or a step that routes work to the next agent. This is the essence of Compound Engineering: Teach the system to work once, and it does that work forever.
A Split V erdict on Fable vs. Astra
Hello, and happy Sunday. The models kept coming this week—Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 on Tuesday, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on Thursday—and Katie Parrott compared the two in a report from our end-of-week camp for paid subscribers, where the team came away split. Between the releases, we kicked off our How We Write Now series with her guide to Compound Writing, her system for writing with AI, adapted from Kieran Klaassen’s Compound Engineering.
The Folder Is the A gent
Next week, we’ll be publishing a reflection from Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen on how human builders can keep compounding—rather than switching off—once Compound Engineering removes them as the production bottleneck. In anticipation, we’re republishing his April piece on the folder-as-agent approach that let him orchestrate 44 specialized agents sustainably. Read the full compound engineering guide and install the plugin.—Kaushik Viswanath Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
Vibe Check: GPT-6 Astra Is a Big U pgrade With Some Bad Habits
OpenAI’s new model impressed us with writing, operating software, and visual design. Anthropic’s Fable still has better instincts for building a product. September 3, 2026 GPT-6 Astra wrote the first draft of this Vibe Check from a single prompt. Every’s cofounder and CEO, Dan Shipper, thought I had written it. “Tbh I didn’t realize this wasn’t you,” he wrote when I shared the draft.
Transcript: 'How Every's Star Writer Turned Her Career Coach Into an AI Employee'
The transcript of AI & I with Every staff writer Katie Parrott, hosted by Natalia Quintero, is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
How an Every Staff Writer Developed C ompound Writing
Hello! I’m Kaushik Viswanath, the new managing editor at Every. In my first week here I’ve had the pleasure of getting to meet much of the Every team, including staff writer Katie Parrott.
Vibe Check: Fable 5.1—Anthropic Is S o Back (Again)
Vibe Check Our tests show where it replaces Fable and Opus—and where we’re keeping the alternatives Anthropic is so back. The company just released Fable 5.1, the successor to the model we called the best coder in the world, Fable 5. After lackluster reception for its last two releases, Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, the new model had us all wondering where the next Anthropic release would fall. Bottom line: it’s a great model.
What We Learned From 15 H ours of Anthropic Certification Training
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. Fifteen years ago, I took my first online course on edX, a learning provider founded by MIT and Harvard. At the time, edX was cutting edge and I binge-watched a ton of courses. (I still love and recommend Michael Sandel’s course Justice, but that’s beside the point.) I found myself recalling that time when I took four courses earlier this summer to earn our team Anthropic certification.
Our Agents, O urselves
Hello, and happy Sunday. When OpenAI folded Codex into ChatGPT in mid-July—in a move known as the merge—the coding tool became a general-purpose workspace, and the setup most knowledge workers had learned changed. So Katie Parrott rebuilt our guide from scratch: ChatGPT for Knowledge Work is a complete walkthrough of the merged app—16 workflows from the Every team, recast for what now lives in Chat, Work, and Codex, plus the new goals, projects, and scheduled tasks.
33 Questions E xecutives Ask About AI—Answered
Natalia Quintero, who leads Every’s consulting practice, has spoken with more than 100 companies about AI adoption, including the New York Times and the hedge fund Walleye Capital. In June, she and Mike Taylor—now Every’s head of evals practice—hosted a live webinar for 400 executives on how organizations can adopt and implement AI without stalling out.
Our ChatGPT and OpenClaw G uides Just Got an Overhaul
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox. We talk about AI progress like it’s a race between models. That’s the part with version numbers, and what you argue about over dinner. But the model is only one piece. It reaches your work through the app you open it in, the files and tools you let it touch, the instructions you’ve saved from last time, and the person keeping all of that from going stale.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Dan
Contact Dan, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack