Skills are taking over - Ben's Bites

Source: original

Skills are taking over

A new model I'm excited about

Jan 27, 2026

The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.

Hey folks,

OpenAI hosted a town hall answering questions from builders. I used YouTube’s “Ask” button to get the gist: OpenAI can drive costs down by 100x in the next two years, still very focused on general models and will have a model with better writing in GPT-5.x

Andrej Karpathy posted his reflections on where we’re at with coding agents/vibe coding. I have similar feelings. The TLDR is; people are mostly moving to predominantly agent work with minimal human input, “no more IDEs” + Agent swarms are too hypey right now, agents just power through tasks and never get tired (which is insane to think about if you consider it a super-intelligent teammate), feeling way faster with what you can produce and instead of us lounging on the beach we’re, shock, producing more, learning how to guide models is becoming an art - write failing tests and then pass them or put in a loop with a browser to verify, working with agents is genuinely so fun and 2026 will be the year of slop - given the above advancements (I agree - but slopping our way to learn and produce things that aren’t slop is still a reasonable path).

I jumped on Every’s Vibe Code Camp (full recording here) alongside other well-known builders. Chatting about how I reverse engineer tools, build stuff and generally tinker a lot with agents and code (even though I’m not technical).

Signals - Droid learns from all its failures and suggests actionable work items for the team to improve itself. Currently, humans review and merge the changes, but these are early signs of self-improving agents.

Claude now has interactive interfaces for apps like Slack, Asana, Figma and more. Very similar to ChatGPT Apps and built on top of MCP.

Claude Code is replacing Todos with Tasks. Suitable for longer projects (as models improve), and saved on your device so that multiple agents can access/complete them.

ChatGPT can now pip/npm install packages , run bash and download files in Code Interpreter.

Vercel has built skills.sh - A directory for agent skills and a simple way to install them. Context7 has a similar attempt. Some skills I came across over the weekend:

Kimi K2.5 is a new open-weights model from China, and it scores better than Opus 4.5 or GPT-5.2 on benchmarks in all areas other than coding. It’s also great at vision like Gemini 3 Pro, and it’s priced similarly to Gemini 3 Flash. This has actually got me excited to try it, as they are also going hard on tooling around the model with Kimi Code (CLI) and their web app for slides generation, general tasks and more. Also see, Qwen 3 Max Thinking, which has similar performance but not open weights.

Enterprises hold valuable data locked inside content, but manual processes make it difficult to unlock. Box Extract securely & accurately extracts valuable data at scale to drive faster decisions & automated workflows. Learn more from Box on how to transform enterprise content into actionable data.*

🌐What I’m consuming

⚙️ Tools and demos

🥣 Dev Dish

🍦 Afters

That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋

PreviousNext