Issue #1: GPT-5.6 arrives, Codex disappears, and Fable gets a stay of execution

Welcome to issue #1 of The New Way — the daily pulse of AI coding tools: what shipped, what matters, what's next. The one read that keeps up so you don't have to.

The model war

GPT-5.6 is here: cheaper than Opus, with multi-agent built in

OpenAI's new flagship family (Luna/Terra/Sol) landed Thursday. Skip the launch post — Simon Willison's independent notes are the read that matters: programmatic tool calling and multi-agent land in the API, Sol undercuts Opus on price, and yes, there are 18 pelicans.

Notes on GPT-5.6, which includes some interesting new additions to the API (programmatic tool calling and multi-agent in particular) - plus 18 pelicans for the 6 reasoning levels and 3 new models: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/9/g...

— Simon Willison (@simonwillison.net) 2026-07-09T19:48:51.988Z

OpenAI is killing Codex as a standalone — it's becoming ChatGPT's agent

Four days after shipping GPT-5.6, OpenAI started folding Codex into ChatGPT as the "superapp." Theo's teardown of what that means for your workflow — and why the agent, not the editor, is where OpenAI thinks the money is.

Fable 5 stays free for paid users — second extension, now through July 19

Anthropic's preview of Claude Fable 5 on paid plans got extended again — that's twice now — and Claude Code keeps its raised rate limits. Nearly 5,000 upvotes of relief on r/ClaudeAI, which is also a warning about building your workflow on a promo deadline.

Access has been extended!
by u/DavidCBlack in ClaudeAI

Grok 4.5: "pretty damn good and REALLY well priced" — and already in Cursor

The week's other model launch, in one working dev's verdict — Theo, quote-tweeting Cursor's announcement. With Cursor now in SpaceX's orbit, Grok-in-your-editor just stopped being hypothetical.

Shipping with AI: what works, what breaks

Anthropic's own math: Fable orchestrates, cheap models execute — 96% of the performance at 46% of the cost

First-party benchmarks for the multi-model pattern, and you can reproduce it in Claude Code today — the r/ClaudeAI thread has the setup.

Anthropic just benchmarked "Fable 5 orchestrates, cheap models execute": 96% of the performance at 46% of the cost. You can run this pattern in Claude Code today
by u/john990129 in ClaudeAI

The AI-everywhere startup whose product didn't degrade — thanks to boring old tests

Gergely Orosz asked their infra lead how. The answer wasn't a new tool: an "irrationally thorough" E2E suite built back when humans wrote the bugs. Quality infrastructure is the AI multiplier nobody tweets about.

Talking w a larger startup whose product seems to not have degraded (vs many other products), even though they also use a AI for coding everywhere. Asked an infra lead: how? "Even before AI, we were paranoid about quality, and built this irrationally thorough E2E testing system"

— Gergely Orosz (@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com) 2026-07-08T15:21:02.213Z

Cloudflare's Workers lead just banned AI-written PR descriptions

Kenton Varda's moratorium: they narrate the obvious and omit the framing reviewers actually need. Expect this rule to reach your team within the quarter.

Kent Beck: "If these tools are so good, where's all the magic software?"

The man who wrote the book on testing sees more bugs now, in software that was rock solid before. The uncomfortable question of the year.

"If these tools are so good, where's all the magic software?" I see more bugs now, in software that was rock solid before. The uncomfortable question: when does that hit something load-bearing? Has it already?

— Kent Beck (@kentbeck.com) 2026-07-07T17:03:03.073Z

Open + local

Open models get "6 months to live" — and the threat is policy, not capability

Nathan Lambert's warning. If any part of your stack assumes a steady flow of open weights, this is your required reading.

6 months to live for open models Staring down the barrel of policy action that could make open models a permanent second class citizen. We need to a) win on the distillation issue and b) form a coalition www.interconnects.ai/p/6-months-t...

— Nathan Lambert (@natolambert.bsky.social) 2026-07-12T16:54:38.350Z

A 35B model running locally one-shotted a playable flight simulator

Qwen3.6 in opencode, from r/LocalLLaMA — with a practical twist buried in the thread: Q8 on CPU beat Q4 on GPU. Local coding models are quietly getting real.

Qwen3.6 35B-A3B (Q8_0, no KV quant) single prompt in opencode: "Create a beautiful, relaxing flight simulator in a single html file with mountains, clouds, and endless procedural terrain"
by u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ in LocalLLaMA

Straight from the builders

Claude Code began as safety research — "We are 1% done"

Boris Cherny, its creator, tells the origin story for the first time. Useful context for every roadmap bet you're making on it.

How Claude actually thinks — from the people who built it

Anthropic's first-party explainer of thinking levels. Ten minutes that will change how much you pay for reasoning in Claude Code.

That's issue #1

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The New Way is human-curated — a person picks every story. The summaries are written with AI (Claude) and reviewed before we hit send.