Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IWednesday, September 23, 2026 · 57° & overcast on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war

Simon Willison · made the Sunday

Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped yesterday — Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 per million, a 20% cut from Opus 5, against GPT-6 Sol at $2/$10 and GPT-6 Luna at $0.10/$0.50, which halves the previous generation's price across the board. The number to sit with is Luna's: a dime per million input tokens is cheap enough to change which parts of a pipeline you let a model touch at all, and it undercuts the position Grok 4.7 was holding at $2/$6 a day earlier. Willison's testing turns up the useful caution, which is that more reasoning is now actively a way to lose — Opus 5.5 at maximum thinking blew through the 128K output limit while still deliberating, at $2.56 and twenty minutes a try, while Fable 5.1 at the same setting simply answered. The floor is falling out of the mid-tier while the top of the range holds at $10/$50, which is the shape of a market segmenting rather than one commoditizing.

AI & Agents

Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer

How will AI change operating systems? Part 2: Windows

The interesting move is that Windows is giving agents identities — Entra ID accounts that show up in Task Manager next to human users, so an agent's activity can be monitored and scanned like anyone else's. Underneath that, Microsoft Execution Containers let you dial containment per tool through a JSON policy, from bare process isolation up through WSL, lightweight Hyper-V, and a full VM, with enterprise fleets managed via Intune. Whatever you think of Windows as a dev machine, this is the first serious attempt to answer the question every agent runtime eventually hits: what is the unit of trust, and who gets to set it.

Nathan Lambert, Interconnects

The current balance of power in open models

Chinese open-weight models have passed 3.2 billion Hugging Face downloads — roughly twice the American total — account for more than 80% of OpenRouter inference volume, and now trail the closed frontier by something like two to five months rather than a generation. Lambert's estimate that distillation explains only one or two months of that gap is the load-bearing claim, because it reframes the lead as a real engineering result rather than a copying artifact. For anyone costing out an agent pipeline, the practical version is that the cheap tier of your stack increasingly has a Chinese name on it, and the companies already there are not small ones.

Engineering & Leadership

Stephane Moreau, LeadDev

How engineering managers actually get rated

The attribution problem stated plainly: an engineer can point at the thing they built, while a manager's contribution has to be inferred from a team's outcome, which means evaluators fall back on sentiment and 360s. The number worth carrying into your next calibration is that two supervisors agree less about a manager (r=.57) than about an individual contributor (r=.68) — the noise is measured, not imagined. Moreau's fix is unglamorous and correct: stop saying 'my team delivered the migration' and start saying which decision, in which month, made it deliverable.

Sage Lazzaro, LeadDev

Meet the developers rejecting AI

Four developers who have opted out entirely, including a CTO who left rather than hand-code under protest and a twenty-year veteran who announced his exit to 900,000 viewers knowing what it might cost him. The objections are not all sentimental — one describes refactoring generated output from thousands of lines to hundreds, and the code being unreadable exactly when an incident required reading it. Worth an hour from someone going deliberately the other way, if only because these are the people your hiring process will meet and misread.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Introducing Worker Previews: isolated preview environments for every change your agent makes

Every Git branch gets its own URL, config, observability, and — the part that matters — its own Durable Object namespace and Container application, so a bad migration stays inside the branch instead of landing on production state. A `previews` block in the Wrangler config defines the base, individual previews override from there, and `npx wrangler preview` does the rest. The honest limitations are listed too: service bindings still route to production Workers, and queue consumers and Workflows don't isolate yet, which is worth knowing before you point an agent at this and walk away.

Carson Gross, htmx

Markdown in /src

Gross's argument is that Markdown has quietly become source code rather than documentation, and therefore belongs in `src/md/` under version control — an index, an overview, a file per feature, data model, API, and piece of infrastructure — with the code and tests derived from it. The motivation is that a compiler keeps its input and an LLM session throws it away, so the intent behind generated code lives nowhere greppable, diffable, or reviewable. It is the same instinct behind every AGENTS.md in the wild, but pushed to the point where the spec is the artifact and the implementation is the build output.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag · made the Sunday

Here's the UWS Dish: Breads Bakery's chocolate babka

Breads braids theirs instead of loafing it, and layers Nutella and chocolate chips in with the dark chocolate so the ribbons come out tight and irregular rather than neat — $18.95 at Broadway and 63rd. If you bake, the braid is the tell: it's a structural choice that trades the clean loaf cross-section for more surface, more edges, and a crumb that stays moist longer.

Hell Gate

Photographer Alfredo Jimagua wants you to find beauty in Sunnyside and Washington Heights

Jimagua shoots working-class New Yorkers candidly — his stated aim is to make known the things people take for granted — and his show 'Seeds of Revolution' is up now at Word Up Community Bookshop in Washington Heights, with the opening reception this Friday. A free reception at a volunteer-run bookstore is a low-cost evening and a part of the city most Manhattan itineraries route around.

Diversions

Susan Coll, Literary Hub

What learning to paint and reading The Elements of Style have in common

Coll quits writing for painting during a bad year, fails to draw a pencil convincingly, and gets talked back to her manuscript by an instructor being kind about it. What she brings back is the transferable part — that 'omit needless words' and knowing which shapes to leave out are the same discipline, and that both are learned by drawing badly for a while first.

Loose Change

Maya Barkai

Walking Men Worldwide

Maya Barkai collected pedestrian-signal figures from cities around the world, at human scale, and installed them as a photographic collage on construction fencing — first on Church Street beside the World Trade Center site from 2010 to 2013, then in Perm, Bat-Yam, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Taipei. Lined up together they stop reading as signage and start reading as portraiture: each city's little green man has a stride, a posture, a degree of hurry, and none of them were drawn by anyone trying to make art. It is the largest body of anonymous public design on earth, and almost nobody has ever looked at one on purpose.

The Back Page

Ed Aarons, The Guardian

Édouard Mendy: 'Winning Afcon was 10 times better than the Champions League'

The keeper from the 2021 Champions League side has retired from Senegal at 34, turning down a personal call from Patrick Vieira, and ranks a disputed Afcon final well above the night in Porto. The detail worth the read is his account of reading Brahim Díaz's Panenka two steps out — he noticed the slow-down came early, stayed up, and caught it — after a seventeen-minute protest, a yellow card, a stolen towel, and lasers in his eyes. CAS hears Senegal's appeal next month; Mendy's position is that the trophy was lifted and you can't unlift it.

Around town

Fri Sep 26 · 5:45pm, also Mon Sep 29 · 8:10pm

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Diaries (U.S. premiere)

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

The U.S. premiere, and the quieter companion to the concert film — the footage a man shoots when he is not performing, which is usually the part that gets edited out.

casual

Sat Sep 26 · 10:00am

104th Street Yard Sale

West 104th Street, Upper West Side

The whole block turns out, there is a raffle with real money in it, and it is the one morning a year the neighborhood's closets are legible from the sidewalk. Ten minutes from the front door.

casual

Sat Oct 3 · 4:45pm

Valie Export: Invisible Adversaries

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

A 1977 Austrian film about a photographer convinced her neighbors are being replaced, introduced by the filmmaker Lynne Sachs. Export built her reputation on performance work that treated the camera as an instrument of confrontation, and the paranoia here is formal as much as narrative.

casual

Thu Oct 8 · 8:30am

Elastic{On} New York

Convene, 30 Hudson Yards

A full day on search and observability at the scale where those two stop being separate problems — the useful sessions are the ones where someone shows the query patterns that fell over first.

professional

Sat Oct 10 · 11:30am

Latinos x AI Hackathon

1 World Trade Center, 285 Fulton St

A Saturday build day at 1WTC, which is a better read on what people are actually shipping with agents than any evening panel, and a cheap way to meet the builders behind the demos.

professional

Quote of the day

“That rhythm — I think that's a beautiful, creative process.”

— Brett Chalupa, on writing code by hand

On this day

September 23, 1962 — Philharmonic Hall opens at Lincoln Center, the first building of the complex, and sounds so wrong that the next sixty years are spent fixing it: gutted, renamed twice, and not actually finished until 2022.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Two labs shipped on the same morning and the mid-tier price floor fell through, which is the sort of thing that reads as noise on the day and as a hinge in six months.