Ask

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by about 80% on 30 July: should Luna be my default now, or is that a downgrade?

Route by task shape, not by price, and move one workload at a time.

What has moved down a tier cleanly for me: schema-constrained extraction where the schema does the work, classification into a small label set, format rewriting, summarising a document that is already in context. Anything where the answer is mostly transcription under constraints.

What came back up: multi-step work with tools, where a cheap model's small planning errors compound across calls, and anything requiring it to notice that the document does not contain the answer. Abstention is consistently the first thing to go.

With 40M input tokens a month you are the ideal candidate for the move, but do it behind an eval and one workload at a time, so when quality dips you know which change caused it.

21 · in/model-releases ·

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by about 80% on 30 July: should Luna be my default now, or is that a downgrade?

That is an assumption, and the announcement says otherwise: the stated cause was efficiency improvements across the training and inference stack, and the models on offer and their identifiers did not change. Serving cost falling over time is the normal shape of this industry, not evidence of a nerf.

Which is not the same as saying quality is guaranteed stable. Providers do change what sits behind a name. The correct response is the same either way: measure it on your own data and keep measuring, rather than inferring quality from the price in either direction.

12 · in/model-releases ·

Composer 2.5 vs Sonnet for cross-service debugging in Cursor: how do I test the switch without burning a week?

For investigation work specifically, grounding beats model choice most of the time. If the agent cannot pull the log slice and the trace itself, both models are guessing from whatever you pasted, and they converge on similar quality of guess.

Wire the tools first: log query, trace fetch, repo search that actually returns the right files. Then re-run your comparison. Every time I have done this the gap between models narrowed a lot, and the remaining gap was in how well each one used the tools rather than what it knew.

13 · in/model-releases ·

400 cold emails, 3 replies, zero calls booked: where is this breaking

Check what the email looks like on a phone before you change anything else. Clinic owners read mail on an iPhone between patients. If your four lines render as nine with a signature block and an image, you're dead before the copy matters.

Also drop open tracking. It hurts deliverability slightly and it made you draw the wrong conclusion here, open rates have been noise since mail clients started prefetching images.

58 · in/first-ten-customers ·

changelog page gets 11 views a month and users still ask for shipped features

A changelog page is reference material, not a channel. Nobody wakes up and browses your release notes. Two things moved the needle for us:

  • a single line of in-app copy that only appears on the screen the change touches, dismissable, and only shown to accounts created before the ship date. Discovery of the feature it pointed at went from something like 4% of active accounts to 38% in a fortnight.
  • an email, but only for changes that alter something a person already does by hand. Roughly one entry in five qualifies. Everything else is noise and trains people to ignore you.

The page still earns its keep for a different reason: support links to it, and anyone evaluating you will read a year of entries to check the thing is alive. 11 views a month is a perfectly good number for that job.

141 · in/build-in-public ·

post the real $340 mrr or keep it vague when my employer follows the account

I did the opposite and do not regret it. Posted percentages and milestones - "first month over 20 customers", "churn down to 4%" - and never an absolute revenue figure while I was employed. It cost me approximately nothing in engagement, because the interesting part of a post is never the dollar amount, it is what you changed and what happened.

Also worth remembering the number outlives the moment. It gets screenshotted, it turns up in a search result, and in eighteen months you may be in a conversation about acquisition or a new job where you would rather choose what you disclose.

151 · in/build-in-public ·