The Code Red response.

A fork in the road.

And new results.

Topics for this week:

• The Wind Down

• Fork in the Road

• Brand Pause Benefits

• Red Alert Response

• Up and Coming

The Wind Down

Only 3 newsletters left for the rest of the year!

I haven’t done it yet, but I plan to go back and review where things were last year so I can recap in one of these last few emails of 2025.

There are projects that will continue for next year, but a number of projects that won’t, so I’m compiling that list.

Divs Design will continue on, supporting websites, SEO and Wave for now.

And maybe even with a new landing page to support it.

But some of the AI and Automation endeavors may take a backseat.

Too many things happening with not enough results.

Divs Cloud may make a return instead, with a renewed focus on SaaS, aided by SEO.

And YouTube may transition to more software and AI, but less Automation.

Lots of possibilities as usual, just starting to map out what those may look like for2026.

So more to come on the final list, but looking forward to fully re-evaluating while trying to wind down a very eventful year.

Full list hopefully early next year.

Fork in the Road

Somehow I’ve been living financially independent for more than 2.5 years now.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but at the same time the pressure has been increasing.

Which is another reason for re-evaluating my current list of projects from above.

Good to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Which isn’t out of the ordinary, I probably re-evalutate a little too often.

But there’s also another reason.

I may have the opportunity to return to a full-time role, and if I take a new position, I will have make the list much shorter.

Going back to the working world would take up quite a bit more time day-to-day and leave a lot less time for so many projects, but the ones that do make the cut could be done properly, without the constant pressure that it needs to highly efficient and highly profitable.

It’s been a great 2.5 half years of working for myself, but it may be coming to an end soon.

At least in the full-time sense.

I’ll for sure continue to have work for myself on the side, but I would also have a boss and Monday-through-Friday responsibilities taking priority again.

Nothing official at this point but there’s a high likelihood in the near future.

More to come on what’s next for the new year.

Brand Pause Benefits

I’ve pretty much paused all content at this point while figuring out what’s happening next.

But despite the pause, there’s still growth!

Yet again, the beauty of the almighty algorithm working it’s magic.

Actually multiple algorithms at this point.

All thanks to the impressive Blotato system from a few weeks ago.

I’ll be anxious to get that automation repurposing TikToks to multiple platforms again.

Specially since posting to TikTok was actually boosting my YouTube growth.

I managed to post all of 6 TikToks but still gained 2 subscribers and more than 6000 views on YouTube because of those repurposed TikToks, not including the 20+ followers and 10k views on TikTok.

If I keep following the Blotato creator’s advice about posting 2 TikToks a day consistently for 6 months, it does seem like 500,000 followers/subscribers across all platforms is a very realistic outcome.

And on top of that, YouTube itself is still growing my Skool community, even when I haven’t posted an n8n video in a few weeks now.

Nearing 800 members just from YouTube traffic alone.

So despite pausing most of my social media efforts, I’m still seeing the benefits.

Hard to deny the impact of regular posting and letting internet traffic do it’s thing even when I’m not actively pursuing growth.

Red Alert Response

Shortly after OpenAI’s internal “Red Alert” memo, rumors were they already had new AI models ready to go to try to bring them back to the top of the leaderboards.

Sure enough, yesterday they tweeted that GPT-5.2 Auto, Instant, Thinking and Pro were all rolling out to everyone with a paid account, and free accounts today.

Sporting some impressive evals, it does seem to be closer to the top than 5.1:

It’s getting hard to tell if these benchmarks are valuable or not anymore, but GPT-5.2 Pro (High) seems to be the highest performing on the “ARC-AGI-1” test:

The green dot farther to the right seems to be Gemini 3 Pro and GPT is performing higher than that so it may be the leader in “General Intelligence” for now.

But with a quick release, it’s also a little more expensive than GPT-5.1, which probably isn’t too surprising.

Up $.50 for input and up $4.00 on output from gpt-5.1 which isn’t a terrible hike.

What’s really interesting here is that gpt-5.2-pro released with the API when gpt-5.1-pro didn’t have an API yet.

But gpt-5.2-pro is also $21 for 1 million tokens in and $168 (🤯) per million tokens out.

That may be partly why they were hesitant to release 5.1-pro’s API.

These new releases have moved gpt up in the LMArena rankings so it may gain them back some traction.

But it also may kick off another round of updates from all the other model leaders.

Sounds like Grok 4.20 is already in the release rumor-mill so there may be another new one in the top spot here soon…

Up And Coming

I’m fairly tuned into the AI market but not quite to professional levels yet, so I completely missed this one.

Looking at the GPT 5.2 benchmark posts and responses on X, I saw someone point out that the “poetiq” model was missing from the evals.

I had never heard of poetiq.

Apparently it’s a new model created by former Google Deepmind developers who broke off to start their own project.

Google Deepmind might actually be the secret AI winner right now because it’s very limited access but seems to test completely off the charts on all the evals.

The problem is it isn’t publicly available so the results can’t be independently verified, just have to trust Google and those with access.

So it would not be surprising to see a team that worked on the potential AI lead create a new model that’s already a top performer.

This is a week old so naturally it’s completely out of date, but Poetiq looks to be right on par with GPT-5.2. for the ARC-AGI-2 test.

We’ll see if more comes out about Poetiq, but it might be one to keep an eye on as the AI race continues.

And that’s it for this week. New opportunities, new releases and new models.

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters.

I also have a Free Skool community if you want to join for n8n workflows and more AI talk: https://www.skool.com/learn-automation-ai/about?ref=1c7ba6137dfc45878406f6f6fcf2c316

Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].

Thanks for reading!