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- Agent Automation, Browsers and Cowork
Not a lot of development this week for me, but plenty planned for next week.
And a very busy week in the AI development world.
Topics for this week:
Wave Refresh
Wave has taken a backseat for a while now with a few other projects taking priority but that’s about to change.
There’s been a growing backlog of items to update or fix, so next week I’ll be cutting that backlog down as much as I can.
Mostly admin items like user and location management, but a few other features are on the list with improvements to notifications, social posts, and of course, bug fixes.
I always enjoy working on Wave once I get back into the swing of it, so I’m looking forward to jumping back in and knocking out what I can.
Plus this will be a nice excuse to test out some of the newer coding models since I haven’t been as deep in development lately.
Anxious to stretch my agentic coding capabilities and see what Cursor and maybe Claude Code can do in a short amount of time.
Custom Automations
I haven’t mentioned n8n lately because I haven’t really touched it in the last few months.
I’ve thought about it quite a bit, but there’s a few things that cause me to talk myself out of going back to an automation platform.
Cost is part of it, having a dedicated machine to run it is another, but like I’ve mentioned in the past, I’d rather be in the code.
And n8n is “no-code”.
Similar to the financial app vs spreadsheet comparison last week, n8n is the paid budget tracking app that’s limited in features.
There’s way more flexibility in building something custom than building something custom inside another platform.
And maybe this n8n aversion is really just driven by the current Claude Code hype.
The only hang up with Claude Code is a scheduled task to kick off the terminal command, but Anthropic might have solved that problem with the most recent release.
ChatGPT does has scheduled tasks, but they’re pretty straightforward - basically repeat the specified prompt at the designated interval, and they exist in the background.
But Codex or Claude Code have a more agentic approach that expands being “do this thing at this time” so really I guess this is about scheduling custom agentic activity.
And that concept makes n8n feel obsolete.
You don’t need an automation platform when you have an engineer to delegate tasks too, even if that engineer lives in the cloud.
Along with Wave, agentic automation is also on the list for the next few weeks.
I’ll report back if I find anything exciting in the world of scheduled agents.
Agent Options
There will always be a debate on which model is the best at the moment, and right now GPT-5.2/Codex and Claude Opus 4.5 seem to be at the top.
Some are saying Gemini 3 is good if you can keep it in-check with proper prompting.
Grok 4.20 should be released soon and it’s inventing new math apparently.
Supposedly OpenAI has a new model on the horizon that might be even better than the unreleased Grok 4.20.
And the obvious answer to which model is the best is the most unfun answer.
The answer is… it depends.
Each model is good at different things, and people have different use cases.
The big debate right now is Opus 4.5 vs GPT 5.2
Crazy to think that’s the big debate.
Already passed the point of arguing that AI will ever be good at code, now it’s do I want for GPT to be slower but make less mistakes, or use Opus 4.5 to be faster and need to check more of its work.
It’s really down to personal preference.
Getting back into code next week, I’m sure I’ll have more opinions on this.
I’ll for sure be resubscribing to Claude and trying all these flows for myself.
Excited to see the results.
Code Building Code
Things are really accelerating at this point with AI writing more and more code.
Cursor is working on building a web browser, and they let AI build a majority of it.
Anthropic launched a new desktop app feature called “Cowork” where it runs in the background and can interact with your computer.
Apparently they let Claude Code build all of Cowork:
An entire desktop app feature built in a week with Claude Code.
I’m sure humans were involved to some extent for both projects, but a majority of the work is being done with AI taking the reigns.
Things are not going to slow down any time soon.
OpenAI has already said their last few new models have been improved by the existing models doing a majority of the coding.
More code is going to lead to more code.
Claude Cowork
This isn’t Anthropic’s first attempt at letting Claude control your computer, but it sounds like this attempt is much better.
You can download the Claude app, which now features Cowork, point it at a folder on your desktop, and it can get to work reading, creating, updating or renaming files.
It’s finally time to clean up all those documents and screenshots hanging out on the desktop.
After that, Cowork can be connected to other apps on your computer or even given access to the web through their Chrome extension so that it can looks things up and get additional context for the task at hand.
Super promising tool that I just setup so I’ll be looking forward to having it get to work on some things on my machine.
I could certainly use some help reorganizing files and folders.
Before today, I’ve been using the ChatGPT desktop app for a few months.
It has been surprisingly convenient to be able to Cmd + Tab to GPT at any time to ask a question or ask it generate something, and maybe even more powerful is being able to use the Cmd + Shift + 2 shortcut to take a screenshot of whatever window I was just looking at so that I can ask GPT to look at it and answer questions.
The ChatGPT app has some connectivity to other apps too, and it can be connected to Cursor or the Terminal or a few other coding related applications to work within that connection, but otherwise, it’s sort of self-contained to just working within the limitations of the GPT conversations.
The Cowork feature of the Claude app opens up way more possibilities beyond the GPT app.
The Cowork tab also adds a nice interface for managing tasks which GPT has indirectly, but Cowork makes it much more upfront.
Cowork tab of Claude Desktop
Looking forward to testing both desktop apps out side by side to see which one I end up using more.
More updates on Claude Cowork soon.
Let me know if you end up trying it out!
And that’s it for this week. Plenty of AI development happening now and planned for the future.
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!