An old coding buddy is back.

And an old project revitalized.

And an n8n replacement?

Topics for this week:

• Wave Events

• YouTube Cadence

• A Quick Year Break

• Old New Code Buddy

• No More n8n?

Wave Events

Taking a slight detour from the Wave marketplace for now to focus on monetizing Wave more directly.

Getting venues to sign up for a Stripe Connect account shouldn’t be too much of a challenge but it’s a harder ask than something like “Wave will bring you 100 people for free on Saturday”.

Wave gets to charge tickets for the event, the venue gets all the food and drink business and it’s a win-win.

Since a Wave event in this situation would be owned by Wave, but hosted at a venue, it seemed logical to make the event button a separate button.

And a nice looking button at that.

I had Claude Sonnet 4.5 cook that one up and it did a spectacular job.

I needed a number of other screens to help create and manage the information about the event and Sonnet 4.5 killed it with those too.

After almost a year, Claude is still helping Wave look clean.

With those mocks and most of the database schema built out, Wave Events should be ready to integrate with Stripe APIs this week.

Plenty more work to be done, but it’s looking good so far.

YouTube Cadence

I’ve had a recent flair up of activity with clients and projects so YouTube is starting to fall behind at the moment.

I did start the Live Stream streak back up this week, 4 of out the 5 days, with plans to get a Friday stream in after this newsletter is done.

But I broke the “1 video per week” cadence last week by missing an upload on Thursday.

I got a video done on Monday instead and it’s slowly building momentum, almost 100 views as of this morning.

I’ve been leaning into what brings people to my channel at this point, so that meant sticking with Nano Banana for now.

I’m still genuinely impressed with Nano Banana every time I use it.

I also know I need to get more social media content going so I thought a system that could generate some options would be useful.

As often as you want, this system will take a prompt, choose a template image and add a word from a word bank to the appropriate image chosen by GPT.

Pretty pleased with how this one turned out, not too complicated but still helpful.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

A Quick Year Break

After nearly a year, The Dev Sync will return with Episode 11!

And it will have a special guest!

We recorded last night so I haven’t had a chance to edit it yet.

The plan is to get it uploaded on Monday.

The last episode was just about 1 year ago, October 24, 2024, which is really wild to think that much time has slipped away.

It was great to get the gang back together and ramble about AI again.

A lot has changed since then!

I built an entire app in that time and there have been 4 different versions of Claude Sonnet between then and now.

And plenty more to discuss.

Here’s the last episode in case you want to get caught up for the new one:

Old New Coding Buddy

I finally gave Claude Sonnet 4.5 a try this week, and at first I was really impressed.

Sonnet 3.5 was my main coding companion when I started Wave and it helped built out most of the original styling of all the screens.

But after a while, I got frustrated with Sonnet’s struggle to stay on task.

I ended up finding a lot of luck with Gemini Pro 2.5 instead.

And even more recently I’ve had a lot of success with GPT-5 within Cursor.

But hearing the hype around Sonnet 4.5 I had to give it a shot.

And as I highlighted above, the results were really great.

New screens looked amazing on the first try, which is quite a feat!

Very satisfying to see the result be nearly perfect with minimal prompting.

And it did so with maybe only 1 line changed that didn’t need to be changed.

But in that one particular trial session, a little over 2 hours of vibe coding which is on the shorter side, Cursor warned me I was on track to burn up my $20 in credits by October 6.

This was on October 5.

Sonnet was using $20 of processing in a few hours, where GPT would last me for a few weeks.

Clearly there is a big price discrepancy.

• gpt-5’s cost for 1.2 million tokens: $.17 

• sonnet 4.5’s cost for 1.1 million tokens: $.95 

This pretty accurately lines up with the printed prices for each service:

I really liked the visuals of Sonnet 4.5 but it might be a little too pricey to use it for everything.

The plan for now will be gpt-5 is the workhorse in Cursor, only switching to Sonnet 4.5 when I need a new screen mocked up or changed.

And this will still be backed up by Gemini 2.5 Pro in the browser.

Until the rumored Gemini 3.0 drops…

But until then, it’s good to see Claude have such a big improvement and be welcomed back into the AI rotation.

No More n8n?

That’s the easy marketing hook everyone is and will be using on social media for a while now.

OpenAI dropped a bunch of updates this week complete with a workflow builder, similar to n8n.

I haven’t had much time to try it myself but I did poke around the demo site and it looks promising.

The widget gallery looks particularly pleasing:

Feels very similar to Google’s Opal.

And now it makes sense why OpenAI announced their Shopify and Etsy chat integrations last week because AgentKit allows for building entire app flows, including purchasing, in a single interface.

OpenAI is attempting to take what n8n does to the next level and build the workflow and app for you using AI.

n8n is supposed to have their own AI builder soon, it’s been previewed, but I’m not sure it’s fully rolled out yet.

And even though this is a promising release for OpenAI, giving control of a full AI flow rather than hoping you prompt things correctly or having to custom code API calls together, I do think n8n still has one big advantage.

Open source.

OpenAI wants to take the Apple approach and create a completely closed system.

They want you to build on their platform and use their tools.

n8n will let you download the code and run it yourself.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages but it will be interesting to see where this leads.

I’m sure I’ll test out AgentKit soon, maybe even have a video about it in the near future.

But another fun release in AI that I don’t think will kill n8n, for now.

Getting closer and closer to AI building entire apps on it’s own though, so maybe soon?

And that’s it for this week. Old and new buddies and projects.

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!