Ed Grosvenor
On Artisan Beer
“Even if Anthropic were to stop research tomorrow and Opus 5.5 is the last thing that they put out, I think that Opus 5.5 in a year is going to be way better than Opus 5.5 today, because there is so much opportunity for just wrapping it in the right harness and the right tooling and improving on that stuff.”
Artisan Beer · AI Builders · October 2026
Context
Peter asked what a builder's life looks like a year from now if models keep improving. Ed argued that most recent gains come from tooling and technique around the model, not raw model improvements.
Transcript
I think, you know, the models are getting better, but I think the biggest driver of the improvements that we're seeing are in the tooling, the techniques, the harnesses. We're all just getting better at harnessing what the models can do.
So I think that
even if even if Anthropic were to stop research tomorrow and Opus 5.5 is the last thing that they put out, I think that Opus 5.5 in a year is going to be way better than Opus 5.5 today because there is so much opportunity for just wrapping it in the right harness and the right tooling and improving on that stuff. And I really do think that's where we're getting most of the value. I think you're in a better position than I am, though, as far as your products go, because the other hesitation I have around building anything that looks like a SaaS right now is that basically the labs are trying to do everything that we're doing. If you're a Figma, they're going to bring out a cloud design and try to kill you. If you're Google or Microsoft, they're going to bring out an Office Suite and try to kill you. And they'll just work their way down the food chain and try to swallow up as much as they can. And so I don't want to be in any sort of a business where an Anthropic or an OpenAI or a meta could look at it and be like, oh, we can create a tool that does this. But data is a much harder thing…
Data's interesting. Another interesting one is being the system of records. Like if software... Anyway, there's all this stuff about moats. We can talk about that next time. But yeah, interesting times.
Yeah. The downside to the models and the tooling getting better is that I think that what happened Wednesday is going to happen a lot.
It's going to happen a lot. But I feel like it's good. The whole ecosystem is stronger now. And I don't mind if it happens again in two weeks, you know, or something similar because it'll be good. It's like, you know, you're getting your website. Down, you're getting stronger. It's good. Yeah,
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