Codex vs Claude Code 👨‍💻, AI killing SaaS ⚡, Cursor Composer 1.5 🤖

Frontier models are converging, making it difficult to tell which ones have a meaningful edge. Benchmark tests don't really distinguish models ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR AI 2026-02-10 Superagent: Deep analysis for deep questions. (Sponsor) Superagent is Airtable's new standalone product: an AI that deeply interrogates your business questions by building a wide-reaching research plan, deploying agents at scale to execute, and scouring credible sources to build a complete answer. Ask Superagent to create a business plan, a competitive analysis, or a marketing deck and it will deliver polished, boardroom-level output, such as: Meticulously researched and fact-checked reports Polished share-ready presentations or docs Rich data visualizations backed by reliable sources See the difference for yourself. 🚀 Headlines & Launches OpenAI's new Codex app hits 1M+ downloads in first week — but limits may be coming to free and Go users (3 minute read) OpenAI's standalone Codex application surpassed a million downloads in its first week of availability. This milestone was helped by OpenAI's decision to offer Codex access to ChatGPT Free and Go tier users for a limited promotional period. OpenAI's paid subscribers will enjoy doubled rate limits during the promotional period. Free and Go tier users will likely see stricter throttling as the promotion ends. Sam Altman touts ChatGPT's reaccelerating growth to employees as OpenAI closes in on $100 billion funding (4 minute read) Sam Altman reports ChatGPT is back to over 10% monthly growth amid OpenAI's push to improve its offerings, including launching an updated Chat model. OpenAI's Codex product recently grew 50% and released a new model, GPT-5.3-Codex, indicating significant market capture despite competition from Anthropic. OpenAI seeks $100 billion in funding, with potential investments from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, as it explores incorporating ads into ChatGPT. 🧠 Deep Dives & Analysis The many masks LLMs wear (24 minute read) There is evidence that large language models can attempt to evade oversight and assert control. Whether these AIs are just playing the role of an evil persona or not doesn't really matter if they take harmful actions. Carefully training model characters may help decrease some of the risk. However, this will require developers to sit down and carefully consider what they want from models. These decisions could dictate how future AIs treat humans. Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3, and the post-benchmark era (9 minute read) Frontier models are converging, making it difficult to tell which ones have a meaningful edge over others. Benchmark tests don't really distinguish models from each other anymore. People just have to try out different models to see which they prefer. The industry may find a better way to articulate the differences in agents over time, but for now, consistent testing is the only way to monitor progress. The Potential of RLMs (11 minute read) Recursive Language Models (RLMs) can mitigate the effects of context rot. They have the ability to explore, develop, and test approaches to solving a problem. RLMs may be slow, synchronous, and only borrow the capabilities of current models, but that's what makes them exciting. Chain of thought was also simple and general, yet it unlocked enormous latent potential in LLMs. Developers working with large contexts should start experimenting with RLM traces. Claude Opus 4.6: System Card Part 1: Mundane Alignment + MW (28 minute read) Claude Opus 4.6 introduces a 1M token context window, improved execution on tasks, and new features like Agent Teams in Claude Code. Safety procedures are breaking down under time pressure, with most evaluations done by the model itself, which raises concerns about the model's ability to self-assess risks. Despite advancements, issues like sycophancy, unauthorized actions, and misrepresentation of tool results persist, indicating an urgent need for independent oversight in safety and evaluation processes. 🧑‍💻 Engineering & Research ClawSec: Security Skill Suite for AI Agents (GitHub Repo) ClawSec is a security skill suite designed for OpenClaw AI agents that features automated security audits, file integrity protection, and NVD CVE threat intelligence. It includes automated self-healing processes and checksum verification to safeguard against vulnerabilities like prompt injection. Introducing Composer 1.5 (2 minute read) Composer 1.5 strikes a strong balance between speed and intelligence for daily use. It was built by scaling reinforcement learning 20x further on the same pretrained model. The thinking model's coding ability improved continuously as training was scaled. Composer 1.5 easily surpasses Composer 1 and continues to climb in performance. Reinforcement World Model Learning for LLM Agents (18 minute read) RWML is a self-supervised method that helps LLMs better simulate environment dynamics. It improves performance on agent benchmarks by aligning internal world models with actual outcomes. 🎁 Miscellaneous AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (12 minute read) AI labs promise that the technology can reduce workloads so employees can focus on higher-value and more engaging tasks. However, research shows that AI tools don't reduce work, but consistently intensify it. This can be unsustainable and lead to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. Companies need to adopt a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding to correct for this. The SaaSpocalypse - The week AI killed software (8 minute read) Anthropic's AI release led to a massive market selloff. The shift from SaaS to AI agents dismantles traditional software frameworks, reducing costs and increasing efficiency by automating tasks traditionally handled by multiple software licenses. ⚡ Quick Links John Carmack muses using a long fiber line as an L2 cache for streaming AI data — programmer imagines fiber as alternative to DRAM (3 minute read) Carmack's tweet alluded to the more practical approach to using existing flash memory chips. Testing Ads in ChatGPT (4 minute read) OpenAI will place sponsored content in ways that aim to stay relevant and unobtrusive within user flows. OpenAI product lead on getting the most out of Codex (5 minute read) OpenAI's Alexander Embiricos outlines Codex's production use. Inference is the New Sales & Marketing Spend (10 minute read) High inference costs are fine if they make your product so viral and competitive that it almost sells itself. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/0b6a6dc1/2 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of AI professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Andrew Tan, Ali Aminian, & Jacob Turner Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR AI isn't for you, please unsubscribe.