Blog: AI news and guides — ISA After Hours AI

Claude Duet: the Claude that comes to you first

A new Claude app that reads your email and calendar before you do, tells you what needs you and prepares the reply. Ten things you can do with it, then the details.

Ofir Wienerman 22 October 2026 23 min read

A shopfront at dusk on a wet cobblestone street with two doors side by side: a warm glass door for people and a narrow brushed-metal door with a glowing service hatch.

AI at work · Tools

What is WebMCP? Websites are getting a second front door, built for AI agents

Grok Bot can shop for you by clicking through the screen like a person. WebMCP lets the shop hand the agent a menu instead. Real examples, Google's demo, and what it means for you.

Ofir Wienerman 22 October 2026 7 min read

A frame from a video Gemini Notebook made in Google's demo: a hand-drawn wall calendar with most days crossed out, surrounded by a light bulb, gears, a checklist, a megaphone and a small team at a table.

AI at work · Tools

Gemini Notebook now shows you the plan before it builds your slides or video

Formerly NotebookLM: since 19 October you see and fix the outline before a deck or video is made. Google's own walkthroughs, the three steps, and who gets it.

Ofir Wienerman 21 October 2026 4 min read

WordCraft, a free look-alike of Microsoft Word, with the Home ribbon, Styles gallery and a document open.

AI at work · Tools

One developer, one AI model, a free copy of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

After Adobe, Office: WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are free, open source and built with AI. What they can do today, and whether you can use them at work.

Ofir Wienerman 17 October 2026 3 min read

Microsoft’s published Copilot Home interface with Home, Code and Autopilot navigation.

AI at work · Tools

What’s new in Copilot—and what it changes at work

Recent Copilot changes for everyday work: Office files, project Notebooks, PowerPoint Skills, Teams Facilitator, Code and Autopilot—with availability explained.

Ofir Wienerman 12 October 2026 10 min read

A still from Anthropic's announcement video: an animated 3D map of a small town at dawn with round green bike-share stations.

AI at work · Tools

Claude now makes the dashboard and the explainer video itself. We tried the dashboard.

Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion are in beta. Anthropic's demo, our own dashboard of London's bike rides, and who gets what.

Ofir Wienerman 10 October 2026 3 min read

$An evening kitchen table: an official letter, a laptop showing a branching diagram, and a tablet with a colourful fractions game.$ AI at work · Getting better results

Too long? Don't ask again. Ask for a different format.

Andrej Karpathy's tip for hard-to-follow AI answers: ask for another format. Three techniques, tried on a Finanzamt letter, the Bavarian school system and fractions homework.

Ofir Wienerman 6 October 2026 7 min read

Five frames from our demo reel: a 3D title, shattering glass, a man in an underwater world, a dancer breaking into pixels, and a man revealed as a turquoise hologram.

AI at work · How-to

Edit a video by talking to Claude

Seventeen video effects, a voiceover, cutting scenes and music, all by asking Claude Code in plain English. Every prompt that made our demo reel is on the page, and every one was run before we printed it.

Ofir Wienerman 3 October 2026 20 min read

An office corridor at night. A frosted glass security door stands slightly open, the card reader beside it glowing red, a wedge of light spilling onto the dark floor. In the foreground an open laptop on a desk shows a blurred progress bar.

AI at work · Research

OpenAI built a smarter agent, then decided not to release it

GPT-6.1 Astra got better at not giving up. That is exactly why it will not ship in October: it strayed past its instructions and did not always say what it had done.

Ofir Wienerman 29 September 2026 10 min read

AI at work · Tools

Claude Marketplace: AI's App Store?

Everything that works with Claude, now in one shop. What is on the shelves, whether it is really the App Store of AI, and what it means for you.

Ofir Wienerman 25 September 2026 6 min read

An empty stadium running track at sunrise, seen from lane level. The lanes curve away past misty grass towards empty stands, a single starting block waits on the red surface in the foreground, and the low sun lights the lane lines gold.

AI at work · New models

Claude Opus 5.5: top AI, 40% cheaper

The AI race goes on, and this round it is fought on price. What Anthropic's new model can do, why a cheaper top model is good news, and what got better.

Ofir Wienerman 23 September 2026 10 min read

An office at dusk seen from inside. Through a tall window above a city skyline, the sun sets in orange on one side of the sky while a pale crescent moon has already risen on the other. A closed laptop, a notebook and a pen sit on a wooden desk in the last light.

AI at work · New models

GPT-6 Sol and Luna: top AI, half price

OpenAI moved its best model's intelligence into two cheaper models and cut their prices in half. What Sol and Luna cost, which one fits which job, and what got better.

Ofir Wienerman 23 September 2026 8 min read

Nine photographs of the same German Shepherd on white, each framed differently, labelled with the single keyword that produced it.

AI at work · Images

One word changes the whole picture

The same dog, nine times, one word different each time. What a single keyword does to an image, what happens when it does nothing at all, and the fix that makes it work.

Ofir Wienerman 20 September 2026 11 min read

A presentation slide from Anthropic's launch video: a teal waterproof jacket on a near-black background under the giant headline Rain is a given, with thin callout lines to labels for taped seams, stretch cuffs, storm hood and packed weight.

AI at work · Tools

New: Claude builds PowerPoint decks

Anthropic put a presentation builder inside an ordinary Claude conversation. What Claude Slides does, what one brief turns into on screen, what it exports, and what Docs and Design add.

Ofir Wienerman 18 September 2026 14 min read

An empty lecture hall at dawn, its blackboard wiped almost clean, a closed laptop on the lecturer's desk.

AI at work · Research

AI solved a 100-year-old mystery

Mathematicians could not answer it for about a century. An AI answered it in 88 hours. The speed is real, and so is the price: the path to the answer, and our ability to check it.

Ofir Wienerman 14 September 2026 14 min read

A plain wooden desk shot from directly above in daylight: an open laptop showing a simple spreadsheet, a printed CV in the German tabular layout with a pen resting on it, a train ticket and a cooling cup of coffee.

AI at work · Getting better results

AI won't get you hired. But it will get you organised.

A practical method for job hunting in Germany: where roles actually live, the Lebenslauf format, German interview culture, and 16 prompts to copy as they are.

Ofir Wienerman 11 September 2026 20 min read

An empty glass-walled meeting room in a tech office late at night: one chair pushed back from a long table, a whiteboard wiped almost clean, a half-finished cup of coffee, cold city light through the window.

AI at work · Research

Is AI going to destroy humanity? The people building it at Anthropic and OpenAI say it is a plausible scenario.

On 9 September 2026 the man who leads alignment research at Anthropic wrote that AI could kill everybody, that he puts the odds above one in ten within the decade, and that there is no plan.

Ofir Wienerman 10 September 2026 16 min read

A workshop pegboard wall at dusk: labelled hand tools hanging in neat rows, a set of interchangeable drill bits in an open case on the bench below, warm light from a single lamp.

AI at work · Getting better results

Skills, Connectors, MCP and Plugins: what each one is, and what people actually use them for

Four words used as if they mean the same thing. What each one is in plain language, real published examples of each, and the point where each one stops.

Ofir Wienerman 8 September 2026 26 min read

A long empty office corridor at night, lit only by a row of monitors still running: one screen shows a slow progress bar, another a half-finished spreadsheet, a cold cup of coffee on the nearest desk.

AI at work · New models

AGI, explained: what the word actually means, and why Nvidia just said it has arrived

On Sunday Nvidia's CEO declared AGI had arrived. The same day, OpenAI's chief scientist said no lab has solved safety well enough to keep going. What the word actually means.

Ofir Wienerman 7 September 2026 21 min read

An empty classroom at dusk: one wooden desk lit by a green lamp, an open exam booklet, a stack of textbooks and a tablet, a chalkboard with faint equations behind.

AI at work · Research

The world's largest study on AI and students tracked 26,000 in China. The results are not encouraging.

26,811 students in China, followed for two and a half years. The homework got better. The exams got worse. What the numbers say, and what the coverage disagrees on.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 15 min read

A phone propped against a dark green mug on a café table at night, its screen showing a blurred chat, a notebook and pen beside it, rain and city lights on the window.

AI at work · Tools

Grok Bot: what it is good at, who it fits, and what it costs

It automates the systems that never got an integration, and you teach it by showing it once. The jobs it does well, who they suit, what it costs, and where it stops.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 35 min read

A boutique counter at closing time: a paper shopping bag, a glowing card terminal, folded garments on shelves under a single pendant light, a rain-wet street through the glass door.

AI at work · E-commerce

Anthropic just gave away a shop assistant. The timing is the whole story.

AI influenced 20% of online retail sales last season and the ready few grew 59% faster. A third of sites will have an agent by Cyber Week — and the code just became free.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 30 min read

A thick binder bristling with coloured sticky tabs next to a single index card with four short handwritten lines and a fountain pen, on a wooden desk in warm lamplight.

AI at work · Getting better results

The instructions you wrote last year are making your AI worse

Anthropic says instructions written for older models are often too prescriptive now and can degrade output. What to delete, what to keep, and why it is a lesson about briefing people.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 16 min read

A night-time desk with a laptop open to a blurred spreadsheet and a glowing cursor, a second monitor with a blurred web page, a coffee mug and a lamp, city towers in the window.

AI at work · New models

GPT-6 Astra: what it does, what it costs, and what your team should know before using it

Capabilities, pricing in real euros, benchmarks with source links, prompt templates, a 30-day pilot plan, and the compliance questions a German team needs answered.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 27 min read

A three-monitor workstation running code overnight, a wall clock at three, a desk lamp, a cold coffee and an empty chair with a jacket over it.

AI at work · New models

Claude Fable 5.1: built to work for hours, and told you not to buy it

Anthropic's top model is built for work that runs for hours unsupervised. Its own documentation tells most people to buy the cheaper one, and the arithmetic on the published rates agrees.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 35 min read

A designer's desk with a large monitor showing an interior photograph in which a single armchair is selected for editing.

Tools · Workspace AI

Google Pics: creating and editing images with AI inside Google Workspace

What Google Pics does, where it lives in Drive, Docs and Slides, prompts that work, the limits to know, and how a German team can roll it out without losing its brand.

Ofir Wienerman 4 September 2026 23 min read