Louis-François Bouchard

It's LIVE. I can finally stop saying "our internal writing benchmark".

It's called ToneBench, and it's public: benchmark.towardsai.com

We ( @towards_AI ) were SO excited to release it first at #AIEngineerNYC, during my talk (a few minutes ago!). Thank you @swyx and the whole team @aiDotEngineer for having me!

5 months of work to answer one question: can any model write like me?

78 models + every thinking level. 6,350 scripts, each scored blind by 4 judges. That's 25,400 judgments. It's A LOT.

A few things you'll find in there right now:

- Claude Opus 5.5 is #1, and xhigh ties max for $1.00 a script instead of $2.58.
- GPT-6 Sol is the best model outside Claude, at 13 cents a script.
- GLM-5.3 Flash is 12th for 2 cents a script. Yes, 2 cents.
- Be careful with GPT as a judge. It REALLY likes itself.

You can compare any two models, see what each thinking level buys you, and read the full methodology. We share everything on how we built it, our decisions, and the full setup.

It measures my voice on my scripts, so it's one writing data point, not the final truth on which model is better. But if you write with AI, it should help you find your model.

The talk will soon be on YouTube, hopefully @swyx ? ;)

I'll keep adding every new model as it comes out, and I'll post the results here first. :)

Claude Fable 5.2 is a BIG upgrade over 5.1!

We ran @AnthropicAI’s new model on ToneBench, our writing benchmark, at all five effort settings. It’s #2 of 86 models.

On high, 5.2 is better, cheaper and faster, and it even ties 5.1 on max for about a third of the price. Even 5.2 on low beats 5.1 on high, for a quarter of the price.

Yes, thinking more seems to have a positive impact here, up to xhigh:

Low: 2416, $0.46, 1.4 min
Medium: 2426, $0.56, 1.8 min
High: 2520, $1.22, 4 min
Xhigh: 2676, $2.22, 7 min
Max: 2651, $5.75, 20 min

Xhigh is the sweet spot for us: it ties max for 39% of the price and about a third of the time.

Compared with 5.1, it seems to produce less slop, give better visual cues, be more accurate in scripts and, from high up, hit the target length. Unfortunately, it doesn’t follow our tone better than 5.1.

Surprisingly, most of the score jump comes from one of our four judges: OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol. Not even from our Opus judge! Jev, our only typed judge, scores 5.2 lower than 5.1.

Max doesn’t buy anything over xhigh. A max run uses about 141K output tokens per script, 2.7x xhigh. That’s $5.75 a script, against $2.58 for Opus 5.5 on max for comparison.

If you’re on Fable, move to 5.2 on xhigh. If you’re picking a Claude model for writing, I’d still run Opus 5.5 on xhigh: it ties Fable 5.2 on xhigh for less than half the price ($1.00 vs $2.22).

Full board: benchmark.towardsai.com

A few conversations can take you in directions you didn't expect.

A while ago, we got talking with the @Cloudflare team about AI and what they were working on. It started out of genuine curiosity about how they were approaching AI and how it could be used by businesses.

Those conversations eventually led us here.

@towards_AI is now a deployment partner for Cloudflare OS, Cloudflare's new AI workspace for companies.

We're also part of their partner announcement alongside EPAM, HappyCog, Asana, Box, Canva, GitHub and Notion.

I've been using Cloudflare myself for quite some time, and as a team, so it's pretty exciting to now be working with them.

What makes this especially interesting is the focus on security as businesses start bringing AI agents into their everyday work. It's something I believe deserves a lot more attention.

Really glad this worked out, all from wanting to hear more.

Take the lead, ask questions, be curious and interested!

I'm officially addicted to @WisprFlow, to the misfortune of my small team

amazing product team

Even in Canadian French, results are pretty 🤯

For all engineers in search of what expertise to develop as coding agents replace us, don't look for what the model cannot do; look for what the model cannot own.

There are a lot of things LLMs, agents, whatever we end up calling them, will not own for companies.

Whether it is intent, accountability, or judgment, some things require decisions and someone to answer for them.