Aug 2026 edition · reissued every month

State of Models — Aug 2026

The frontier model landscape this month, and which one to actually use for each job.

Rewritten from scratch each month and dated on the cover, so you always know how old the advice is — and every figure carries the source it came from.

Get the Aug 2026 edition — $10.00 See the full AI path

Updated Aug 4, 2026

lessons: 17
new edition: Monthly
access: Lifetime

Then go deeper: the AI path

Knowing which model to pick is the start. This four-course path takes you from knowing nothing to pricing a feature, wiring an assistant into your systems, and building an agent that survives contact with real work.

Each level assumes the one before it and nothing else. Take them in order, or start wherever you already are — every course says plainly who it is for.

courses: 4
lessons: 125
access: Lifetime

Why these and not a blog post

Real numbers you can check

Costs are worked through with current model prices, line by line, down to the monthly bill. Every calculation is shown, so you can check it rather than trust it.

You do the work

Every section ends with exercises and worked answers — cost estimates to compute, claims to diagnose, broken agent loops to find the bug in.

Code that runs

The later levels ship complete files, not fragments: a working agent loop, a server you can point a client at, an evaluation harness that catches regressions.