5 New Prompts & Today's Actionable News
By Robert MacKelfresh — August 18, 2026Decide if a release is worth your attention
EASYA new AI model or tool just got announced and I keep seeing headlines about it, but I don't want to chase every release. Help me decide in five minutes whether this one is actually worth…Open full prompt →for ClaudeWalk into a meeting actually prepared
EASYI have a meeting coming up and need to walk in prepared, not just informed. Paste the invite, any prior thread, and whatever you know about the other party. 1. The one goal I should…Open full prompt →for ChatGPTSkim a contract before you involve a lawyer
MEDIUMI'm about to sign a contract and want a fast risk skim before I involve a lawyer — not a substitute for legal review. 1. List every clause that is unusual, one-sided, or worth…Open full prompt →for ClaudeSanity-check a price rise before you ship it
ADVANCEDI'm considering a pricing change and want a sanity check before I take it to the team, not a full strategy overhaul. Current pricing: [paste your tiers]. Proposed change: [what…Open full prompt →for ClaudeRun an honest post-mortem on a churned account
EXPERTA customer just churned and I want an honest post-mortem, not a blame exercise. Paste the account history, tickets, exit interview, usage data. 1. Timeline — the 3-5 moments that…Open full prompt →for Claude
The Context Coda
One more thing: use anything you already know about me from our past chats and anything you're connected to. If you can find it yourself, don't make me look it up.
Paste this at the end of any prompt above. It tells your AI to use what it already knows about you instead of asking you to repeat it — which is the difference between a generic answer and a personal one.
Actionable News
What just happened, and the prompt, skill file, or setup that turns it into something you can use.
Azure's OpenAI Assistants API is retired on August 26 — eight days out, with Foundry Agents as the replacement
here's the migration map, and the state question that decides whether this is an hour of work or an afternoon
EXPOSURE CHECKCISA gave federal agencies until August 20 to patch a Ray flaw that is already being exploited
here's the exposure check, including why "it only listens on localhost" is the case this attack was built for
GitLab shipped an out-of-band patch for an unauthenticated flaw that can delete public projects
→here's the version table — and the branches from 18.2 to 18.10 that are affected and get no fix at all
GET THE VERSION TABLEDDR5 is up 485% in twelve months: 128GB now costs $3,399, and relief is a 2027 story at the earliest
→here's the buy-wait-rent table, because this quietly rewrites the payback maths on running models locally
GET THE DECISION TABLEAnthropic raised its own catastrophic-misalignment rating from very low to low, and disclosed an unreleased Model 2
→here's what the report actually says, which is close to the opposite of how most of it got rewritten
GET THE BREAKDOWN
The AI Five is published by Automation Squad. Every prompt is written from scratch and every claim links to a primary source. Corrections: [email protected].