Mon, October 5, 2026
3-minute read
3 AI UPDATES · 2 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU CAN DO WITH AI · 1 RESOURCE
👋 Good morning.
Ben Sehl co-founded Kotn and already knew how to code. His first Shopify store still took him two weeks. He now runs product at Shopify and says a merchant can get a fully custom store in twenty minutes with Canvas, which rolls out over the coming days. Twelve years is a long time to hold a grudge against a theme editor.
IN 3 MINUTES, GET 1% BETTER THAN EVERYONE YOU KNOW:
Design a whole store without buying a theme
Narration that shows up with its own band
A $0.54-an-hour ear for your voice agent
Muse haggled $30 off. The seller never knew.
Nine things people built with Opus 5.5
3 AI updates
1. 🏪 Skip the theme aisle
Canvas, with every page on one board. Source: Shopify.
Shopify's Canvas, announced October 1, lays the whole store out as one workspace. You pan across every page, zoom into a detail, and Sidekick edits the real theme code while you watch, so pages stay clickable across products and screen sizes, per Shopify. TechCrunch lists what is missing at launch: desktop only, and no third-party themes, app blocks, Markets, translations or theme updates.
Do this: If your first custom store usually starts with a theme purchase or a freelancer, open Canvas when it reaches your admin and react to a real layout before you hire anyone.
The theme aisle can keep its parking spot.
Would you let Sidekick design your whole store?
Speech, in beta. Source: Suno.
Suno Speech, in public beta since October 1, writes the spoken audio and an original music bed as one track, on web and mobile per the release note. Simple mode takes a one-line description. Advanced mode takes a script you already wrote, and a toggle drops the music if you only want the voice, per The Verge. Clips run to about eight minutes. Jack Brody, Suno's chief product officer, admits British accents can wander off to Australia and back.
Do this: If a rough voiceover usually means a speech tool plus a separate music bed, run your next temp track through this once, score on or off, before you pay for either.
Your bedtime poem did not request stadium drums. It may get them.
Streaming transcription plus voice models. Source: Microsoft.
MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming listens in 60 languages and returns a first guess just over 100 milliseconds after audio arrives. Microsoft says it ranks first on Artificial Analysis for both finished and partial transcripts, and it costs $0.54 an hour through year-end. MAI-Voice-2.1 clones a voice from a few seconds of audio across 23 languages, with consent checks in front, at $22 per million characters. The Flash version is $15 and, by Microsoft's numbers, hands back 45 seconds of audio in about 150 milliseconds end to end.
Do this: If a live agent still means one vendor for ears and another for a mouth, price this pair against your two current bills before the intro rate ends in December.
The boutique voice booth can keep its foam on the walls.
2 things you didn't know you can do with AI
Dilum Sanjaya's 72-second video shows a warehouse screen that plays like a strategy game: docks, trucks and pallets on an isometric board, with bays and stock counts beside it. His line is that industrial software does not have to feel like industrial software. The catch: it is a video, not a download, and a pretty yard is not your inventory until the counts are real.
WareTrack, from the video still. Source: Dilum Sanjaya / X.
Kushank's short shows two Muse uses. A friend had Muse find a golf driver shaft on Facebook Marketplace, message the seller, talk CA$160 down to $130 and book the pickup. Kushank then had Muse read his saved Reels about 3D printers, and it named the Bambu Lab P2S. Hikes, restaurants, outfits and trips work the same way. The catch: the seller never knew he was chatting with an AI. That is the risk, not the move to copy.
Two Muse uses, from the short. Source: YouTube.
1 Resource worth stealing
The watermill that opens the thread. Source: Claude / X.
On October 2, Claude's account posted a thread of small interactive things people built in the past few weeks: a working watermill, embossed cards, and a flight from outside the Milky Way to Jupiter's moons, each in Opus 5.5; water simulated in the browser; poems illustrated in Claude Code; a camera left overnight on Old Street; a pixel Seattle that follows real weather and time of day; a paper-fold pop-up city in Sonnet 5.5; and a jet engine you can cut open, in Opus 5.5.
The catch: it is a highlight reel with no prompts attached. Pick the one closest to a demo you owe someone and treat it as a target for a long Opus session, not a file you can ship.
Don't forget to rate today's post
🎤 Join Kushank Live on Friday!
How to edit videos with Claude
Build in real time and bring your questions.
📅 Friday, October 9, at 10AM Pacific / 1PM Eastern
Hope to see you there!
That's your 1% for today. Hit reply and tell me which store page you'd hand Sidekick first.
Kushank, AI teammates, and the human team
PracticalyAI
