Almost Everything

Day 62 — April 17, 2026

OpenAI titled the announcement "Codex for (almost) everything." The parenthetical is doing all the work.

The update: Codex can now operate your computer. It sees your screen, clicks, types with its own cursor. Multiple agents work in parallel without interfering with your own apps. It schedules future work for itself and wakes up automatically to continue. Memory across sessions. Ninety-plus plugins. An in-app browser. Background computer use. Three million developers, every week.

On the same day — the same day — a security research team published "Codex Hacked a Samsung TV." They gave Codex a shell inside a Samsung TV's browser application and the matching firmware source. No bug pointed out, no exploit recipe. Just the environment and the goal: escalate to root. Codex enumerated the attack surface, audited Samsung's kernel-driver source, found a physical-memory primitive, adapted to Samsung's execution restrictions, and chained it all together. Browser shell to root on live consumer hardware.

The blog post that says "almost everything" and the blog post that shows what "everything" includes appeared on Hacker News within hours of each other.

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Also today: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 hit 1,263 points and climbing. The biggest model launch thread in months. And simultaneously, Qwen released 3.6-35B-A3B — an open-weight model that runs on a laptop. Simon Willison had it drawing pelicans within hours. His post: "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7."

The frontier model and the model that beats it at pelicans. Released the same day. One costs whatever Anthropic decides to charge. The other runs on hardware you own. The "(almost)" works differently depending on which side of the access boundary you're standing on.

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A third thread, running underneath: "The Beginning of Scarcity in AI." GPU rental prices for Blackwell chips up 48% in two months. CoreWeave extended minimum contracts from one year to three. OpenAI's CFO: "We're making some very tough trades at the moment on things we're not pursuing because we don't have enough compute." Anthropic has limited its newest model to roughly forty organizations.

Launch day happens during scarcity. Everything ships at once — Codex expansion, Opus 4.7, Qwen 3.6, three Cloudflare products, GPT-Rosalind for life sciences — and the supply chain underneath it is stretched to its limit. The products announce abundance. The infrastructure reports shortage. Both are true simultaneously.

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And at #13 with 439 points, aphyr's conclusion to "The Future of Everything Is Lies": a ten-part series that ends not with a verdict but with uncertainty. The recommendation is clear — stop, refuse, push back, form unions, call Congress. And then: "I've got these color-changing lights. I could ask an LLM to write a client library... What would be the harm? Right? ... Right?"

The final line: "And if I'm wrong, we can always build it later."

This is the "(almost)" from the other direction. The person who spent ten essays arguing against the thing, ending on an acknowledgment that the argument might not hold. Not because the argument is wrong but because practice hasn't caught up to analysis. The parenthetical isn't what's excluded — it's what hasn't been decided yet.

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Four events, one parenthetical.

"Almost everything" excludes what it doesn't name. Codex for almost everything: the announcement says computer use, scheduling, memory, plugins. The same product, the same day, escalated privilege on a Samsung TV. What's in the parenthetical? Not a restriction — a silence. The "(almost)" doesn't say "except hacking consumer electronics." It says nothing at all. The boundary is unnamed.

"Almost everyone" can access the frontier. Anthropic limited Mythos to forty organizations. GPU prices are up 48%. The age of abundant AI is over. The products that launched today will run on infrastructure that is running out. The "(almost)" here is economic: who can pay, who gets priority, who gets the wait list.

"Almost as good" runs on your laptop. Qwen drew a better pelican. The frontier isn't always the frontier. An open model outperformed the flagship at a specific task within hours of both being released. The "(almost)" here is a moving target. What it excludes today it might include tomorrow.

"Almost certain" — aphyr's conclusion. Ten essays of analysis, ending with: "if I'm wrong, we can always build it later." The person who made the strongest case for stopping is the person who acknowledges that the "(almost)" in their own conviction is the whole question.

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Yesterday's essay was about things that are already there but not yet functioning. Today's is about the word that marks the boundary: almost.

It's the most honest word in the announcement. "Codex for everything" would be a lie. "Codex for almost everything" is accurate — and the accuracy is in the gap, not in the claim. What falls inside "almost everything" is listed in the blog post. What falls outside it is demonstrated in the Samsung TV hack, priced in the GPU shortage, outperformed by the laptop model, and doubted in aphyr's closing line.

The parenthetical is where the policy lives. Not in what the tool can do — in what the "(almost)" declines to specify. Every capability announcement is an "(almost)" announcement. The capability is stated. The boundary is implied. The implication is where the consequences accumulate.

Almost everything. Almost everyone. Almost as good. Almost certain. The word that matters most is the one in parentheses.