While You Were Working: September's Tool Updates Worth Your Time

Hi friend! First things first: sorry for going quiet. The June issue went out, and then the summer got completely away from me. July and August came and went without a peep. We're back now, and September was a busy month to come back to.

If you're new here, this is the monthly roundup where I read the release notes for the tools we run our businesses on, test what's worth testing, and tell you what's worth your time. Everything else you have my full permission to ignore.

The theme of the month: everybody launched "skills." Yes, everybody.

The short version

• ChatGPT is retiring custom GPTs, and Gemini is replacing Gems with Skills.
• Zapier rebuilt Zaps from the ground up.
• Moxie V4 is a full redesign, and your data carries over.
• Make's AI Agents got upgrades, and there's a new Jev AI model I'm testing next week.
• The Make MCP is the best way to build Make scenarios with AI right now.
• Plus: Dubsado dark mode, HoneyBook in Claude and ChatGPT, Gumroad local currency, ThriveCart Academy upgrades, Calendly + Siri, and how to turn off Google Meet's AI notetaker.

Your custom GPTs are retiring (and so are Gems)

If you built a custom GPT for your business, this one's for you.

ChatGPT is retiring custom GPTs on every plan and moving everyone to plugins. A plugin bundles your instructions with connected apps, so it can actually do things in your other tools as well as answer in the style you set up. Your existing GPTs keep working until your plan's retirement date, and OpenAI says migration guidance is coming, so you don't need to do anything today. Just don't build a brand new custom GPT this month.

Gemini is doing the same thing with Gems. Google is replacing them with Skills, which you can stack several at a time in one chat. Any Gems you haven't moved will get auto-migrated into draft skills over the next few months.

And it's not just those two. Notion launched Skills as a shared team library of reusable AI instructions. Claude made plugins its main way to extend Claude and opened a Marketplace. Perplexity has a skills marketplace now too. Gemini's skills use the same open SKILL.md format as Claude's, so a skill you write once can move between those tools.

A quick security note

A skill is a set of instructions your AI follows, and some come with scripts or files attached. If you've connected your email, CRM, or Google Drive, a sketchy skill gets that same access. A few rules I'd follow:

1. Only install skills from people or companies you trust.
2. Open it and read what's inside before you add it. It's usually just a text file.
3. Be extra picky about anything that wants to connect to your accounts or send things on your behalf.

ChatGPT release notes · Gemini skills announcement · Notion 3.7

Zapier rebuilt Zaps from the ground up

Zapier launched Next Gen Zaps on September 24, and it's the biggest change to how Zaps work in a long time.

You can now build an automation three ways: by describing it in plain English, by writing code, or by dragging steps around a visual canvas. Once it's built, a Next Gen Zap can branch, run loops inside loops, and handle much bigger lists than before.

The parts I care most about are the safety nets. A Zap can now pause and wait for a human to approve something before it keeps going, which is great for anything client-facing. Error handling is much more resilient, and Zaps can try to fix themselves when a step breaks. If you've ever had a Zap fail without a peep and found out three weeks later from an annoyed client, you know why that matters.

Zapier's announcement

Moxie V4 is here

Moxie rolled out a full redesign. All your clients, projects, invoices, and forms carry over, so there's nothing to rebuild. Some things just live in new places.

What's new:

• Home sorts your day into Respond (people waiting on you), Deliver (project work), and Grow (sales). There's also a "Needs attention" list for overdue items and work that's ready to bill, and you can get the same view as a daily email.
• Client pages keep contacts, notes, recent activity, and related records on one screen, so there's no more clicking through a long row of tabs.
• Projects has three views: Workday for today's tasks, Portfolio for overall project health, and List for comparing projects. There's also capacity planning, so you can see when you're overbooked.
• Saved views remember your filters and sorting on projects, tasks, invoices, clients, and more.
• Command-K search finds records and settings from anywhere.
• Settings now keeps all your templates (email, agreement, project, invoice) in one spot.
• New tools: Moxie Assistant for drafting, summaries, and reports, a visual workflow builder, file version history, a client portal page builder, and a rebuilt bulk email with scheduling and saved lists.

If you're already on Moxie, Moxie's V3 to V4 guide shows where every old menu moved. Keep it open for your first week.

Moxie's V3 to V4 guide

Make's AI Agents got smarter (and I'm testing Jev)

Make shipped a handful of upgrades to its AI Agents at the end of September:

• Improve response with Maia: after an agent runs, Maia reviews it and suggests fixes to weak outputs. You choose whether to apply them. It's on every plan, including free.
• Prompt caching for repeated agent instructions.
• Fallback connection: if your main AI provider goes down, the agent retries with a backup so your workflow keeps running.

The one I'm most curious about is the new TypeSafe app with the Jev AI model. It's built for sorting: routing leads, qualifying inquiries, tagging feedback. Each item gets a decision plus a confidence score, at a lower cost than a general AI model. That confidence score is the interesting part, because you can route low-confidence items to a human instead of trusting a guess.

I'm testing Jev within the next week, and I'll report back on whether it deserves a spot in your workflows.

Maia announcement · Fallback connections · TypeSafe and Jev

The one I'm most excited about: the Make MCP

Make had a bit of a rollercoaster month here. On September 9 it launched a ChatGPT plugin for building and running Make automations from a chat. On September 22 it pulled the plugin, and as of September 29 only people who'd already installed it have beta access back.

Make's suggested workaround is the Make MCP server, and that's where I'd point you anyway. I've been building with it and it's really good. An MCP is a connection that lets an AI tool like Claude see and work with another app directly, and in this case the app is your Make account. So you can describe the scenario you want and build it together, or ask why a scenario broke and get an answer based on what's actually in it.

If you've ever stared at a broken scenario wondering which of the 14 modules is the problem, start here.

Make's ChatGPT plugin post (with the MCP workaround)

A few more worth a look

Dubsado has dark mode!!

It's finally here. Everyone on Dubsado 3.0 can switch to dark mode, and the whole app got a warmer, softer color palette. Statuses are easier to read at a glance and tags are toned down. Your client-facing pages look the same as before. See the update

HoneyBook now works with Claude and ChatGPT

HoneyBook made two AI moves. In August it launched the HoneyBook MCP, a verified connector in Claude that can read your pipeline, projects, invoices, and contracts. With your permission, it can also create projects, build proposals and invoices from your templates, and send payment requests. You approve access one area of your account at a time, and nothing runs until you do.

Then on September 9, HoneyBook launched an app inside ChatGPT as part of OpenAI's new Small Business Collection. You can ask questions about your real HoneyBook data and draft client work from your templates, and you review everything before it sends.

Whichever AI you use, you can now ask your CRM things like "which booked projects haven't been invoiced yet?" HoneyBook MCP · HoneyBook in ChatGPT

Gumroad buyers can pay in their own currency

Buyers can now pay in 19 currencies on all your products, tips, and memberships, and your prices, payouts, and reports stay the same. It's on by default (you can turn it off in settings), and Gumroad says international sales went up 16% in the first week. If you sell digital products to anyone outside the US, you don't have to do anything to get this. Gumroad's post

ThriveCart Academy upgrades

ThriveCart Academy, their course platform, now has a customizable homepage, custom domains so your courses can live at your own URL, and better course bundles and collections. The weekly updates through September also connected Academy to order bumps, upsells, and paid spaces, and added drip content, better quizzes and certificates, and more reliable Apple Pay checkout. ThriveCart's Academy update

Calendly + Siri

This one's small but I love it. You can now ask Siri to send your Calendly link by email or iMessage without opening the app. "Hey Siri, send my Calendly link to Sarah" while you're walking the dog? Yes please. Calendly release notes

How to turn off Google Meet's "Take notes for me"

Google updated its AI notetaker in September, and on some plans it now turns on automatically. I'm not a fan. I don't think Gemini is a good AI tool right now, and I'd rather opt in meeting by meeting than have it running by default. That's totally a personal preference! If you'd also rather it stay off, here's how:

1. Go to meet.google.com on your computer.
2. Click the Settings gear in the top right corner.
3. Click Meeting records in the left column.
4. Under "Automatic note taking for all future meetings," choose Off.
5. Click Save.

If your Google Workspace account comes through work, your admin's settings can still switch it on for certain meetings. Before a call starts, the waiting screen shows whether notes will run, and you can click that notice to stop it for that meeting. Do it before anyone joins, because once someone's in the call you can't change the setting. And if you want to keep notes on, there's a new middle option that only runs them for meetings with 3+ people. Google's help article

Stuff you don't need to care about

• The model name soup. ChatGPT shipped GPT-6 Astra, then GPT-6 Sol and Luna, then GPT-6.1 Sol, all in one month. Gemini shipped 3.8 Flash, 3.8 Live, and 3.8 text-to-speech. Claude shipped Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5. Your tools will pick up the new models on their own. You don't need to keep track of the names.
• Gemini's Live Avatar. It gives an AI a talking, lip-syncing face for live conversations, and it's for Gemini Enterprise. Skip it.
• Slackbot's big Dreamforce upgrade. Most of it is built around Salesforce, so unless you live in Salesforce, it can wait.
• Chrome 153 and 154. Developer and browser engine stuff. Your browser updates itself.

See you next month!

Reply to the newsletter (or leave a comment) and tell me which of these you'll be using, and what you hope your tools come out with next. And if you're not on the email list yet, subscribe here so you get the short version in your inbox every month.

-Molli