The past month of Claude Opus 5 has been a disaster. It was a problematic release because I straight up could not understand it. If you’ve been using Opus 5 you know what I’m talking about. I felt like I spent more time understanding its replies than doing actual work. It was slow, made mistakes more often than I noticed, and seemed to get into these doom loops when reasoning to the point where I had to set effort to medium/low. I had never changed effort levels prior to Opus 5.
It was so bad, that I switched to OpenAI’s Sol for a month to see how well things were going on the other side of the fence. Sol and Astra are good. It’s quick. It’s concise. And the app does this thing, where all the reasoning gets collapsed after its turn to provide a short summary you can quickly read to understand what was accomplished. I hadn’t used ChatGPT for over 4 months, not having tested Astra or Sol lately.
I was impressed by the changes OpenAI has made to the harness, the desktop/mobile apps, and the models. It is very competitive with Claude. I’m still iffy on the security model for Codex, which leans way more permissive than I’m used to, but every harness is leaning towards autonomy over security of late. I really like how Sol talks and does single-threaded work. So just as I was about to buy a month of ChatGPT, Claude released Opus 5.5.
Opus 5.5 addresses most of this feedback. It is noticeably quicker. I’m not holding my breath every time I prompt the model, scared it will doom loop. The way Claude communicates is improved. I would say it is just back to what it was before, and not whatever 5 was doing. Honestly, it was so bad that I think most people will be happy to be back to that baseline. I still think Astra and Sol 6 are better at clear, concise communication. I’ve also noticed an improvement with code quality for Opus 5.5. I’m not sure if I’m just imagining things but even running effort medium, I’m not hitting as many fixes during my /code-review sessions.
I’m going to switch over to Astra for a bit. Fable is not accessible on base plans and Astra 6 is accessible with ChatGPT Plus. I’ve been moving between Claude Pro/Max depending on my work but on Pro I can’t use Fable without API credits. I wonder if I will pull my hair out moving my scheduled tasks and skills over to ChatGPT.
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