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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n