I agree with what you're saying. I have a Claude plan for work and I prefer using Claude more than any other LLM I've tried. Having recently tried the Codex 100€ plan with GPT-5.5 in high/xhigh, I don't think it's worse that the Opus models, just different.

I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is often a bit too literal.

Just my two cents.

> I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is often a bit too literal.

Yeah, exact prompting matters a lot, seemingly more than people think. There is definitely tradeoffs between how literal the models takes the prompts, on one hand it's useful for the model to ignore their own instinct when you know better, so they don't go chasing geese randomly, but on the other hand it's useful sometimes when they self-direct, when you misworded something and it's obvious you meant something different because of the context, and similar things. They're basically good at different things.

Really agree every model isn't equal and they aren't as interchangeable without adjusting how you prompt them as people seem to think.