I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going.

I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest” and “confessing” mistakes and just generally talking a lot. I felt like I had to really dig to see what it’s doing.

The project involves OCR, and despite repeated instructions not to, both Claude models keep spinning out a bunch of agents to re-invent the OCR setup, and they inevitably seem to invent a primitive serial version that takes 20x the time, or longer, to complete, and then running it against thousands of docs. Basically I have to watch it like a hawk or it just spins out on red-teaming tasks that take hours and hours.

I don’t know what its system prompt is, but Sol/Codex is just so much nicer to talk to. It only asks exactly what’s needed, it tells me only what I need to know, and it is just generally workmanlike. And it has not once decided to spawn an agent that spends hours pointlessly burning tokens and CPU cycles re-inventing the OCR process. I’m really liking it.

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chis a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Anthropic is lucky that they've built a lot of loyalty over the last year that they can burn through right now. I see people talking about switching back to Opus 4.8 rather that using 5.6 Sol, which is wild.

My current approach is to occasionally use Fable for high-intelligence tasks but use Sol as the translator and clean-upper afterwards, and otherwise just use Sol for everything. Fable sometimes says the most insane shit, both unreadable and just completely missing the point, and refuses to back down when questioned. It's mentally exhausting to work with and I can't trust it.

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ryanschaefer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had this debate with my coworker who prefers anthropic models to open ai ones. I ended up settling into the idea that gpt 5.6 is better used as a tool and opus 5 is a companion. GPT 5.6 takes you literally whereas opus 5 tends to take more liberties to try to get to the “spirit” of what you want. It comes down to preference, and I don’t want a companion.

	▲	artdigital 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That’s how I see it too. Claude is more “fun” to use, like a coworker I have to talk to now and then to steer it, while gpt-5.6 is a task machine: I give it a task and it is very consistent, reliable and predictable in its execution. I don’t have to interrupt it, it gets the task done exactly how I wanted it, but it’s “boring” and feels more sterile

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disgruntledphd2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, I actually have started using GPT Sol much much more, as Claude (all of them) were far too trigger happy around making changes, and refused to listen to my requests to take things slowly.

Feels like they've overtrained on one-shotting (which does demo well, and presumably converts new subscribers), whereas I want a model to do work for me in small, easily understood changes that I can hold in my head (maybe I'm not smart enough for Claude 4.7+).

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D13Fd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you’re right. It’s not optimized for some kinds of work. My little project has a Textual TUI interface that needs to display a few hundred thousand rows in a table. It takes 14 seconds to load in the default datatable component. I instructed Opus 5 to replace the datatable component with a fasttable alternative, a new dependency. I let it go overnight.

When I got back up, it had spun for hours and proudly announced that, instead of doing that, it had optimized the datatable build and avoided the dependency, because the new datatable loaded in 11 seconds. Once I got it to actually make the fasttable version, it loaded in less than a second…

	▲	yard2010 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I love how it sometimes has false a-ha moments and being "honest" about it, it feels so cringe. Then I recall it has no intelligence. It's a stochastic parrot. It's funny how people, like any other animal, that beetle of David Attenborough trying to reproduce with a brown bottle comes to mind, think that something is X just because it trips the right neurons.

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Laurel1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I got the same impression. It feels like a massive misstep too; it makes sense to have models tuned for this but they should definitely be separate from those aimed at software engineers.

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matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Recently converted to OpenAI too. Similar experience. Sol writes really well.