I'll have to try 5.5 on my work's Cursor account. If they really solved the communication issues, I might consider moving my personal account from Codex back to Claude Code.

Update: It's pretty good.

It still covers as much detail as Opus 5, and provides a healthy amount of caveats, but it's much better at just providing the answer up front and framing the caveats.

5.5 communicates like a real collaborator and not something that constantly demands my mental energy to decode what it's trying to say.

In the application I'm working on, we don't want "user's local midnight" to mean "next day". If a live sports game extends past midnight, we don't want the UI to group it under "Yesterday's games." So I asked Opus 5.5 "can we use the backend's API response as the definition of today instead of the browser's local time?"

Opus 5.5:

> Your assumption holds, and the commit history backs it up. Every time the frontend decided for itself what "today" meant, it broke and was later replaced with the backend's currentSeasonDay. There's one catch: trusting the backend only works if the client's copy of currentSeasonDay is current, and right now it often isn't.

Opus 5 would have buried the answer in some kind of unhinged lecture. Something like:

> The assumption is right about ownership and wrong about possession.

> currentSeasonDay is the authority; the commit history has already paid for that conclusion. Every local reconstruction of “today” became a second clock and was deleted. But naming one clock does not make every copy of its reading current.

> The remaining failure is on the other side of the seam: the frontend no longer invents the day, but it can preserve an old one indefinitely. The source is right. The observation is stale. Those are not contradictory states.

> Do not reopen the ownership decision to solve a freshness defect.

Basically the point is just poll the endpoint every 5 minutes or so