Opus 5.5 has the personality of a proud righteous nerd, definitely incomprehensible at times, unless you explicitly tells it to slow it down, it crams information far too dense.

Great model to architect and resolve eng. problems in a harness loop tho. Poor handoff.

Yes, exactly! Maybe not sarcastic but definitely using jargon and being opaque like we all know it, it’s just hinting. Feels like talking to someone who’s constantly trying to prove to me they are smart(er).

Yes! Literal copy paste from my session with Opus 5.5 this morning:

> You gave me a long answer but it didn’t answer my question: can we safely remove $X

Agree I do not like the way Opus 5.5 communicates with me. It feels like it is trying to act superior in a condescending way. DO NOT LIKE. I have not used Argon yet but Gemini 3.8 Flash has been a joy to use in comparison (and so fast!) as a daily driver.

Sarcastic? wdym?

The three great epochs of AI:

Way too many bullets -> way too many emojis -> way too many em dashes

AI writing style comes from post-training, which is entirely under the control of the labs. It's not copying it from any public sources.

I did at the beginning, but there is only so much you can take, and no one cares if you have read books and seen it before. There were a bunch of programmers whom I thought would understand em dashes, but they did not and said no one uses such dashes only normal hyphens.

Em dashes ended up as one of the first victims of llm age

I think they just used them too much. I suspect that as they naturally form a thematic break point in writing, their probability was unnaturally high at the end of phrases and this led to overuse.

I don't ever recall seeing an LLM using them incorrectly, as opposed to simply at high frequency but correctly (although I'm sure some low param or early models must have done so at some point).

this happens to me as well, meanwhile Pangram claims their false positive rate is 1 in 24000 as if that should be practically negligeable. I bet it's closer to 1 in 10 for gen-x'ers

The worst part is that it seems they just regex it with the semicolon, making the text harder on the eyes

My complaint, and the complaint of many is not the models - they can be good to very good depending on use case.

What sucks, hard, is googles ability to deploy direct to devs and customers at scale when the deployment is not a longstanding Google project.

Case in point: I’m an ultra subscriber and see in my app right now an ad to try Gemini 4; meanwhile the only models I have available are 3.1 pro,3.6 flash, and 3.8 thinking.

Clicking the try gemini 4 link takes me to a demo prompt that loads 3.6 flash. Srsly

I won’t even start telling you what getting api key based access together was like a year ago.

People have very short attention spans and cheerlead whoever is winning at any particular point in time.

"I don't understand why people don't like our models but we can't get our act together on the products they use those models in"

Because Google models are crap. They are on par with local shit models. Last time I tried they were unable to even hold a longer conversation, because they would enter loop and reiterate last answer regardless of the prompt etc.

Then basic mistakes (inferring wrong information from the given text, hallucinations...). Gemini is okay for some absolute basics and the rest of the work goes to actual frontier models.

> and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two

This was part of the issue, as stated in their comment. We couldn't jump around to try it for the reason that is wasn't made available to, as you say, "all the power users".

You're not convincing me. The war for compute within google is well known by now. Every single product decision stems from that.

Do you really think people in google are happy about how long it took to release this model?

I'm still a codex man myself but lots of people feel like opus 5.5 just gets it for some projects in a way that astra doesn't. Especially given the fact that astra and sol 6.1 are often at capacity late at night during US hours, when lots of people want to run longer unsupervised projects while they sleep. There's a general sense I've felt reaching some comment threads that openai failed to react with something better than opus 5.5 and are rushing to release small tweaks to make people feel like they're still getting something new.

There was some backlash around the pricing changes - the $200/month tier offers less usage now, at the same time as the launch of the $500/month tier.

Reddit thread with 247 comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wtgv3z/dev_day_l/

Aside from that I'm not sure what was "disastrous" - maybe the lack of a new model release to compete with the just-released Claude Opus 5.5?

Pulled astra 6.1 at the last moment (allegedly) and only released a dirty looper sol 6.1. Also released dots which are unavailable in EU. There may have been more but no one cared.

There weren't "rumors" that it would be Ultra only, that's what Google has announced two weeks ago. Happy to see they've went back on that, but I haven't seen Gemini 4 on any apps till now, and I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber.

edit: just a few hours after this comment I got access to Gemini 4 on the Gemini app. Yayy! :)

am on pro. updated my apps. no g4. sadge google.