Another pattern I’m noticing is strong advocacy for Opus, but that requires at least the 5x plan, which costs about $100 per month. I’m on the ChatGPT $20 plan, and I rarely hit any limits while using 5.2 on high in codex.

interesting

This does verify the idea that OpenAI does not make models sycophantic due to attempted subversion by buttering up users so that that they use the product more, its because people actually want AI to talk to them like that. To me, that's insane, but they have to play the market I guess

I've been using Gemini exclusively for the 1 million token context window, but went back to ChatGPT after the raise of the limits and created a Project system for myself which allows me to have much better organization with Projects + only Thinking chats (big context) + project-only memory.

Also, it seems like Gemini is really averse to googling (which is ironic by itself) and ChatGPT, at least in the Thinking modes loves to look up current and correct info. If I ask something a bit more involved in Extended Thinking mode, it will think for several minutes and look up more than 100 sources. It's really good, practically a Deep Research inside of a normal chat.

Much better feel with the Claude 4.5 series, for both chat and coding.

Any suggestions?

Curios where this is going to go.

One of the big arguments for local models is we can't trust providers to maintain ongoing access the models you validated and put into production. Even if you run hosted models, running open ones means you can switch providers.

I spent about half an hour trying to coax it in "plan mode" in IntelliJ, and it kept spitting out these generic ideas of what it was going to do, not really planning at all.

And when I asked it to execute the plan.. it just created some generic DTO and said "now all that remains is <the entire plan>".

Absolutely worst experience with an AI agent so far, not to say that my overall experience has been terrific.

1) Our plan for Claude Opus 4.5 "ran out" or something.

I've heard great things about the mixtral structured outputs capabilities but haven't had a chance to run my evals on them.

If 4.1 is dropped from API that's the first course of action.

Also 5 series doesn't have fine tuning capabilities and it's unclear how it would work if the reasoning step is involved

opus 4.5 is better at gpt on everything except code execution (but with pro you get a lot of claude code usage) and if they nuke all my old convos I'll prob downgrade from pro to freee

So we'll have to wait until "creativity" is solved.

Side note: I've been wondering lately about a way to bring creativity back to these thinking models. For creative writing tasks you could add the original, pretrained model as a tool call. So the thinking model could ask for its completions and/or query it and get back N variations. The pretrained model's completions will be much more creative and wild, though often incoherent (think back to the GPT-3 days). The thinking model can then review these and use them to synthesize a coherent, useful result. Essentially giving us the best of both worlds. All the benefits of a thinking model, while still giving it access to "contained" creativity.

> creative ideation

At first I had no idea what this meant! So I asked my friend Miss Chatty [1] and we had an interesting conversation about it:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697bf761-990c-8012-9dd1-6ca1d5cc34...

[1] You may know her as ChatGPT, but I figure all the other AIs have fun human-sounding names, so she deserves one too.

If you disagree on something you can also train a lora.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.

LOL WHAT?! I'm 0.1% of users? I'm certain part of the issue is it takes 3-clicks to switch to GPT-4o and it has to be done each time the page is loaded.

> that they preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.

Uh.. yeah maybe. But more importantly, GPT-4o gave better answers.

Zero acknowledgement about how terrible GPT-5 was when it was first released. It has since improved but it's not clear to me it's on-par with GPT-4o. Thinking mode is just too slow to be useful and so GPT-4o still seems better and faster.

Oh well, it'll be missed.

(Upgrade for only 1999 per month)

On the other hand - 5.0-nano has been great for fast (and cheap) quick requests and there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative today if they're sunsetting 5.0 models.

I really don't know how they're measuring improvements in the model since things seem to have been getting progressively worse with each release since 4o/o4 - Gemini and Opus still show the occasional hallucination or lack of grounding but both readily spend time fact-checking/searching before making an educated guess.

I've had chatgpt blatantly lie to me and say there are several community posts and reddit threads about an issue then after failing to find that, asked it where it found those and it flat out said "oh yeah it looks like those don't exist"

Despite 4o being one of the worst models on the market, they loved it. Probably because it was the most insane and delusional. You could get it to talk about really fucked up shit. It would happily tell you that you are the messiah.

RIP

Latest Advancements

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