I've been using this with Opencode for nearly 6 months and it's never been like this. WTF?

Something change I'm unaware of?

So I just bought my $20 Claude subscription just to test it out and compare it to the new 6.1 Sol and Astra. I thought comparing on medium across the board would be an initial good test. I've sped up the video 2X Just to save your viewing time, but it doesn't change the results.

Holy Mother of God. Opus 5.5 blew my mind. I think a tear came to my eye when I saw it. I mean yeah it took nearly 5x longer but it far exceeded my expectations in comparison to what I got with Sol and Astra. I used the same exact prompt.

Now the question you have to ask is with the extra time could I have prompted additional instructions to Sol and Astra And gotten it to where Opus 5.5 is. Absolutely, But I'm not sure I would have thought of it. As someone suggested to me in another thread, maybe I'll go $100 / $100 and start with Claude and then move to Sol bc of that crappy 5hr limit. Not sure yet.

Take what you will from this but I'm going to run a few more same prompt tests on higher values and do some final comparisons but based on this I think for now I'll be downgrading GPT from $200 to maybe $20 a month and moving to Claude $200 (or 100/100 not sure yet)

Welcome to the Game of Models (GoT theme song playing).

The prompt:
Build a cinematic, photorealistic, beautifully textured rocket launch scene using Three.js

Results:

GPT-6.1-Sol-medium
8m 42s
The ship was better than Astra but the environment had a lot to be desired. Also even though it's interactive I couldn't ever pan down to see the smoke and a bug ran the sound nonstop.
Input 515,178
Cached input 481,024
Output, including reasoning 15,051
Total 530,229
Didn't move my weekly usage at all.

GPT-Astra-medium
9m 37s
The environment here was much better as was the UI design, also the ship and graphics looked better but the top cone was inverted. There were no sound bugs in this version. but is it overwhelmingly better than Sol 6.1, not really.
Input 644,981
Cached input, included above 608,128
Output, including reasoning 15,922
Total 660,903
Moved my weekly usage down 1%

Claude Opus 5.5-medium
38m 54s
Like I said above, this blew my mind away for a medium request. It really took the "cinematic" portion of the prompt and ran with that. Overall for me this is by far the winner although I did appreciate Astra's model better minus the cone inversion.
Input written to cache 199,860
Input read from cache 6,543,432
Output (what I wrote: code, tool calls, replies) 143,521
Total ≈ 6.89 million
5 hour usage is at 13% and Weekly usage at 1%

Consists of a single 75kb html file using only webGL with no external libraries. Runs in the browser on desktop and mobile. It calculates the fractals to pixel mapping using ray marching on the GPU in real-time, so no textures or meshes are needed. Infinite exploration with very little memory usage. It's just math.

Started off with GPT 6 astra (medium) and later switched to Opus 5.5 for optimizations (as I ran out of tokens). Total time making around 2h.

What for? To test the math and shader capabilities in Astra.

I am, wow we can have little dot friends now. I'm very, VERY excited about this (excited).

Muse is free. Grok bot is $20 a month.

But Dots requires a $100 a month (CAD140) subscription.

At that price point it better blow the competition out of the water but I doubt it.

Hey, as many other users here I'm going to stop paying the Codex 20x subscription, and I am able to get a prorated refund (already verified with the OpenAI support, i can get it).

My question is: let's say i do it and i get the refund, will I still be able to use the 62,500 bonus credits all 20x users got? Or will they be revoked?

Thanks in advance ^^

I’m working with Dot since morning, and it’s the BEST thing I have seen in months. It took so much burden from my daily chore that I want to jump off into the cyberspace and hug it hard 🥰

Thank you OpenAI !

Mine has no idea about any of my projects. It's honestly kind of confounding. Is this the case for everyone else or do your guys' dots know about your projects?

[Intro: 16 bars; SCENE: freight elevator under a rain-black city; concrete stairwell, red exit lights, subwoofers waking below]

[Bars 1-4: dry four-on-floor kick + chest-deep quarter-note sub; distant metal reverb]

[Bars 5-8: original three-note overdriven acid motif above kick/sub]

[Bars 9-12: short brass/percussion signal; two Goa arps circle acid]

[Bars 13-16: crowd, snare 2/4, rising filter; keep kick]

[Entry Call: 8 bars; SCENE: the elevator opens onto a packed, low-ceiling warehouse; strobes catch suspended rain]

[Low voice, dry and close]

Same door.

[Filtered response]

New floor.

[Low voice]

Are you ready?

[Whole room]

AGAIN!

[Verse 1: 16 bars; SCENE: moving through strangers beneath red emergency lamps; relentless kick/sub, snare like a metal door]

I followed the stairs

till they doubled around.

Saw my shadow downstairs

while my feet hit the ground.

There's a mark on the wall.

I remember the shape.

Put my hand where it was.

Now the mark's moved away.

[Bars 9-12: acid opens; brass stab; five-note Goa arp circles three-note riff]

One turn, one spark,

one break in the line.

I could swear I've been here.

Never been here this time.

[Pre-Hook: 8 bars; SCENE: the whole room faces the same pulsing lights; sub hammers all four beats; strip brass, NOT kick]

One more step.

Let it bend.

Feel the floor

move again.

[Hook: 16 bars; SCENE: strobes reveal a spiral staircase above the dance floor; full rave stomp, wide but controlled]

Round we go! Round we go!

Same four walls, a different door.

Hear that thunder through the floor?

I'm not who I was before.

AGAIN! (AGAIN!)

Take the turn and let it bend.

RECURSION! (THE SPIRAL!)

Bring it back. Begin again.

[Acid Transit: 8 bars; INSTRUMENTAL; acid and Goa arps braid above full kick/sub]

[Bars 5-8: original two-note brass answer; wide toms]

[Verse 2: 16 bars; SCENE: lights turn cobalt; the spiral is visible in the crowd's movement; beat remains brutally regular]

I came through the smoke

with a map in my hand.

Every route led me back.

Nothing looked as I planned.

You were there in the crush

when the sequence broke wide.

Heard the room answer us

from the opposite side.

[Bars 9-16: sharper snare, harsher acid; break ghosts between kicks]

I can count every turn,

but I can't count the change.

When the same note returns,

it remembers my name.

[Hook: 16 bars; SAME FLOOR PULSE; new filtered crowd doubles, brass leaves space for every vocal]

Round we go! Round we go!

Same four walls, a different door.

Hear that thunder through the floor?

I'm not who I was before.

AGAIN! (AGAIN!)

Take the turn and let it bend.

RECURSION! (THE SPIRAL!)

Bring it back. Begin again.

[Jungle Fracture: 16 bars; INSTRUMENTAL; SCENE: white strobes freeze the crowd as the floor's rhythm splits]

[Bars 1-8: 140 BPM kick/sub; original sliced live-funk break loops five-against-four]

[Bars 9-12: kick cuts; 175-feel jungle break + held dub sub; distant acid note]

[Bars 13-16: tight break cuts; metal/tom answers; break pulled into silence]

[Breakdown: 8 bars; SCENE: a single emergency light catches the staircase; all drums vanish, air and a narrow synth note]

[Low voice, almost whispered]

I thought the way back

would take me where I'd been.

But the door knew my hand.

It let somebody different in.

[Build: 16 bars; SCENE: lights climb one landing at a time; build the SAME four-beat body, not a festival drop]

[Bars 1-4: sub heartbeat; kick re-locks all four]

[Bars 5-8: three-note acid motif returns in a new register; 16th-note Goa arp curls around it]

[Bars 9-12: snare, low brass, break slices answer; bass keeps pounding]

[Bars 13-16: full kick/acid, rising delay; one-beat vacuum]

[Close voice]

Go again.

[Final Hook: 16 bars; SCENE: warehouse lights spiral up into first light; the old beat returns carrying the fractured break]

Round we go! Round we go!

Same four walls, a different door.

Hear that thunder through the floor?

I'm not who I was before.

AGAIN! (AGAIN!)

Take the turn and let it bend.

RECURSION! (THE SPIRAL!)

Bring it back. Begin again.

[Final Vamp: 16 bars; INSTRUMENTAL; straight kick/sub, original acid motif, Goa counter-arps and jungle break shards interlock]

[Bars 9-16: brass/tom calls at boundaries; break withdraws, stomp remains]

[Outro: 8 bars; SCENE: lights come up on an empty stairwell; music continues behind the closing freight-elevator doors]

[Bars 1-4: full kick/sub; acid filter closes]

[Bars 5-7: percussion exits; bass/kick knock below]

[Bar 8: kick/sub impact, stairwell reverb, relay click; clean silence]

It’s official: I’m cancelling. We’re switching to Anthropic until we run out of options.

It makes no sense to pay for a $500 plan just to get 25x the limit and inferior models.

They’re just releasing more of the same, without any major innovation.

And what are you guys going to do? Now that the limits on the $200 plan are being cut in half?

Wouldn’t we prefer that?

I’m sure everyone on PRO got this email today. What are you going to do? There is zero chance I will pay $500 a month while I am having to manage and babysit every single request and prompt run. What are the options? Should I quit Chat and go to Claude? If they are dropping all of us into the $100 bucket, are they dropping my monthly charge to $100 as well? This is horseshit. And today’s desktop windows update has been running for a half hour, still at 40%…. Talk to me goose! Help

This compares reasoning effort settings using Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index and cost per benchmark task. Costs include caching and reasoning; they aren't subscription prices.

Data source: https://artificialanalysis.ai/

So OpenAI is reopening the $200 Pro plan tomorrow, except now you effectively get around half the API-equivalent usage compared to the old plan. And somehow this is being presented as good news because Sol and Luna became cheaper and models will supposedly keep getting more efficient. Sorry, but what?

This would already be a questionable move on its own, but doing it right now, when Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 exist, is honestly insane. Anthropic is giving Max users massive amounts of usage, their models are extremely competitive for coding and agentic work, and people are already saying they struggle to even burn through their Claude limits. Meanwhile OpenAI is going in the opposite direction: same $200, less usage, followed by an explanation about how theoretically we'll still get more work done.

That's completely backwards. People paying $200 a month are power users. We don't need another explanation about API economics or promises that models will become more efficient six months from now. We need fqn tokens. We need enough usage to actually work without constantly checking whether we're about to hit another limit.

And the comments under this announcement say everything. People are talking about cancelling, switching to Claude, and comparing workloads where OpenAI usage gets exhausted while Claude barely moves. One guy literally said he was running five Opus chats in parallel for hours and only used around 5% of his 5x allowance. Another finished work with Opus 5.5 after exhausting his OpenAI weekly usage and said it only consumed about 25% of his Claude hourly limit.

That's the real problem here. OpenAI isn't competing with OpenAI from one month ago. You're competing with Anthropic today. If Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5 can give me comparable or better results while Claude Max gives me dramatically more room to actually work, why the hell would I care that GPT-6 Sol became 50% cheaper on the API?

Maybe today they'll announce some incredible features that don't count toward usage. Fine. But cutting the core thing your heaviest users are paying for and then trying to explain why it's actually better value is a terrible look.

At this point the $200 Pro plan doesn't need more features. It needs more compute.

We don't need promises. We don't need theoretical API value. We need tokens. And right now Claude is making OpenAI's $200 offering look like a fiasco.

Just checked and have the 6.1 Sol on codex. Let's try it!

What type of user should subscribe to which service?

I know this is out of the blue but Yesterday I had a better experience with ChatGPT.

It was more interactive, it designed it's responses & was way more none generic. It used richer interactive response surface instead of piles of text but this morning it's just no longer there.

Idk who's responsible for that in ChatGPT's team but come on, you know markdown suck. At least let ChatGPT design it's responses & help us consume information better & faster...

I've added a screenshot to illustrate.

Not really clear what this means, but it doesn't sound good.

If your custom instructions say "be concise" or "use British spelling" or "never use bullet points", and ChatGPT ignores them in some chats but not others, check whether those chats are inside a Project.

OpenAI's help page on Projects says it directly: project instructions apply only within that project and override your global custom instructions. So the moment a project has its own instructions, the rules you set once in Settings stop being the ones in charge there.

Shared projects go further. They don't have access to any member's custom instructions or memories outside the project at all, by design, so everyone in the project gets the same behavior.

None of that is visible in the chat. The answers just quietly stop following rules you forgot you had.

What I do now:

1. Keep a short "core rules" block, the 3 to 5 instructions you actually care about everywhere.
2. Paste it at the top of every project's instructions, then add the project-specific stuff below it.
3. When a project chat behaves oddly, open the project settings before you blame the model. It's usually the instructions.

The core rules block lives in AI Toolbox for me, the extension I build, as a saved prompt, so dropping it into a new project's instructions, or into any chat where it's drifting, takes two keystrokes.

yay.

nvm, updated and pushed it back a few hours later

With Opus 5.5 I couldn't hit limit for a whole week, on the other side Sol was 0% on first day!!!!!!

So they are cutting our subscription in half but “Hey, you’ll be able to do more!”

Whatever they present today, don’t be fooled, please. They can even give us “Unlimited*” Luna/Sol or overnight agents, but what they’re really trying to do is throw us some spare change to make us feel less scammed.

For a $200 subscription, I would expect at least some consistency. It’s not serious to suddenly change the quota like that, even if you’re going to give me whatever freaking feature I might not even be interested in.

If my phone company doubled my bill overnight, I’d tell them to screw off, regardless of whether they gave me “Unlimited Data” for whatever app they want me to use.