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GPT-5.6

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Re: GPT-5.6

#521

Post by layer8 »

cma256 wrote: post #412
simonw wrote: post #379

Here are 18 pelicans - six each for Luna, Terra and Sol at the six different reasoning effort levels (plus the price to generate each one): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-5.6-pelican... Or if you want to see some in 3D, OpenAI featured a pelican riding a tricycle, bicycle, pony and another pelican in their livestream this morning: https://www.youtube.com/live/Wq45rvPGNHs?t=1070s

Is the direction of the pelicans encoded in your prompt? Curious why they are all left to right with the exception of terra xhigh.

Cultural bias.

Re: GPT-5.6

#522

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

guybedo wrote: post #388

It's good to see labs taking into account the cost/task. Grok 4.5 is interesting because it's smart enough at great price. It seems gpt 5.6 is right there with great efficiency and great pricing. Working with Fable has been a great experience, but at the end of the day, if you can get only 10% of your work done because it just burns through tokens, that's not that interesting. I've been mostly using Opus and Fable hi…

Using the Claude "superpowers" skill will downgrade models automatically, using Sonnet and Haiku for trivial things.

Re: GPT-5.6

#523

Post by gorgmah »

jstummbillig wrote: post #355
gorgmah wrote: post #341

Just used terra ultra for exactly one prompt in codex and it ate through my full 5h window in about 10mns (20$ plan). The results look pretty good though. Luckily I have had my chatGPT subscription for a while and have a bunch of resets available (nice compared to anthropic). Assuming I take the 5x plan it would give me about an hour of active sessions with terra ultra (maybe ultra is not good value regarding tokens?…

> maybe ultra is not good value regarding tokens? Well, yes, as explicitly stated on https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/ : "ultra goes further by coordinating four agents in parallel by default, trading higher token use for stronger results and faster time-to-result on demanding tasks."

thanks, it makes sense, I'll stick to max from now on

Re: GPT-5.6

#524

Post by senko »

rsoto2 wrote: post #493
senko wrote: post #439

I love testing the new models by asking them to code a toy RTS game. Here's what Terra did: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/2026/rts-gpt-5.6-terra.html (one try, in codex app, xhigh effort) Comparing this to other models, I find it similar to GPT-5.5 and a bit behind Sonnet 5. You can see how other models fared here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/ (you can also fetch the prompt and the the 5.6 Terra resulting cod…

So the measure of a model is how well they can recreate something they easily have thousands of examples of in their training data. There's probably a better base RTS on github somewhere for free.

Well, it is a silly test, not a scientific benchmark.

However, I would say it is a measure (not the measure). If you look at the entries, there's a lot of variation - definitely not something they memorized outright.

And the test itself is deceptively simple. You need to do canvas rendering, there's pathfinding, command queueing, terrain generation, etc. There are some subtle click handler bugs (various LLMs often stumble on those). And I ask the model to do it all in one file, further increasing the complexity of the task.

And the result is something that you can instantly evaluate. And if the result is any good, even play! So yeah, I think it's a fair test.

I'm sure it'll get saturated at some point. Actually I started with Minesweeper and switched to RTS last December, because Minesweeper was being saturated. I'm expecting (hoping?) the RTS test will last until the end of this year...

Re: GPT-5.6

#525

Post by YuechenLi »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #249
YuechenLi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is it depends. Claude's generally better at frontend and debugging tasks, while Codex is stronger at backend features and exploratory work. They have very different coding styles and thus very different strengths.

Any actual data backing this up? Or is this just your personal experience?

Just personal experience, I just find it way easier to do frontend work with Claude than it is with Codex.

Re: GPT-5.6

#526

Post by RhodesianHunter »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #467

Not specific to OpenAI / Codex, but I'm curious what people are doing to protect themselves from any destructive actions by their coding agents? Just install and pray? Explicity approve all actions? Reconfigure for safety? Run in a sandbox (Docker) ?

Don't let it outside the sandbox. Don't let it have access to anything but dev environments. Continue using git.

Never had any issues.

Re: GPT-5.6

#527

Post by 5555watch »

So with this release do they kill the 5.5-Pro model with super long thinking and reasoning? 5.6-Sol-Ultra is not the equivalent, right?

Re: GPT-5.6

#528

Post by observationist »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #451
simonw wrote: post #379

Here are 18 pelicans - six each for Luna, Terra and Sol at the six different reasoning effort levels (plus the price to generate each one): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-5.6-pelican... Or if you want to see some in 3D, OpenAI featured a pelican riding a tricycle, bicycle, pony and another pelican in their livestream this morning: https://www.youtube.com/live/Wq45rvPGNHs?t=1070s

I think the 'pelican test' is becoming useless. It's been around long enough that now I'm sure good examples are in the training data, and hell they might even do some hand tuning to make it do a decent job since they know people will ask about it. But either way, with no real way to visualize the result of the text it starts with - it will always be stabbing in the dark. It can't understand conceptually what any of…

Pelicans, maybe, but the point is to measure how good the "internal visualization" abilities are. Throw curveballs, like a unicorn with a duck bill serving coffee at a basketball court. An elephant playing a piano while its trunk swings a baseball bat at a tiny alien spaceship buzzing its head.

Have them use tikz instead of svg, or have it write code that moves the cursor and draws the thing in paint.

Compositionality and visualization are generally much, much better at each new generation / release cycle.

It's fascinating how well models have internalized visualizing things without actually having joint embeddings / broad multimodality.

Re: GPT-5.6

#529

Post by senko »

gorgmah wrote: post #501
senko wrote: post #439

I love testing the new models by asking them to code a toy RTS game. Here's what Terra did: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/2026/rts-gpt-5.6-terra.html (one try, in codex app, xhigh effort) Comparing this to other models, I find it similar to GPT-5.5 and a bit behind Sonnet 5. You can see how other models fared here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/ (you can also fetch the prompt and the the 5.6 Terra resulting cod…

this is so cool: it's playable (even though super boring since there are no enemies) and you can feel that a few iterations would make it very usable. Which model is the best at the moment, for this kind of stuff, in your experience?

I'd say Fable 5: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/2026/rts-fable-5.html

It even has enemies! (I'm not too mad about it not following my instructions because it can be fun to play :) And I generated that from Claude Code on my phone.

Sonnet 5 also produced a pretty nice version. You can see all of them here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/

Re: GPT-5.6

#530

Post by dbt00 »

pupppet wrote: post #450
simonw wrote: post #379

Here are 18 pelicans - six each for Luna, Terra and Sol at the six different reasoning effort levels (plus the price to generate each one): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-5.6-pelican... Or if you want to see some in 3D, OpenAI featured a pelican riding a tricycle, bicycle, pony and another pelican in their livestream this morning: https://www.youtube.com/live/Wq45rvPGNHs?t=1070s

Time to dump this test. Probably not a coincidence every version has the same rolling green hills, gradient blue sky, sun in the corner, etc.

Goodhart's law.
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