Because Opus is kind of degrading lately, I said "fuck it" and made a new OAI account and used the month free trial. I put one query into ChatGPT using 5.5 thinking - the frustrating thing was that it did put more effort into getting correct answers rather than Opus, which is just guessing. Specifically, I asked about the coding harness pi, and despite explicitly referring to it as a harness, Opus 4.7, 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 all fell back to telling me about Aider or OpenCode and ignored my query completely, while ChatGPT said "I'll assume pi is a harness" and then did in fact find the harness.

However the language of ChatGPT is still the same slop as years ago, so many headings, so many emojis, so many "the important thing nobody mentions". 10 paragraphs of text for what should be a two paragraph response. Even with custom instructions (keep answers short and succinct) and using their settings (less list, less emoji, less fluff) it's still NOTICEABLY worse than Claude on base settings.

I've yet to test Codex, will get to that this weekend, but in terms of research or general Q&A I have no idea how anyone could prefer this to Claude. Unfortunately Claude has seemingly stopped giving a fuck about researching entirely.