Nathaniel Whittemore

The process so far is really good.

To be clear, because I'm coming at this from a non-technical perspective, I don't really have the ability to know how this code compares to what 5.4 would have written.

And I also think that this falls in that category that Matt Schumer was talking about of fairly easy build tasks that any of the last few generations of models could have done really well with.

What I can say is that the experience of using Codex for this was very smooth.

The auto-review mode kept it so that it didn't ask me too many questions, and so it could kind of just work in the background.

Finally, one thing it absolutely crushed.

I dumped in an absolute boatload of data, basically 10 or 12 different charts from both Apple and Spotify about the show and asked it to analyze it and give a bunch of insights.

It did a great job at this.

Enough that I actually also asked it to then think about how that should inform podcast strategy going forward.

And this is not something that I've gotten great results from LLMs on before.

Mostly I've found that it gives very stereotypical advice that would befit any podcast rather than AIDB specifically.

It was much better than that.

And on top of that, when I asked it to turn all of this data into a spreadsheet that organized all the information, it did that really well too, getting me pretty enthusiastic about what it can do from a data analysis and spreadsheet usage standpoint.

So the TLDR on all of this is my first impressions are very positive.

For a long time now, six months or more, really kind of since Opus 4.5, I've never fully stopped using ChatGPT, but Opus models have definitely been the daily drivers.

Cloud Code has been the main building app.

I would not go so far to say that I'm 100% sure that's going to shift overnight, but the combination of the initial impressions that I have of 5.5 being pretty positive, and the improvements in the harness that come with the Codex app, means that at least for the next period, I anticipate doing a lot of jumping back and forth and seeing which model and which harness does better on particular tasks.

From a strict competitive standpoint, you gotta think that the model released in the moment right now is a win for OpenAI.

Cremio summed up the feelings of a lot of folks when they wrote, Model update, Opus 4.7 is so lazy that it's worse than 4.6, GPT-5.5 is a good model and it's gotten much faster.

And just to be clear that this isn't just people's bitter grapes or just model preferences expressed more aggressively, on the same day that 5.5 came out, the team at Anthropic published a post-mortem around recent Cloud Code quality issues, and the TLDR is that people weren't just imagining things.