Nobody has asked me whether GPT-6 Astra is better than Sol. Everyone has asked me what to set the reasoning effort to. OpenAI’s docs list five levels, tell you none of them is the default any more, and leave it there. The Codex crowd say high. A few people on X say max because you’re paying flagship money anyway so why not. One person on dev.to did the maths and landed on medium.
GPT-5.5 dropped yesterday under the rumoured codename Spud, and I’ve been hammering on it inside Codex for most of today. I want to say something that probably won’t be popular. It feels a lot like GPT-5.4. That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it’s also not the leap the X timeline had me bracing for. Every leaker for the past month was whispering about big model smell. The general vibe was that OpenAI was about to drag the throne back from Anthropic in one swing. Sam’s strawberry potato tweet didn’t help calm anyone down. By the time the announcement landed, half the AI internet had convinced itself we were getting a generational jump.