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Comment by throwaway2027 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2027

December 2025 was the breakthrough for me. January Claude was euphoric, ChatGPT was up there. February Gemini cooked for a second there. March amazing. April the big bad nerf. May GPT 5.5 is just pure bliss altough 2x limits temporarily, not sure about Claude it's sort of okay still not as good as it felt before, slowly increasing limits with more compute and rebuilding good will.

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I find your emotional language truly quite fascinating. I've heard people talk like that about drugs.

Similarly, I've heard people talk like that about things that are not drugs.

You can get a dopamine rush from anything, from drugs to using LLMs.

I actually thought it was a joke comment, but I'm worried now that it's not the case.

I think Opus 4.6 at its peak was the "how can anyone not get that this is good" for me.

Then the nerf, and the massive uplift in tokens for 4.7, a model which I find lazy and prone to hallucinate.

It's probably time to try GPT5.5. Like many I'm pretty heavily invested in the anthropic ecosystem at this point, which I suppose gives another strong reason to make the switch.

I was a dedicated Claude user but in March/April I started using GPT5.5 on a new project that Claude had tried and failed to execute successfully. GPT knocked it out of the park, and was able to do it within my subscription allocation of tokens. I'd recommend giving it a go at least. Something like OpenClaude can let you use the Claude tools you're used to

I only used Claude first time in April, previously only ChatGPT and Gemini. And I struggle to see what the hype is all about - yes it seems a tiny bit smarter than the pack, but on the 20$ subscription it runs out of tokens in 5-20 minutes, and then you need to wait 3-4h.

ChatGPT 5.5 seems capable, although a bit stingy with “thinking” compared to earlier models, and I never run into session limits.

I couldn't imagine using CC on the basic tier!

Even operations and GTM are all at "professional" level (which I think is vaguely equivalent to 5x).

The openclaw ban pushed me over to 5.5 for some daily usage. I feel like Opus and 5.5 are good at very different things. 5.5 can be too literal, and it does not have as much of a ‘creative’ bent whether that’s toward design, UI/UX, interpreting vague instructions, etc. So, in that way, Opus had sort of spoiled me.

On the other hand, this year I’ve been in the habit of using codex as a bug finder / audit layer, where it shines, and I can tell you, Opus makes a lot of mistakes, and as we all know struggles with laziness — and has gotten good at encoding that laziness into the codebase (// Per instructions, pass this test by default) where it can live for a long time. So, Opus had spoiled me, but more with its ability to sketch holistically than its ability to put out perfect codebases.

Upshot - it was good to switch horses for a while, as you mention. Slightly different skill sets there. And I still reach for claude especially for initial design. But right now the daily driver is 5.5 / xhigh fast mode, and it’s very capable.

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