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Comment by ryanschaefer | Hacker News Reader

I had this debate with my coworker who prefers anthropic models to open ai ones. I ended up settling into the idea that gpt 5.6 is better used as a tool and opus 5 is a companion. GPT 5.6 takes you literally whereas opus 5 tends to take more liberties to try to get to the “spirit” of what you want. It comes down to preference, and I don’t want a companion.

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That’s how I see it too. Claude is more “fun” to use, like a coworker I have to talk to now and then to steer it, while gpt-5.6 is a task machine: I give it a task and it is very consistent, reliable and predictable in its execution. I don’t have to interrupt it, it gets the task done exactly how I wanted it, but it’s “boring” and feels more sterile

Reminds me of this: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-w...

I think this is such a great reframing. It makes so much sense; I need an AI that acts more as a HUD and gives me superpowers, not just a copilot that can tell me when I've misspelled a word.

False dichotomy, no? You can have a HUD, and a copilot, and your copilot can also have a HUD. And to complete the idea, you can also have neither.

Sol is an absolute machine. I stopped doing parallel worktrees just because the cost of context switch outweighs the cost of waiting Sol to just finish the task it’s working on which is usually anywhere from 1-10mins.

I also like Codex CLI more than the Codex App bc it’s more scriptable and displays all the tool calls and reasoning whereas in the App it’s kind of folded away/obscured. This way as soon as I see a tool call fail (eg it tries to use jq assuming it’s available but it wasn’t so I take a note to set it up as it’s obviously useful for the agent to wrangle json).

I think its amazing what OpenAI have been able to squeeze out from a model like Sol thats much smaller in size than Fable.

Yes, Codex has no comparison so far.

Do you use the annotations and forking features in codex CLI? I can't find an easy way to access them.

/fork IIRC for forking. it's open source so you can ask Codex to take a look at the Codex code

I've switched to Codex a few months ago when Claude's weekly limits were getting pretty stiff, and I haven't looked back. Both GPT 5.5 and 5.6 are quite capable, especially compared to nerfed Opus 4.7 (haven't tried 5).

Also, the Codex guy regularly resets weekly limits for everyone, which is a nice bonus (I know it's a temporary gimmick to attract more users, but I might as well use it while it lasts.)

We haven't had a banked reset in a while though. Tibo should give them out instead of forcibly resetting everyone and their refresh date.

I doubt there is such a clear difference.

One week it feels better to work with Fable and Opus 5, the other I work more with GPT 5.6 Sol. Either takes its liberties, and neither communicates like a companion.

I hear you guys, but it sounds like we’re taking about the default settings or “personalities” baked into the models by their creators.

Either of them will act exactly the way you want if you explicitly tell them too. Add the instructions to your own system prompt. If you don’t want a companion, say so. If you want shorter answers in a different style, tell them. They will obey :)

Read this.

https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

> We retired the “Nerdy” personality in March after launching GPT‑5.4. In training, we removed the goblin-affine reward signal and filtered training data containing creature-words, making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts. Unfortunately, GPT‑5.5 started training before we found the root cause of the goblins. When we began testing GPT‑5.5 in Codex, OpenAI employees immediately noticed the strange affinity for goblins, and we added a developer-prompt instruction (opens in a new window) to mitigate. Codex is, after all, quite nerdy.

Note that the permanent solution was not just adjusting the prompt, and in fact being perfectly aware of that option they decided on a different course of action. That means either you are wrong or they are wrong.

> making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts

So inappropriate goblins are still likely, just less so…

Hey, remember when tech bugs were things like buffer overflows or cross-thread performance impacts? I miss the days when our war with system goblins was purely metaphorical.

Did they ever discuss what the root cause of the goblins turned out to be?

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