tl;dr - It’s an incredible model, but there’s something different about this launch…
OpenAI isn’t just going for raw intelligence. They’ve improved the personality of the model. This is almost certainly to capture more of the personal agent (OpenClaw) market. Its responses are shorter, more human-like, and less formal. It actually has a personality.
While Anthropic actively tries to prevent you from using Opus tokens outside of their harnesses, OpenAI is making their models better for that exact use case. If you were using OpenClaw and felt like your agent lost its soul when you had to switch to GPT, try it again now with 5.5.
GPT-5.5 is an expensive model, more expensive than GPT-5.4. But it’s significantly more token-efficient. To reach GPT-5.4-level intelligence, GPT-5.5 uses far fewer tokens. 5.5 should cost less to run overall. This is probably a bigger deal than most people realize.
But Is It Good?
Yes, it’s incredible. It comes in two forms: Codex and Pro. Within Codex, it is the absolute frontier of what’s possible with agentic coding. It finds and solves difficult bugs, builds entire applications, and has no problem understanding large codebases. It’s better than Opus at backend, but it’s still not as good at front end design.
I found myself using medium and high thinking settings, extra high was just too slow and I didn’t feel the extra thinking juice was worth the squeeze. Opus, especially 4.6 fast, is still significantly faster than any GPT model. I’m a speed-maxxi, so this matters to me.
And within Codex, it just goes. I gave it a PRD for a new project I’m building and just said “go.” I had full confidence it would build the entire project, and it did. GPT-5.5 Codex running for hours to build something is not a problem. It’s also in its own league at visual inspection, better than I’ve seen with other models. It’s able to iterate by building -> visual review -> build more that feels much more autonomous than any other model.
Using 5.5 Pro in ChatGPT is insane. It just feels like it can solve everything. Honestly, I can’t even come up with hard enough problems to give it. And it’ll work for 30, 60, 90 minutes or more. And it seems to be optimized for taking advantage of their plugins (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc) and can easily create 60 page coherent and well-designed documents.
GPT-5.5 is now the bar. It is the frontier. And besides for speed, it is as good as any Opus model and oftentimes better at certain tasks.
