EDIT: this doesn't say anything about availability on either Azure or AWS. I'm assuming it will show up later, but it would be interesting if it didn't.
Does anyone care about code quality anymore?
Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
Input
Output
Price reduction
GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol
$4 → $2
$20 → $10
50% cheaper
GPT‑6 Luna vs. GPT‑5.6 Luna
$0.20 → $0.10
$1.20 → $0.50
50% cheaper
Should be B vs A correct?
Else it's confusing
Wierd!!
But the reason people say "Claude can't compete" is because Claude Opus has been going downhill since 4.7, and many have found Opus 5 intolerable. Fable is much better, but also much more expensive than OpenAI's offerings.
Then they do a new model launch, issue quota resets all around, and it's a party for 2-3 weeks before things return to normal.
Which... fine, I'll take that.
Astra was/is superior for planning type tasks. It was capable of doing seemingly magic things with rather vague/lazy instructions ("I need to be able to test this on Windows, maybe a qemu VM or something? Shrug." ... 1 hour later "yeah i built you a whole qemu + eval windows image + harness of powershell scripts + shell scripts to retrieve & verify harness.").
And for UI work -- which is not something I do a lot of but do here and there -- it was clearly superior to 5.6 Sol.
But it also feels sloppier? Somehow. And too expensive to use.
We'll see how Sol 6 is.
Terra had the "workhorse" quality where it could do these changes in bulk and follow directions without being too 'smart' (but sloppy) as you described. Luna was a bit too dumb and would make sloppy mistakes; I see that more as a "run these tests and format the results" sort of model. Maybe 6 Luna will be better.
I also just reread your comment and realized the naming convention is still extremely confusing with respect to ordering of [Family]x[Model]x[Number].
Terra ended up just being an awkward middle ground that was not particularly suited for any workload.
Edit: Yes, it applies also to subscriptions, source https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2102463847714247142
Now GPT 6 Luna is even cheaper, and more intelligent, there is no going back... to SOL 5.6 for intelligent layer.
I was hoping for a serious Luna upgrade. It was already cheap enough. This feels more like a price reduction than an upgrade.
That said, if the new Luna is able to handle ultra mode and subagents v2 in codex cli, then at least that’s a win.
My previous comment--which suggested astroturfing--was the highest upvoted comment here until it got flagged. Which implies to me that atleast the other remaining humans on this forum see it as well.
Clearly organic: 26 minutes, 89 comments, upvoted instantly to the top, posted within one hour of the Opus 5.5 announcement. Please @Dang, after this comment is flagged as well, delete my account.
fyi, i flagged it because it is boring reading and against the rules.
if you suspect astroturfing, flag the comments and contact the mods.
(complaining that your complaint got flagged is also tiresome. contact the mods. "@dang" doesnt work, use the email.)
I respect you for replying here though, and yes I get that HN forum standards would suggest flagging my previous comment. But it is just sad to see a place used to be so vibrant get manipulated because of how much weight it holds for us in the industry.
And yea sure, I could go and flag all the bots and message Dang. But probably time to stop shouting into the void. :)
1/ Usage limits: downstream of input/output cost, but resets and obscure windows and odd 20x plan / 5x plan != 4x usage math throw a wrench into it. Winner right now is Codex by a mile, especially when you factor in ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan. Always a bummer when asking if I should see a doctor about a rash means I can't code as much. It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems, giving better planning results or deeper code analysis without burning usage.
2/ Context window in the harness. Claude Code wins on this. There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing. 252k is just not enough. Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that even a model as powerful as Astra sometimes loses the plot on long-running tasks.
3/ Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.
I've subscription hopped a bunch, and at times I've had both, but I keep coming back to Codex because it wins on 2/3.
As far as I know Codex (at least the GUI) can automatically call the ChatGPT Chat models (including Astra 6 Pro), you just need to @ a ChatGPT Chat conversation from within Codex and tell it when to use it.
> There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing
Not true, it works again[1]. I confirm that it works both on 5.6 Sol and Astra 6, possibly other models too.
I actually preferred 5.6-Terra not because it is technically superior (it isn't) but because it had better instincts to NOT do this stuff.
PS - Speaking of better instincts, have they closed the UI-design gap at all? I keep a Claude subscription just because /design produces significantly higher quality UI design/UI feedback/UI refinement than anything I've seen from OpenAI.
The GPT / Codex models have always been "overengineer" personalities. I prefer that to "I left a pile of race conditions lying around and big gaps in testing" though, which is what I was getting from Opus at times.
But yes both Astra and Sol veer on the side of paranoid. And honestly that's better for team work. For solo work where you just want to yeet something, it can be tiring.
You learn to tame the GPT "personality" on this front by combing over once a week and asking it to find and exterminate pointless tests, clean abstractions etc.
Incredible.
> GPT-5.6-Sol is retiring. This conversation will automatically switch to GPT-6-Sol
I don't recall OAI retiring a model so early lol. Similar arch?
> In the Coding Agent Index, Sol improves but Luna regresses: In OpenAI's Codex harness, GPT-6 Sol (max) scores 57 in the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, up 2 points from GPT-5.6 Sol (max), with gains in Terminal-Bench 4.0 (43% vs 37%) and SWE-Atlas-QnA (58% vs 54%). At $2.99 per task it costs ~50% less than GPT-5.6 Sol (max) and sits on the Pareto frontier of Coding Agent Index vs Cost per Task. GPT-6 Luna (max) scores 41, down 2 points from GPT-5.6 Luna (max), with lower scores in SWE-Atlas-QnA (44% vs 49%) and DeepSWE v1.1 (64% vs 66%), at ~60% lower cost per task.
Here's GPT-6 Luna pelicans: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
And GPT-6 Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Scroll to the bottom for the GPT-6 Sol max one: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
For comparison, here are the pelicans I got for GPT-6 Astra: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - I still like the Astra Max one best.
For example, I had Fable review Astra’s output yesterday, and it found some issues and fixed them. Passing the fixes back, Astra then uncovered additional issues with Fable’s fixes (and yes, this will go on ad infinitum if you let it, but these were “real” issues).
It seems the big story here is the reduced Luna pricing. It’s a fantastic model that can handle most automation needs (though I still use the big models for day-to-day development).
The "paradox" is when an increase in efficiency which would decrease the use of a resource all else equal, instead indirectly causes more use.
Its a great release, I will use both heavily.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing?latest-pricin...
This is great, but practically, I'm not going to start working on more side projects.
Perhaps in another 6-12 months I'll be fine to drop down to $20/m instead of $200.
A lot of what I'm doing has pretty expensive build/testing processes between iterations - even on a 40 core machine - so I'm not burning tokens 24/7 like some people may.
I'd guess I'm probably spending >50% of the time running tests & build processes & tooling and the remainder is purely burning tokens.
I also have some internal tooling (that I will hopefully open source soon) that makes LLMs substantially more correct (thus more efficient) - so there's that, too.
>> $4 → $2
>> $20 → $10
Do you mean 100% more expensive? GPT 6 is 100% more expensive than 5.6 per your post.
Performance increases both with larger model (Luna vs Sol)
And with more reasoning (low vs xhigh)
If they’re subsidizing my usage, that’s great.
If these price changes mean that coding plans have effectively more usage then that's great, but Codex is surviving on resets from my own experience using it. I was glad to go back to Claude.
The parent + subagent workflow has become critical for keeping the reasoning agent (parent) context-lean while also letting me chat to the main agent while work is getting done.
My main process is to use Fable to reason and then spawn Opus subagents, and I get amazing results, and I'm always looking into what the subagents are doing.
Did cache read/write also decrease by 50% or similar? That's where most (95%+) of the cost is for agentic coding workloads.
Asking cuz I don't think I'm a bot [pats self], I legitimately prefer the GPT models to Anthropic's, don't like Anthropic's customer service/reliability story at all, and I welcome a massive price reduction. Seems like something I should be happy to get.
If you'd told me I'd be typing this a year ago I'd be skeptical though.
OpenAI/Anthropic meanwhile feel a bit like they're hoping to sell iPhones in a market about to be flooded by $20 flip phones, with almost no channel of their own to do it. And for whatever mad reason OpenAI are now signalling they will attempt to compete on price with flip phones despite their cost of labour, energy, and just about everything else being far higher
Highlight and lowlight of my week was successfully convincing the OpenAI support chat robot to give me a refund for the month for my issues with 6 chewing threw my usage with no output.
Having limitless webUI ChatGPT usage is much better user experience, though. I'll give them that.
(edit: Sol-6 is half the price, so maybe the usage limits are going to be way better.)
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