Yes, but don't we expect GPT 5.5 Pro will eventually be a free tier? Maybe I'm missing something because I only use the free tier. But the free tier has gotten way better over the last few years. I'm pretty sure, based on descriptions on this site from paid subscribers, that the free tier now is better than the paid tier of say 2 years ago. That's the lag I'm wondering about.
Free ChatGPT is like a fast car with a barely responsive steering wheel. Guardrails on that thing are insane. Even for math. It wont let you think. It will try to fix mistakes you havent even made yet based on intent that was ascribed to you for no reason. It veers off in some crazy directions thinking that's what you meant and trying to address even a little bit of that creates almost a combinatorial explosion of even more wrong things. Is why I stick to Claude. The latter is chill and only addresses what you had typed. Isn't verbose and actually asks you what you getting at with your post. That said, ChatGPT is more technical and can easily solve math problems that stump Claude.
Paid plans give you access to much larger, more intelligent models which have thinking enabled (inference time compute). In the example here you can see GPT Pro taking 20-80 minutes to respond with the proof.
All this is far more expensive to serve so it’s locked away behind paid plans.
I do not think this is true. You will continue to get smaller, cheaper-to-host models in the free tier that are distilled from current and former frontier models. They will continue to improve, but I’d be very surprised if, e.g., 5.4-mini (I think this is the free tier model) beat o3 on many benchmarks, or real world use cases.
I won’t even leave chatGPT on “Auto” under any circumstances - it’s vastly worse on hallucinations, sycophancy, everything, basically.
Anyway, your needs may be met perfectly fine on the free tier product, but you’re using a very different product than the Pro tier gets.
lol, I love that their first example is bringing Slack content into Teams. It's like they've completely forgotten if I have Slack, there's 0 way I'm going to have Teams open if I can avoid it at all.
I've been using Codex since before ChatGPT (the OG version) and CC since launch. For me personally - Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet generally has better taste, more personality in interactions, and is more willing to just do the work. Paired with skills, LSPs, linters, and hooks, it works very well. I think of the two like this:
Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet is the L7 senior engineer still gunning for promotion. Hasn't hit burnout, hasn't been ground down by terrible teams yet. Capable and willing to get their hands dirty.
Codex (the harness) with GPT-5.4 or 5.3-codex is fantastic but terse. Some of the UX frustrates me. I want a visual task list. That said, Codex as a harness is phenomenal. Think of it as the senior EM / CTO-in-waiting who won't write new code without complaining and nitpicking for hours. But they'll thoroughly tear your code apart and produce a plan you can execute yourself or pass to Claude Code.
Both are great, and so is Factory Droid. Also worth checking out Compound Engineering from Every.to if you haven't.
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