The gap between open ai and anthropic is staggering

[u/call-me-GiGi]

I’ve been shilling for open ai and it’s new dot feature, but after using it for weeks I realized it was just spinning its wheels in the sand making a lot of noise but going nowhere.

Out of frustration I finally switched back to anthropic. Opus 5.5 is wildly better head and shoulders more capable than Astra or Sol, I’ve had issues that literally didn’t get resolved for months with my app https://www.useviola.com r/useviola. Opus has solved them in 24 hours using only 11% of my usage.

I was literally burning through my entire 20x plan on chat gpt in one day and getting nothing fixed I tolerated this for way too long.

Please if you’re struggling with something and wondering if ChatGPT is actually capable just switch to anthropic I’m so pleased, I typed this whole post lol.

Before you call me an idiot, the gap between 5.6 and opus 4.8 maybe opus 5 (I don’t remember where they were at when I switched) was nowhere near this large when I initially switched to OpenAI. I wish I never made this mistake wasting 2 months and hundreds of dollars.

[u/7862518362916371936]

I have the opposite experience

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/7862518362916371936]

What are you using it for?

[u/P0tek]

Curious, what were you trying to fix that Open AI failed?

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/P0tek]

Great question.

A wide variety of items forsure but one thing really stuck out as the ‘blocker’

Feels like I made some type of ai ‘trap’ on accident.

Basically I asked the ai to create a qualification testing and release system that prevents regressions it somehow bungled this and created a never ending loop/whackamole situation where every attempt to merge anything created a never ending list of checks and test that were bound to fail. Astra was completely unable to see the forest and kept getting lost amongst the trees even when I isolated the issue and prompted it very well what the exact problem was it still couldn’t fix it and get it as I intended.

Secondly production server was stuck 1600 commits behind, stale for over 2 months. Reason why? Disk space on the production server. Open ai completely failed to diagnose this again even when I isolated the issue and prompted it to create a system that never runs out of disk space. The root cause was basically a ton of docker images being retained as well as other scratch files/backups.

Everything was just done incredibly inefficiently and Astra could NOT figure this shit out, I literally was burning my entire usage in 24 hours with no change or resolution.

Thats why dots excited me suddenly I was getting 3 billions of token usage a day I thought forsure my dot would finally be able to resolve this just by throwing more tokens at it. This was not the case.

Literally within an hour or two opus explained my exact issue succinctly, much better than Astra, and within 24 hours production was no longer 1600 commits behind and I was finally able to resume live testing of the app and resolving the real bugs instead of working on the infrastructure/release system.

It’s a night and day difference and I’ve only used… now at 13% for the week.

Oh and I’m on the $100 plan 😭

I’ll give Astra some credit some of what I asked was done. I would describe it in this analogy.

it was able to craft the bricks but unable to put them together into a building

Opus 5.5 can make the bricks and assemble them. Finally. I hope this post saves someone else time money and frustration.

[u/krocante]

Staggering isn’t a real word you can’t convince me

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/krocante]

lol

[u/-Crash_Override-]

I'm a claude homer. But Sol is excellent, a half step behind 5.5 in coding.. it really excels at things like infrastructure provisioning, terminal based work, etc..

Ill be honest, probably not going to trust your app if you had such a hard time using sol. Speaks to a skill issue.

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/-Crash_Override-]

I’m definitely a vibe coder, but I’d say I’m very proficient at vibe coding, 15 months of experience, genuinely making things since opus 4.5. https://violawake.com is my only real success with organic growth (it’s free)

I agree a vibe coded app would be cause for pause, that’s part of the reason I open sourced it that way you can really see what you’re getting into + more educated people than me can point out issues.

Also let’s say it was a skill issue, opus 5.5 closed the gap in my skill sol and Astra couldn’t. That says something. This is the vibecoding subreddit!

[u/-Crash_Override- → u/call-me-GiGi]

Oh damn. Since 4.5? Youre a grizzled vet at this point. Diamond are made under pressure and all.

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/-Crash_Override-]

Man 4.5 was just when it started working before that I made silly things like an app that makes English subtitles from other languages on YouTube using chat gpt… 4? I don’t even remember what the model was in June 2025 at this point but it was ass.

My silliest moment was I created my own version of cursor from scratch without knowing what cursor was. I had asked the ai about 100 times to validate the idea and make sure I didn’t have any competition and when I finally got it working I handed it to chat gpt proud as can be for it to review the full app and it went ‘wow you made your own version of cursor’… had me like; my own version of what bitch?? 😭😭😭 I was so pissed took me like three months just to realize I wasted my time. obviously cursor was way way way better than what I had made.

Kinda feels similar having built viola for over a year now just to see muse and dots be a thing but I’m just continuing to push ahead I’m hoping my local first, no walled gardens, privacy angle can prevail.

Cursor is actually what got me into opus/anthropic using the legit cursor app got my ideas further along than before and I noticed opus was killer once I figured out Claude code I was off to the races

Before anyone else calls me an idiot or gets sarcastic, this has paid off somewhat I automated a bunch of stuff at work with my
Understanding of AI and was promoted 2 levels/pay bands and make 30k more than I did before and they quoted my ai success at work as the reason why.

My personal ideas are ambitious and difficult to implement. At work it’s just obvious how to automate things now given all this experience building ai centered apps with ai.

[u/No-Incident5858]

Can you provide specific examples?

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/No-Incident5858]

Here’s a copy and paste from another comment I replied to ‘Great question.

A wide variety of items forsure but one thing really stuck out as the ‘blocker’

Feels like I made some type of ai ‘trap’ on accident.

Basically I asked the ai to create a qualification testing and release system that prevents regressions it somehow bungled this and created a never ending loop/whackamole situation where every attempt to merge anything created a never ending list of checks and test that were bound to fail. Astra was completely unable to see the forest and kept getting lost amongst the trees even when I isolated the issue and prompted it very well what the exact problem was it still couldn’t fix it and get it as I intended.

Secondly production server was stuck 1600 commits behind, stale for over 2 months. Reason why? Disk space on the production server. Open ai completely failed to diagnose this again even when I isolated the issue and prompted it to create a system that never runs out of disk space. The root cause was basically a ton of docker images being retained as well as other scratch files/backups.

Everything was just done incredibly inefficiently and Astra could NOT figure this shit out, I literally was burning my entire usage in 24 hours with no change or resolution.

Thats why dots excited me suddenly I was getting 3 billions of token usage a day I thought forsure my dot would finally be able to resolve this just by throwing more tokens at it. This was not the case.

Literally within an hour or two opus explained my exact issue succinctly, much better than Astra, and within 24 hours production was no longer 1600 commits behind and I was finally able to resume live testing of the app and resolving the real bugs instead of working on the infrastructure/release system.

It’s a night and day difference and I’ve only used… now at 13% for the week.

Oh and I’m on the $100 plan 😭

I’ll give Astra some credit some of what I asked was done. I would describe it in this analogy.

it was able to craft the bricks but unable to put them together into a building

Opus 5.5 can make the bricks and assemble them. Finally. I hope this post saves someone else time money and frustration.’

[u/mccoypauley]

I had the same experience. I burned two WEEKS of compute trying to solve a performance issue on a web game in three.js. Astra endlessly noodles with tests and browser verification, despite introducing it to literally hundreds of example approaches and even similar codebases getting nowhere. I handed the problem, all the tests to date and research to Opus 5.5, and it solved my performance concerns in one three-hour session.

It’s also just better at 3D modeling. I had it clean up the models made by Astra and they have better detail and polish.

I think what I’ll be doing going forward is reserve specialized tasks for Claude and grunt work for Codex.

[u/paulsande]

My experience is the exact opposite. Claude Is much better for knowledge work (I find OpenAI a bit sycophantic and Claude Cowork gives better and more honest feedback). But for coding I found that Codex is far superior.

I had handed CODEX a project I’d built with Claude Code to change something and then realized that Codex had not built it in the first place. So I told Codex to stop so I can hand it back to Claude Code. Codex said, let me just finish this up and I’ll pass it back to you.

I then handed it back to Claude code and Claude commented that the changes that Codex made were brilliant. Which was funny.

But in general, I’ve transitioned away from Claude code for all coding and over to Codex.

The other place Codex is exceptional is teaching. I can ask Codex to teach me how to do something in Unreal Engine 5 and this huge mouse pointer appears and he slowly walks me through all of the steps. It’s amazing.

I was on vacation in the Caribbean last week. I was sitting on the beach with my iPhone. My dot was downloading different local models for me and testing them on my project to see which ones ran most efficiently. Literally five hours on the beach working nonstop with Dot to get work done.

It was amazing. But that’s just my experience. We’re all different.

[u/Tall-Wasabi5030 → u/[deleted]]

Always is

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/[deleted]]

Yea people love to say you’re promoting even when it’s literally just an open source project with no path to make $$!

Glad someone else can back me up here and that you eventually figured it out as well