Life comes at you increasingly fast. Two months after Claude Opus 4.5 we get a substantial upgrade in Claude Opus 4.6. The same day, we got GPT-5.3-Codex.

That used to be something we’d call remarkably fast. It's probably the new normal, until things get even faster than that. Welcome to recursive self-improvement.

Before those releases, I was using Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Code for essentially everything interesting, and only using GPT-5.2 and Gemini to fill in the gaps or for narrow specific uses.

GPT-5.3-Codex is restricted to Codex, so this means that for other purposes Anthropic and Claude have only extended the lead. This is the first time in a while that a model got upgraded while it was still my clear daily driver.

Claude also pulled out several other advances to their ecosystem, including fast mode, and expanding Cowork to Windows, while OpenAI gave us an app for Codex.

For fully agentic coding, GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 both look like substantial upgrades. Both sides claim they’re better, as you would expect. If you’re serious about your coding and have hard problems, you should try out both, and see what combination works [...]

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Outline:

(01:55) On Your Marks

(17:35) Official Pitches

(17:56) It Compiles

(21:42) It Exploits

(22:45) It Lets You Catch Them All

(23:16) It Does Not Get Eaten By A Grue

(24:10) It Is Overeager

(25:24) It Builds Things

(27:58) Pro Mode

(28:24) Reactions

(28:36) Positive Reactions

(42:12) Negative Reactions

(50:40) Personality Changes

(56:28) On Writing

(59:11) They Banned Prefilling

(01:00:27) A Note On System Cards In General

(01:01:34) Listen All Yall Its Sabotage

(01:05:00) The Codex of Competition

(01:06:22) The Niche of Gemini

(01:07:55) Choose Your Fighter

(01:12:17) Accelerando

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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