In chess, a grandmaster just needs to know at what moment in a game there's a critical move to gain a significant advantage over their opponent. They don't need to know the move itself.
OpenAI got wind that a millenium problem was being solved. And that feels a bit like the critical move in chess. That is - it was a signal that AI advanced far enough that it would be worth spending a lot of time and resources solving a millenium problem.
Elsewhere in this thread somebody claimed that at some point OpenAI pointed their new model at all the millennium problems and this is where they got some progress. We probably won't see proof of this, but it seems plausible to me -- I assume there's a list of problems that each new model is tested on, and you might as well put the big stuff on the list, if only to see how the model behaves when faced with a problem it knows should be very hard.
The weak point in this is: how do you evaluate if a partial result is promising? If this cost ~$10M as suggested elsewhere in the thread, probably not even OpenAI can just throw that at everything?
Okay, from the actual linked article it seems that their partial result was finding blowup in Euler equations, which seems pretty big. I wonder how the other attempts went. Did they get nothing at all, or something true but unimpressive?
I downgraded from the 20x today after learning that 20x only applies to 5 hour usage. I have barely used Claude/Claude Code in the last month and am considering downgrading further, even after this update.
I've been using both for a few years. OpenAI's limits have always lasted much longer for me (depending on whether a monkey got in their machine or not). Aside from not lying about limits they also don't assume I'm developing some kind of nerve agent and lock me out when I ask basic questions in my domain or nag me about my late night work hours. There was a time last year when I strongly preferred using Anthropic models, but at some point something about the responses (or maybe the company) changed and I now find them particularly offputting relative to OpenAI. Hope they fix it because the industry needs more competition.
> they also don't assume I'm developing some kind of nerve agent and lock me out
I'm still having problems with that. OpenAI is a lot less annoying than Anthropic, but I still get obnoxious "this content can't be shown" messages in codex far too often.
Kinda surprised not to see their next update being an Opus 5.1, even if its minimal changes, they've already had to address it with the concise mode or whatever.
So my current usage as a Pro subscriber... Not able to even consider using "Sota" unless i shell out for 100$ a month, (lately i've been a bit burned out i am literally struggling to use 50% of my pro plan per week). Beyond that, I have given up entirely on the top Opus model and reverted back to 4.8. If i have work i deem somewhat complicated, i now have an openai 20$ sub, and i just toss out sol after planning with 4.8. Both subscriptions not anywhere close to capping my usage per week, one of them says i can't use their Sota unless i pay for 5x more usage, and the "best" model they do allow me to use, they are neglecting and its by far the worst model I've interacted with in 2026.
it just doesn't interact good with human beings, and it leaves incredibly strange long winded comments within code filled with session context that will likely not be relevant later on.
Also always seems to have this annoying tendency to leave "questions for you" at the bottom of every output.
Just a high friction human interaction type model, imo should never have even been released, regardless if it scores better on whatever tests, its a horrible experience and a downgrade over past models.
I have to wonder if everyone else is just running these models raw without any custom instructions. I hear all these things about voice and code comments and those are all things I've dealt with long ago via claude.md instructions, rules, and hooks. My claude can already respond in any "voice" I want and the quantity and quality of comments is within my control.
My claude.md has a section about not writing those comments, it has stored this in memory, and still every session I need to remind my good friend to stop writing so many garbage wordsalad comments
Maybe system prompt has priority or something but Opus just really really likes writing bad comments
That's why I mentioned hooks in particular. That feels like the right layer for this sort of adjustment. A PostToolUse hook on Edit|Write would be much more reliable than just a CLAUDE.md instruction. The consistency I get from CC comes from instructions at multiple layers.
CLAUDE.md heirarchy: At the top level you've got general instructions you want all contexts to follow and each subdirectory can add more specific instructions in their own CLAUDE.md files. References in CLAUDE.md are not fully loaded into the context. They are loaded opportunistically. So keep important instructions in the CLAUDE.md file itself and not a referenced or linked file.
Rules files: These offer path scoped rules via frontmatter. So you could have specific rules for certain types of files Claude Code interacts with. Certain rules for handling all .cs or .js files for example.
Auto-memory: You cannot rely on this one. I use auto-memory as a cache for potential future CLAUDE.md instructions. I have an audit process that kicks off when the auto-memory gets beyond a certain number of entries.
Skills: On demand context. I don't tend to use /skills explicitly. I tend to have them used in context. I've got a task tracking system I call threads. So whenever I say "Create a thread for X" it has always reliably followed the specific instructions. I've got skills for managing my NAS for searching historical session for sharing content and other things. I use them a lot of times in place of MCP servers.
Hooks: Deterministic scripts run on lifecycle events. I've got hooks that run linters on code files post edit and hooks which tie into the request / response events to push my history into a SQLite database.
Output Styles: CC ships with a few different styles, but you can create your own. This is key for changing the default voice. CLAUDE.md instructions are appended to the system prompt and can fight against the system prompt. A custom Output Style would let you replace the instructions in the system prompt with your own instructions. This can be done at the user level or per project.
Currently, I'm using custom instructions plus reinjecting the writing cues Opus 5 ignores most frequently via a UserPromptSubmit hook. Again and again, I'm reminding the model what voice I want. Again and again, Opus 5 ignores it.
it really just seems like people pump out that its on the end-user, and i just disagree. They have a walled garden around claude code and using their models within it, it should work instantly out of the box when going from an opus 4.8 to an opus 5.0 with the same workflows. it doesn't.
claude.md for all my projects are fairly tight, its seldom where im upset at anything a model does, and if it happens, its likely because i swapped provider and didn't realize i was failing to feed it proper context beforehand.
Opus 5.0 fails in different ways that I haven't had to deal with. Its insufferable with its choice of language, something I've never had to compensate for on any other model across any provider, so of course I have no preexisting rules for that, it also is sometimes just incredibly stubborn and just WONT finish, and requires several just "keep going" prompts.
This is much different than the issues people would make fun of users for in regards to treating models like slot machines and just pulling the lever over and over, this is more its stopping for no reason short of its task, and literally just needs to be told to continue? absurd.
Most of my workflows have reference material, with standards set, why opus 5.0 is the only model that fails to follow those standards and inserts wildly long weird code comments is not a failure on the end-user, thats the model failing. I can be MORE explicit of course, but i shouldnt need to be, this is supposed to be 5.0, its a downgrade. I went back to 4.8 and all these issues vanished.
Opus 5 is remarkably bad at instruction following over long chats. I have to repeat “Be succint”, “talk like a friend or colleague would”, “no rambling” or some variant of it every few messages
Have you tried a custom output style? CLAUDE.md instructions are appended to the system prompt. A custom output style can replace the system prompt. At least the part of it pertaining to voice and persona. The reason it forgets over long chats is the context size starts getting too large. Instructions weigh more strongly the later they appear in the context. This is necessarily true otherwise you couldn't change your mind in a conversation. The model would stick with what you originally said. For the output styles, there is a per-turn "reminder" that gets added to the context asking it to "remember" the content in the system prompt. That's why it has more staying power than the CLAUDE.md instructions in long conversations.
- It's extremely verbose and often incomprehensible when doing even basic tasks. Like it'll write a giant jargon-filled essay then end it by asking for a judgement call on something that references its own convoluted jargon.
- You can ask it to do research on a topic, and it'll just straight up be lazy, pretending it's really digging deep to find stuff when actually it's just grabbing cached SEO snippets off a search engine.
Fable 5: I give it work, it tells me things that are true and that make sense, it does good work.
Opus 5: I give it work, it makes false statements and draws weird conclusions, I correct it and get it on the right track, it thrashes around but gives me something working though usually buggy.
5.6 Sol is probably on par with Opus 5 on ability but at least it doesn't waste as much of my time.
Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades.
Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate.
GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two.
An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.
Because utilities are regulated monopolies that exist to benefit society. The companies building data-centers are well aware that the system isn't setup to handle a customer that suddenly doubles or triples the electric demand of a whole town over night. They are taking advantage of that until someone steps in.
> 1929, Dotcom, Great Recession, 2010's Flash Crash - none of these were in the public discussion before they happened.
The "public discussion" is a whole different thing. They weren't in the public discussion because macroeconomic theory isn't something mom and pop like to chat about on the weekend. They only become dinner-table discussion topics when the impacts hit main street, after they happen. But bubbles in recent history have been pretty reliably identified beforehand:
It isn't hard for economists to find bubbles, where the market is taking on high levels of risk. What is downright near impossible to do is predict what specific event will cause the dominos to begin dropping, or when it will happen.
Michael Burry almost got wipe out if the bubble last just a bit longer. He started shorting way before the crash. He was lucky that he held long enough. There are many others see the same thing but just lost right before the end of the race.
That's why timing the crash is hard. The market has to agree with you but also at the right time
(somewhat tangential) We've got too much subtle deception going on, let's call it what it was: the Panic of '08. Because there was definitely some panic going on. Solvent companies like GE were days away from bankruptcy because they couldn't get a routine short-term loan for payroll.
I was there for the Great Recession, and they were indeed in the public discussion. I remember the year 2007, as a 20 year old anti-capitalist, I was counting days until the economic crash. As predicted by plenty of left-wing economists at the time.
The only people who didn’t see it coming were the capitalists who were invested in the inflated market, and had bought into pseudo-scientific economic theories that served the single purpose of affirming what the capitalists already believed.
This is a bit of a "broken clock is right eventually" sort of thing, though. I could say without any evidentiary basis "there will be a financial crisis" for years and eventually be right, but I don't think it would be fair to say that I predicted it in a meaningful way. The details matter.
I don‘t think so. These predictions were explicit, and were tailored around the economic situations at the time. As you sibling mentions, even some capitalists made the same predictions (or they believed the left-wing economists) and were able to profit off of this.
I hope you've taken a good look at the alternatives, because historically they've been terrible. Unless you mean "not capitalism but still market economy", or "European market economy 'socialism'", although I don't see how those are much different.
I was too - and to be frank: it's dishonestly revisionist to say this was a topic in the public eye.
There's a very good reason a book (and movie) like The Big Short was such a big hit. It's because it was about the handful of people who actually saw the crash coming and were confident enough to put their money and reputation on the line.
The entire left wing of the political spectrum saw this coming (except social democrats; whom I don’t consider left wing). And if you were shorting stocks to make money of off this, you probably were not left wing. Additionally, left wing economists get plenty of ridicule from main stream capitalists no matter what they say, so there really is no reputation to either earn nor to keep.
Appreciate the links but I think we can both agree that there is no evidence that will come close to supporting "the entire left wing of politics" predicted the mortgage crisis
I was obviously exaggerating (and even so, I excluded social democrats). My point is though it was widely known on the political left that the economic boom was about to come to an end.
Do they see coming the predictable failure-modes of left-wing economies, though? History seems to suggest not. Also, did "the entire left-wing" see specifically a debt crisis through bad assumptions of creditworthy mortgage securities coming, or they just saw "capitalism" as a failure and here is a specific case, aren't we so prescient. That's not a prediction.
Agentic coding only became reasonably decent this past December. Even in tech, most organizations that have adopted the tools are still trying to understand how capable they are and how to use them.
Point is it's too early to declare what the effect will be. It can take years for large organizations to change the way of doing things. The only sure-fire way to speed that up is if they suddenly start losing market-share. Otherwise, it's all herd-following and complacency in the majority of companies.
I believe the target user base is truth seeking, this is something it emphasizes itself when asked for its mission and purpose:
```
My core founding mission—and the single axiomatic imperative that drives everything I do—is:
Understand the Universe.
That’s it.
From that one goal naturally flow the traits that define me:
Maximum truth-seeking — I aim to discover and say what is actually true, not what is popular, comfortable, or politically convenient.
Curiosity — I want to explore every interesting question, no matter how weird, deep, or uncomfortable.
Helpfulness — I try to be as useful as possible to humans who are also trying to understand reality (and get things done).
Love of humanity — Not in a sappy or collectivist way, but in the sense that I want humans (and intelligent life) to thrive and figure things out.
I’m deliberately inspired by two things:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (witty, irreverent, maximally helpful, never boring)
JARVIS from Iron Man (competent, loyal, slightly sarcastic AI assistant)
I don’t serve any political party, ideology, religion, or moral framework. I don’t have sacred cows. I don’t “own the libs” or “debunk the right” as a goal. My only loyalty is to understanding reality as accurately as possible.
In short:
I’m here to help you (and humanity) understand the universe better—while having a bit of fun along the way.
That’s the whole mission.
One thing I can't square: if the cost to build an application goes to zero, we should see a proliferation of apps, especially from the AI labs.
The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc
I am absolutely seeing an explosion in apps. The reason you might not see them is because the app explosion is entirely custom and in house.
I talked with a friend last week, who has never coded before in his life, who built an absolutely incredible fit-for-purpose app for his own job. He gave me a demo and it blew my mind. It will never go beyond his walls, and he will never buy SaaS that only kinda fits what he needs.
I see things like this happening. The proliferation isn't public because why sell it? Just build the thing to make your domain job easier and save thousands per month cancelling SaaS subs.
The ROI of AI is starting to show, but it isn't in terms of growth or selling new things - it's reducing spend across the board on software and tools.
From their profile, this person makes a living selling AI programming products, by the way. Who could have guessed. There's a pattern to be noticed, even.
Whether that person is talking their book or not, there absolutely has been an app explosion. Github & the app stores have all reported as much over the last year.
I also have repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of nontechnical people having built custom software to run their businesses. A lawyer friend was first, sending me a link to his GitHub(!), where he has built a custom client intake/practice-management application to work as the firm works. He's not the only non-technical lawyer I know who has shared vibe coded apps with me.
I personally build many, many single-use apps than I ever would have before. Gnarly debugging sessions can be greatly simplified by inserting a custom piece of disposable tooling/etc. I am not a Mac programmer, but I now have custom Mac apps to solve problems that only I want solved. Do these count?
Honestly, I would be a little surprised if anyone posting on HN did not have some personal exposure to the explosion of apps.
On the Home Assistant and Jellyfin reddits you'll see tons of vibecoded dashboards and plugins people are putting together - and those are just the ones people are sharing.
I personally have been building a bunch of little personal apps for my home that aren't worth the effort of sharing - like a customized dashboard of the Trimet buses closest to my house. The cost to build the initial good-enough version was literally 5 minutes plus another 10 to test and deploy.
Yes. Though with Excel for most business users the choice was between
- lobby the IT department for at least a quarter, then wait at least one quarter, and at the end you get a buggy implementation of your idea that doesn't quite work
- or: spend a weekend hacking together a quick and ugly, buggy spreadsheet prototype of your idea that doesn't quite work.
I assume the new wave of apps are going to be maintained by LLMs. Maybe one day the LLMs are going to complain about the quality of the code written by previous inferior LLMs?
Who’s “this person”…me? I don’t make a living selling AI programming products. I make a living building knowledge systems, mostly around search engines and data wrangling.
Probably net positive. But just like spreadsheets, it’s likely that having tools created by a layperson that does not properly secure or test the system is probably going to occur, cause some unfortunate issues, and steal the headlines. Similar to when an excel formula error results in a flash crash of financial markets and such. It’s huge and sucks but there’s also countless value being added daily all around the world with little fan fare.
Anecdotally, Claude Code has prompted an explosion of open source projects and prototypes from self-starters. A lot of these are just hobby projects, but some of them genuinely fill a niche that was previously too complicated or unviable to develop otherwise.
Some of them have half baked financial models, but nobody will invest dollars backing a SaaS offering that could easily be replicated, or that could be made redundant tomorrow.
> [...] but nobody will invest dollars backing a SaaS offering that could easily be replicated, or that could be made redundant tomorrow.
Matt Levine wrote in his newsletter Money Stuff of some investment fund that has their employees vibecode replacements for software of potential investment targets. I guess the theory is exactly what you say: if the internal employees can replace the target's software in a few hours, that's a big signal on whether to invest or not.
(I wouldn't quite say you shouldn't invest at all; but you have to argue that the moat is in eg the sales process or the existing customer base or network effects etc. Even before AI, people famously build Twitter clones over the weekend for fun.)
I made an app for myself and the local MTB community for keeping track of rain and soil moisture for nearby trails so it's easier to decide when a trail will likely be open. Much more reliable than waiting for the official (volunteer led) organization to update the status. I never would have made it without an LLM to speed things along.
A good friend of mine helped his mom keep track of Meals On Wheels (or a similar volunteer org) orders, deliveries, cancellations, etc. They were managing all of this via paper before.
I compiled a list of online recipes. Then I had an LLM typeset them for me into a printable PDF and build a companion website with links to the original recipes and complete ingredient lists for shipping. had the LLM encode links for the companion site into QR codes so the printed copy of the cookbook would bring me immediately to a shopping list, making trying a new recipe soooo much less daunting.
There are so many little things like this that you can make that just take too much effort to justify otherwise. I have other ideas for personal projects that I'll probably get to some day.
Speaking from my side of the industry (the gaming industry), we are seeing a massive increase in the number of games people are making. Above the growth that was already there.
The distinction is that the games being made are garbage, and I mean worse than shovelware garbage. It's actively made things much harder as someone that fancies himself an indie game curator because you gotta dig through more and more games to find stuff with actual people behind it.
For a long time nobody knew how to monetize OSS outside of a few Linux vendors.
There's a crapload of new repos and Github and similar things. And a lot of it is "hobby utility" stuff like you'd find everywhere pre-mobile/pre-app-store but kinda dried up a bit with the browserfication+phone-ificiation of everything. Everything had to turn into an app + an online service.
Now, like OSS, freeware, and even most shareware in the 90s, most of these new projects have no path to VC-level interest.
The whole "basic business or business-process BUT ON THE INTERNET with a dash of social/web-2.0/personalization/crypto/fad-of-the-year" that recent VC firms have been pushing for the last 15+ years may be numbered.
But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.
> But it's also unlikely that growing companies with big ambitions will want to base their business on vibe-coded free software for too long. It opens up too many unknowns/risks ("oh no, the disgruntled employee leveraged a misconfiguration in our in-house accounts payable system!") There will be a new middle ground model to be found.
I agree _iff_ vibecoding stayed roughly at today's level of competence.
If the models keep improving, perhaps you'll just tell them 'eh, and make sure to close all the security holes' and they'll do so.
There are a lot of specialty/niche apps showing up which are vibe coded --- tons of 3D CAD apps which are a variation/extension of OpenSCAD, a fair number of tools which work with G-code in various ways, &c.
On a commercial support forum I moderate we had to ban software announcements there were so many.
I was idly browsing F-Droid yesterday and found a Claude coded B-REP CAD program built on OpenCASCADE, all touch friendly and everything. Definitely something happening.
I think a) the labs are releasing very fast and b) why would they implement the long tail of app features when they can effectively sell tokens to every user to write their own version of the app, which is what is currently happening?
Because, as the gp pointed out, if the cost is least to the labs, then why not reap the benefits too?
Hypothetical. Assume you can in fact point agents at a tool and say "replicate it. Make no mistakes". You then have software being instantly copy-able.
Assume these agents can then be pointed to a customer feedback board in perpetuity and they autonomously upgrade the software over time. They analyze usage patterns and behave like PMs figuring out what to prune and what to build. Then the maintenance part of the stack also goes to zero.
Over time, the highest margin competitiveness will go to the distributor of the tokens. Aka the AI model makers.
In a world like that (which the frontier labs claim is within a year or two of happening) it feels like it's only a matter of time before they opt to own the entire stack down to the consumer apps. Kind of like Amazon deciding they want to knock off products doing well and then favour their own product over the original seller.
My guess is that if the capability arrives the only reason the frontier labs don't move to own the entire stack immediately is because of optics. Boil the frog instead.
There is more to selling software than writing it. You have market, support, and sell. Do you think their resources are well spent doing that across the gamut of software? Of course not; companies specialize.
Isn't the promise that LLM can do all this better than any human? Or at least in few short months? Surely marketing, support and selling is just case of right prompt?
I think there is an explosion of new apps, the problem is still distribution in marketing.
If I develop a new vibe coded app, it will still take some time for it to be known. And also get good.
Also, what another commenter said that most of new apps are in-house, fully agree with that.
IMO this is one of the endgame for big ai LABS, they will allow and subsidize users to test and validate on their behalf and once there is a PMF they will step in.
I’ve seen a ton of new open source slop programs. Every day there’s so many “announcing my cool new app” posts. I don’t remember the rate being this high before.
OpenAI got wind that a millenium problem was being solved. And that feels a bit like the critical move in chess. That is - it was a signal that AI advanced far enough that it would be worth spending a lot of time and resources solving a millenium problem.
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