First impressions of GPT-5.5 from Aaron Friel

I'm Fel. Uh I work on engineering acceleration here at OpenAI. Uh and my job is to keep uh everyone moving quickly. >> Thank you so much for uh chatting with me. Uh you have been one of the first users at OpenAI to have your hands on GPT 5.5 and I'd love to hear about your first experience. >> Yeah. Uh it's been incredible using GPT 5.5. Uh I did not expect the title wave of pull requests and changes coming in uh as a result of engineers having so much intelligence at their fingertips. Um on in my role uh we manage our continuous integration systems. We help keep uh all of the ships moving uh smoothly at OpenAI and uh it it's just been incredible. Was there like any particular like task or very complex problems that you've seen already GPD 5.5 able to tackle that previous models might have struggled with? >> Yeah, I've seen a number of cases of this where uh we've had engineers run this model and work on a single task for more than 40 hours at a time. Um it's been really incredible to see the use of uh the codeex harness. Uh we just launched that new codeex for uh almost everything. um to be able to see that used for developer productivity um but not just for the traditional sort of you know my role is mostly like backend engineering platform engineering but also for front end for uh building on chat GBT itself um really all sorts of tasks have been bene have benefited from this new model >> that's incredible um can you tell me more about like speed have you observed like anything special there >> yeah it's incredible how fast it is and I felt like you know I've heard heard that with every new model release, we sort of expect we're going to pay a price for more intelligence in terms of slower throughput. Uh that has not been the case with GPD 5.5. I've seen that the velocity is still there. Uh yet it's just a much more capable model. That's incredible. So we've obviously made a ton of updates to the Codeex app and we're trying to make it way more friendly, not just just developers, but also kind of anyone at work. Mhm. >> Um, has there been anything special there with like this new GPT 5.5 and what you're kind of trying to see here with like all parts of work that that that you can tackle? Yeah, we're not just seeing an increase in contributions from engineers and researchers, but from everyone across the company is being uplifted by this new model and the ability to interrogate our code to make their own changes and suggest improvements or or ship new product features um just by virtue of having a much smarter model. That's amazing. From your vantage point, if you had like any advice to give like to engineers or developers that may already be like pushing GPT 5.4 four already quite far. What would be their advice on on what they should try with GPT 5.5? >> Yeah, I have spent a lot of time uh bringing up reviving some old projects of mine. So some 10 to 15year-old code projects that I had back from college or earlier and I've revived those and it's been incredible being able to have it run on those tasks and see them all the way to completion where I have a running version of something that hasn't been building for more than probably 5 years 10 years. Um, at the same time, I think that uh, Codeex remains the best teacher I've ever seen for teaching me how to use something new, whether it's a new technology or a new product or even using the apps and skill integrations in Codex, uh, just to to navigate the the wealth of information that we have available.