In this mini episode, I break down OpenAI’s new GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.5 Pro after weeks of early testing. I walk through three real jobs I threw at the model: building an app for me to teach my second grader more advanced subtraction concepts, tackling a tech debt problem in the ChatPRD codebase, and hacking into a proprietary Bluetooth pixel display that every other model had failed me on. My verdict: higher intelligence, better efficiency, and genuinely autonomous long-running loops that change what I think is worth tackling.
What you’ll learn:
- How I think about GPT 5.5 Pro’s pricing vs engineering time, and when I believe the “intelligence tax” is worth paying
- Why I treat GPT 5.5 as a developer model first, and why I couldn’t find a consumer use case that justified its intelligence
- The exact prompt pattern I use to unlock a long-running autonomous subagent loop
- How I got a near-six-hour autonomous run to one-shot 98% of edge cases in a migration over millions of chat threads and drop my Sentry error rate to the floor
- Why I’m now throwing GPT 5.5 at tech debt, flaky tests, and security backlogs first
- How I combined a Bluetooth packet sniffer and GPT 5.5 to reverse-engineer a proprietary pixel speaker after Claude Code and GPT 5.4 both gave up
- How I use the /personality command inside Codex to swap the default “baked potato” tone for something I actually enjoy working with
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In this episode, I cover:
(00:00) Introduction to GPT 5.5 testing
(00:40) What is GPT 5.5 and how much does it cost?
(03:23) Testing GPT 5.5 in ChatGPT: the intelligence overhang problem
(07:12) Moving to Codex: where GPT 5.5 really shines
(16:01) Hacking a Chinese Bluetooth speaker
(21:47) Final thoughts on GPT 5.5’s intelligence and efficiency
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Tools referenced:
• GPT 5.5 and GPT 5.5 Pro: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/
• Codex: https://openai.com/codex/
• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
• Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code
• Sentry: https://sentry.io/
• Divoom MiniToo: https://divoom.com/products/minitoo
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Other references:
• OpenAI Codex Security: https://openai.com/index/codex-security-now-in-research-preview/
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
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