08/16/2025

Developers Say GPT-5 Is a Mixed Bag

Software engineers say the model is helping them think through coding problems

When OpenAI launched GPT-5 last week, it told software engineers the model was designed to be a “true coding collaborator” that excels at generating high-quality code and performing agentic, or automated, software tasks. While the company didn’t say so explicitly, OpenAI appeared to be taking direct aim at Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has quickly become many developers’ favored tool for AI-assisted coding.

But developers tell WIRED that GPT-5 has been a mixed bag so far. It shines at technical reasoning and planning coding tasks, but some say that Anthropic’s newest Opus and Sonnet reasoning models still produce better code. Depending on which version of GPT-5 developers are using—low, medium, or high verbosity—the model can be more elaborative, which sometimes leads it to generate unnecessary or redundant lines of code.

Some software engineers have also criticized how OpenAI evaluated GPT-5’s performance at coding, arguing the benchmarks it used are misleading. One research firm called a graphic that OpenAI published boasting about GPT-5’s capabilities a "chart crime."

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.