The ChatGPT Desktop App feels really different right now: → Much faster overall → Noticeably smoother animations → Cleaner and more polished UI → Faster navigation between chats and tools → Lower memory usage on my machine → Less stuttering and fewer random slowdowns → Everything just feels more responsive I honestly don’t remember the desktop app ever feeling this fast and efficient. Whatever OpenAI changed under the hood, this is a pretty massive improvement.

I’ve created a new category for AI labs: "Laggard Labs." Current members: SpaceXAI Google DeepMind Meta Frontier labs push the frontier, and laggard labs keep telling us the next model is coming soon.

For now: Astra Minor, which is already available, Aeon (OpenAI’s bot), and possibly a new Astra iteration, something like GPT-6.1 Astra. Anything significantly more powerful internally seems to be getting held back as a response to Fable 5.5 over the next few weeks, while the strongest system of all is still expected before Christmas, according to Sam.

Claude and ChatGPT are so good that I can build something with Opus 5.5 and then throw it onto ChatGPT Sites and have it hosted in like a minute. Honestly, if you don’t get tribal about companies and actually use all these subscriptions for what they’re best at, you can get some incredible results.

I built an entire Gothic basilica with Opus 5.5, and I’ve open-sourced it. ⛪✨ Basilica of Celestial Light is especially close to my heart. I genuinely loved creating this church. Working on it brought me a real sense of peace, and being able to share it with everyone feels just as meaningful. Everything was created with Opus 5.5, entirely in code. No external assets: no imported 3D models, image textures, or audio files. The architecture, stained glass, landscape, lighting, and soundscape are all generated at runtime with Three.js. You can walk through the nave, visit the crypt, climb the bell tower, explore the gardens, or take the guided tour, all directly in your browser. The project is open source under the MIT license. Explore it, learn from it, change it, fork it, and make something of your own. I’d genuinely love to see what others create from it. Source code: Play it here: I hope you find a little of the peace I felt while creating it.

Posting fake leaks and watching normies repost them without even understanding what they’re sharing has somehow become an insanely profitable business. I just saw an “AI insider” with posts hitting nearly 1 million views and 400 reposts while spreading some of the fakest information I’ve ever read in my life.

I find it hilarious that whenever I criticize Anthropic, some of their fans decide I must secretly work for OpenAI. Then I criticize OpenAI and suddenly their fans say basically the same thing in reverse. Meanwhile, I criticize both all the time, and I praise both all the time too. You can literally just scroll through my posts. Or ask Grok. 😂

Our currency is pretty weak compared to the dollar. To give you a practical example, $1 is around R$5.17 here right now. A PS5 costs about $650 in the US. If you simply convert that to Brazilian reais, that’s already around R$3,365. But the official price of the same PS5 here is R$5,099.90. Now for some perspective: the minimum wage in Brazil is R$1,621 per month. So a single PS5 costs more than 3 full minimum-wage salaries here. At the official minimum hourly rate, that's roughly 692 hours of work, assuming someone spent literally 100% of their income on it and nothing on rent, food, transportation, or anything else. That’s why even $1 can mean a lot more here than it might sound, especially for an independent developer.

Our currency is pretty weak compared to the dollar. To give you a practical example, $1 is around R$5.17 here right now. A PS5 costs about $650 in the US. If you simply convert that to Brazilian reais, that’s already around R$3,365. But the official price of the same PS5 here is R$5,099.90. Now for some perspective: the minimum wage in Brazil is R$1,621 per month. So a single PS5 costs more than 3 full minimum-wage salaries here. At the official minimum hourly rate, that's roughly 692 hours of work, assuming someone spent literally 100% of their income on it and nothing on rent, food, transportation, or anything else. That’s why even $1 can mean a lot more here than it might sound, especially for an independent developer.

A huge thank you to everyone subscribing to my profile. $1 may sound like almost nothing, but for me, as an independent developer from Brazil, it genuinely helps a lot. Every single subscription supports the time, experiments, projects and weird things I keep building here. Really, thank you. 😊

Thariq (trq212) has faced this before: Jan 2026: "we absolutely don't change which models we route to or 'nerf' the models" Apr 2026: "we don't degrade our models to better serve demand" Aug 2026: "We sometimes test API serving configs... evals confirm this doesn't affect model performance." Anthropic's Apr 23 postmortem later detailed harness changes (effort defaults, caching bug, verbosity limits) that passed tests yet degraded quality.

Anthropic has a recurring habit of weakening models publicly, calling the changes “tests”, then acting like nothing meaningful happened. So enjoy Opus 5.5 while it’s this good, because if their usual pattern repeats, they’ll probably ruin part of what makes it special sooner or later.

Let’s not forget that Tibo said Astra helped pull forward launches they had originally planned for 2027, which means there’s still A LOT coming. I genuinely hope DevDay ends up being incredible and manages to surprise even the most ambitious among us.

Some people I know who are incredibly talented, and genuinely very special to me, are having real existential crises right now. A few of them are anxious because Opus 5.5 suddenly makes it possible for almost anyone to do in minutes what they spent years learning to do really well. And I honestly understand both sides of this. One side looks at it and thinks this is amazing. Someone with $20 or $100 can suddenly build genuinely impressive things, especially in game design, 3D, coding, and creative work in general. That level of access is incredible. But the other side feels like AI is slowly taking away one of the most meaningful parts of the work itself: learning, designing, testing, failing, improving, and eventually becoming really good at something. There was value in the struggle, and also in knowing that your skills made you rare among millions of other people. It’s a very strange time. Dark in some ways, incredibly hopeful and exciting in others. I’ve never seen this many developers going through this kind of crisis at once. Some are completely fascinated and happier than ever. Others are genuinely sad, questioning their value, and even thinking about changing careers.