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 g

See Full Page