[dilap]

Personally I don't find this to be true anymore! It's not always great and does still will often tend towards unneeded complexity (especially if not pushed a bit), but I often find GPT 5.5 writing code I would have written myself. This was very much not true with earlier models (who make something that worked, but I'd always have to rewrite to make it "good code").

[dawnerd]

Personally I found 5.5 a massive step back from 5.4. Both of them still use way too many fallbacks and unnecessary checks, especially if you're having it output php. It's fine if you're just one person and checking everything and able to catch and correct. But it's really bad when you have a team all using it, not checking the output and trusting it's output leading to spaghetti code. Technically works, but very messy and will no doubt lead to buggy code.

It still writes like a junior dev, in that despite AI being able to get a picture of an entire repo, it's changes are typically confined to the task it's working on and will opt to duplicate logic to keep changes contained. Again, technically works, not ideal.

[dilap]

Yeah, it has a tendency to default to "smallest local hack that will work" and code as defensively as possible.

BUT I have had great success using AGENTS.md and becoming better at prompting to get it to not be like this.

Basic approach in AGENTS.md: don't code defensively, yada yada, we have a validation layer at X, no need to check for anything behind that layer. Works well.

An approach I've found helpful when prompting: What would be the best architecture for this change? If you say "do X" it'll tend to just do the hackiest, shortest path thing. If you say, "what's the best way to do X?" it will think more holistically.

That said, who knows, maybe when it's PHP it just really wants to hack ;-)

(Also, yes, you still need to review the code -- it will still do stupid things, so you can't just be pure hands off w/o ending up with quality degredations. The same is true of humans too though in my experience...)

[esikich]

Idk man, I think at this point, if you can't get good code out of frontier models, you're doing something wrong. Plenty of resources out there for you to familiarize yourself with the workflows if you can be bothered.

[_zoltan_]

100%. this is what I tell people who fail at using these models. the model isn't the problem anymore.