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Theo
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Theo spent $131,700 and Ben spent $93,000 in API tokens testing GPT-5.6 Sol during the early access period.
A $200/month Codex subscription can yield up to $20,000 worth of token usage per month when factoring in usage resets that restore a full week of compute.
An analysis of Theo's session logs comparing GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable-5 concluded Fable is the stronger strategic advisor while 5.6 is the stronger day-to-day coding agent.
When tasked with comparing plans, Fable-5 voted for its own plan 6-0 even when it could acknowledge benefits of the alternative, showing it's worse at critiquing its own work.
Moving agents to Linux eliminates macOS's aggressive process monitoring of Codex subagents, which was causing syspolicyd to consume 215% CPU on an M5 Max.
When forced back to GPT-5.5 during testing, tasks that 5.6 happily ran to completion got only about a fifth of the way through before stopping.
Theo increased Codex's subagent limit from the default of ~3 to over 20 to enable more aggressive parallel work, which also pushed macOS to its limits.
Both hosts concluded the capability gap between Codex and Claude Code's subagent/workflow systems is now larger and more impactful than the raw model capability gap between 5.6 and Fable.
GPT-5.6 Sol is likely the first ever model release where going public actually reduced the number of people with access, since early testers all lost their privileged access simultaneously. Theo and Ben held what they describe as a 'memorial' when their access was cut mid-testing.
Ben spent an entire night in deep back-and-forth dialogue with Claude Code to build an agents.md that embedded a specific, unusual worldview into his project context. The result: UI outputs with genuine personality that escaped generic LLM patterns. Out-of-distribution prompting produces out-of-distribution results.
OpenAI's flat model naming convention made sense when reasoning levels were the only axis. Now that Anthropic has established Fable as a distinct generational tier, OpenAI faces a branding trap: calling their next model GPT-6 loads it with expectations a larger, pricier model can't cleanly satisfy across all use cases.
Theo burned $131,700 in API tokens and Ben burned $93,000 during their GPT-5.6 Sol early access period — a combined $224,700 before the model was even publicly available. Most of that was deliberate stress-testing with long-running loops and massive subagent swarms, not practical production work.
Ben's single run to port the Executor project to Rust and Svelte ran to 100 billion tokens and cost $65,000. The real driver wasn't the orchestrating reasoning model — it was the dozens of subagents it spun up underneath, which is the only way to blow through API usage this fast.
According to Semianalysis measurements, a $200/month Codex subscription can yield as much as $14,000 worth of token usage in a single period. Factor in mid-month usage resets and you can push that to $20,000 per month. This is why extreme testing runs are possible on a flat subscription.
Once Theo and Ben spent time with GPT-5.6, returning to 5.5 wasn't just annoying — it was actively painful. Their mental bar for what an AI should do had been reset by the new model, so 5.5's tendency to stop mid-task and ask for permission felt far worse than it ever had before.
Running 50 simultaneous Codex subagents on macOS means 50 separate MCP processes, causing syspolicyd to consume 215% of CPU on an M5 Max. Linux has none of these process-monitoring penalties, so you can spin up dozens of subagent threads simultaneously with no performance hit.
Claude Code gives agents a full JavaScript workflow file they write themselves — dynamic, multi-stage, and parallelizable in one tool call. Codex's subagent system is a pre-built feature agents work around. This architectural difference is now larger and more impactful than the raw capability gap between GPT-5.6 and Fable.
Running both models against the same session logs revealed fundamentally different identities: GPT-5.6 produces terse, telegraphic outputs like a build bot reporting to a coordinator. Fable-5 writes conversational prose that teaches the maintainer. Neither dominates every stage, but the behavioral divergence is accelerating.
To unlock 5.6's full potential, stop handing it tasks at the midpoint. Go two steps earlier in your workflow — let it think about the problem — and two steps later — have it spin up the app, adversarially review its own work, respond to PR comments, and merge itself. The model does all of it.
A $200/month Codex subscription provides access to approximately $14,000 worth of API token compute in any given period according to Semianalysis measurements. With mid-month resets that restore a full week of usage, the practical ceiling hits around $20,000 per month — making extreme testing economically rational for power users.
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