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title: “It blows my mind”-“It has a tendency to overengineer...
description: Developers share real-world experiences with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, the most powerful model in the GPT-5.6 family. One developer used Sol to audit a...
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og:description: Developers share real-world experiences with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, the most powerful model in the GPT-5.6 family. One developer used Sol to audit a...
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# “It blows my mind”-“It has a tendency to overengineer things a little”: Developers react to road-testing OpenAI GPT‑5.6 Sol

**[The New Stack](https://daily.dev/sources/newstack)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Developers share real-world experiences with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, the most powerful model in the GPT-5.6 family. One developer used Sol to audit a 3-million-entry US database, finding it outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 as a reviewer. A Columbia PhD candidate claims to have solved six open Erdős mathematical problems in five days using Sol's 'ultra' reasoning mode with OpenAI's Codex workflow. A tourism booking software founder calls Sol his go-to model for architectural discussions, though notes it tends to overengineer solutions and he still uses Claude or Gemini for smaller frontend tasks. Experts caution that comparing models by having one review another's output doesn't establish ground-truth accuracy without an independent benchmark.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thenewstack.io/developers-review-gpt-56-sol>

## Questions this post answers

### What are the three GPT-5.6 model variants and what is each one for?

GPT-5.6 comes in three variants: Sol is the most powerful option, Terra is for mainstream use, and Luna is the fast, efficient option for everyday tasks. Sol also features six reasoning effort levels — low, medium, high, extra high, max, and ultra — where ultra coordinates multiple agents across parallel workstreams for demanding tasks at the cost of higher token usage.

_Developers choosing between frontier model tiers for production workloads track these distinctions on daily.dev._

### What is GPT-5.6 Sol's 'ultra' reasoning mode and how does it work?

Ultra is OpenAI's highest-capability reasoning setting for GPT-5.6 Sol. It coordinates multiple subagents working in parallel on different parts of a complex problem, trading higher token consumption for stronger results and faster time-to-result on demanding tasks. It sits above low, medium, high, extra high, and max in the six-level reasoning hierarchy.

_Engineers pushing Sol on long-horizon research or math-heavy tasks find the tradeoffs between reasoning levels discussed on daily.dev._

## Similar posts on daily.dev

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- [OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 Sol to 20 government-approved partners in restricted preview](https://daily.dev/posts/openai-releases-gpt-5-6-sol-to-20-government-approved-partners-in-restricted-preview-7shaoufzx) · The Next Web · 2 upvotes · 2 comments
- [OpenAI Previews GPT-5.6 Sol With Restricted Access and Stronger Cyber Safeguards](https://daily.dev/posts/openai-previews-gpt-5-6-sol-with-restricted-access-and-stronger-cyber-safeguards-kmzh7xyee) · Security Boulevard · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, boasting lower cost and fewer mistakes](https://daily.dev/posts/openai-launches-gpt-6-sol-and-luna-boasting-lower-cost-and-fewer-mistakes-7fzpvatba) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#claude](https://daily.dev/tags/claude)

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