I have been testing 5.6 Sol lately and haven't seen a really big difference to the old model when I used it with medium, high, extra high effort.
The only thing that surprised me was a co-op bot for my roguelike game. You press a bot run button on the host and it runs kinda optimal strategy and plays the game from all clients. It was done in around 2 prompts and works very well.
I was able to catch around 6 bugs already with it.
Then I added auto mode for LLM, it launches multiple clients each with their own set of launch args. And then LLM reads the console every 5 mins for each client to find anomalies or bugs. It also found a few bugs which led to an incorrect loss.
Apart from that other tasks were the same in terms of speed and quality as 5.5.
This morning I wanted to test 5.6 ultra and compare it against Fable 5, which I used at work to create a pretty big feature on which it worked for 2 days straight with pauses when it was hitting the 5 hour limit of $200 subscription.
So I selected ultra effort, started to write a prompt and then I saw the new update available. It must make things better, right?
I hit it, codex restarted, and the ultra mode is now gone 💀
Do you still have ultra effort on the latest codex version?
And have you tested it against Fable? Which one is better for you?
Drop 💯 if you want to hear more about my Fable experience and how it completed the feature in 2 days on its own.
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1July 12, 2026 693 8
