# GPT-5.6 Sol

734 Hacker News commenters recommended GPT-5.6 Sol and 463 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.2 years (18 owners).

**Verdict:** Recommended for handling large autonomous coding tasks, frontier math and tight, clean writing, but critics note it can get expensive and still makes baffling basic mistakes.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles big coding tasks autonomously (5 comments): "I can tell 5.6 Sol to do something like "optimize this entire subsystem to have no ongoing memory allocations" and go work on other code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024060)) "GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom's bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913301)) "over the course of ~1 week I was able to review, plan, implement, test and release a significant change to a production system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347797))
- Clean writing and instruction-following (4 comments): "GPT-5.6 Sol dominated the practical details that decide real-world usefulness: tighter instruction-following, cleaner formatting, and fewer correctness slips." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48989558)) "I do prefer GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra for producing code that I personally feel is more tasteful, with comments that are less stupid and redundant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599962)) "I’ve interestingly found 5.6 sol to produce much better writing, and it can generally cut to the point much more effectively." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49042121))
- Strong cost-performance after price cuts (3 comments): "Cutting the price by 50% while pushing a model this capable is exactly the kind of move that makes advanced AI feel genuinely accessible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347295)) "5.6-Sol on xhigh achieves a slightly higher score than Fable 5, but consuming half the tokens and at about 1/3rd the cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960177)) "$1.20 per 1M output is crazy, but let’s also not forget that OpenAI was one of the first to start increasing model prices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117466))
- Excels at hard math problems (2 comments): "It's been very successful at frontier math tasks - a bunch of the Erdos questions have been solved by it - more than any other model." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48801273)) "5.6 Pro is genuinely pretty good at certain kinds of math problems that just require trying out lots and lots of solutions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964304))

## What people warn about

- Expensive and burns through usage (4 comments): "Sol is great at talking to the human and orchestration of agent calls, but it's just too expensive to use everywhere." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885442)) "pairing Sol Medium for architecting with Luna High for coding does kinda make sense. But beware that architecting can be very read-heavy, and Sol is a bit read-pricey compared to Terra." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113412)) "In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343814))
- Makes basic mistakes, writes falsehoods (4 comments): "They all work, they all are "good", they all are both "smart" and commit incredible basic mistakes a fair amount of times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49531054)) "sometimes it seems great, other times it makes mistakes so stupid I cannot understand how it ever gets anything right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274817)) "I'm often amazed by the gap between how well a frontier model (GPT 5.6 Sol in my case) can comprehend code and investigate a bug, and how badly it writes code and documentation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110256))
- Prone to overengineering (2 comments): "GPT 5.6 can be prone to overengineering, but with a little steering and good judgement it generates very nice interfaces" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355060)) "Even GPT-5.6 Sol tends to be easier on the eyes for me (though the stereotype of it overengineering and no common sense are still true)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239160))
- Slow, even on small tasks (2 comments): "I've learned how to deal with and steer Sol medium quite efficiently, but at the same time I realize it's so slow for the small tasks it can do well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291213)) "In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343814))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://openai.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "GPT-5.6 Sol", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-6-sol/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).