GPT-5.5 prompting guide

WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

25th April 2026 @scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark: I feel like we need to stack these tests now I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and it did - the prompt Scott used was: Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API -…

Quoting Romain Huet

25th April 2026 Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore. GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer. — Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price 24th April 2026 Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They’re using the standard MIT license. I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It’s larger than Kimi K2.6 (1.1T) and GLM-5.1 (754B) and more than twice the size of DeepSeek V3.2 (685B). Pro is 865GB on Hugging Face, Flash is 160GB. I’m hoping that a lightly quantized Flash will run on my 128GB M5 MacBook Pro. It’s possible the Pro model may run on it…

Serving the For You feed

24th April 2026 - Link Blog Serving the For You feed. One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts. spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works. The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC in spacecowboy's living room - 16 cores, 96GB of RAM and 4TB of attached NVMe storage. Recommendations are based on likes: what else are the people who like the same things as you liking on the platform? That Go server consumes the Bluesky firehose and stores the relevant details…

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

24th April 2026 - Link Blog An update on recent Claude Code quality reports (via) It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems. The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users. Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me: On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. I frequently have Claude…

It's a big one

24th April 2026 This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

The people do not yearn for automation

24th April 2026 - Link Blog The people do not yearn for automation (via) This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else. […] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to…

Millisecond Converter

24th April 2026 LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

russellromney/honker

24th April 2026 - Link Blog russellromney/honker (via) "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this: import honker db = honker.open("app.db") emails = db.queue("emails") emails.enqueue({"to": "alice@example.com"}) # Consume (in a worker process) async for job in emails.claim("worker-1"): send(job.payload) job.ack() And Kafka-style durable streams like this: stream = db.stream("user-events") with db.transaction() as tx: tx.execute("UPDATE users SET name=? WHERE id=?", [name, uid]) stream.publish({"user_id": uid, "change": "name"}, tx=tx) async for event in stream.subscribe(consumer="dashboard"): await push_to_browser(event) It also adds 20+ custom SQL functions including these two: SELECT notify('orders', '{"id":42}'); SELECT honker_stream_read_since('orders', 0, 1000); The extension requires WAL mode, and workers can poll the .db-wal file with a stat call every 1ms to…

Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web 23rd April 2026 LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js. Spatial text parsing Refreshingly, LiteParse doesn’t use AI models to do what it does: it’s good old-fashioned PDF parsing, falling back to Tesseract OCR (or other pluggable OCR engines) for PDFs that contain images of text rather than the text itself. The hard problem that LiteParse solves is extracting text in a sensible order despite the infuriating vagaries of PDF layouts. They describe this as “spatial text parsing”—they use some very clever heuristics to detect things like multi-column layouts and group…

Quoting Maggie Appleton

23rd April 2026 [...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit. — Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via) Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0

23rd April 2026 Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API 23rd April 2026 GPT-5.5 is out. It’s available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I’ve had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it’s hard to put into words what’s good about it—I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for! There’s one notable omission from today’s release—the API: API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on the safety and security requirements for serving it at scale. We’ll bring GPT‑5.5 and GPT‑5.5 Pro to the API very soon. When I run my pelican benchmark I always prefer to use an API, to avoid hidden system prompts in ChatGPT…

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

22nd April 2026 - Link Blog Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model (via) Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks. On Hugging Face Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is 807GB, this new Qwen3.6-27B is 55.6GB. I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using this recipe by benob on Hacker News, after first installing llama-server using brew install llama.cpp : llama-server \ -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M \ --no-mmproj \ --fit on \ -np 1 \ -c 65536 \ --cache-ram 4096 -ctxcp 2 \ --jinja \ --temp 0.6 \ --top-p 0.95 \ --top-k 20 \ --min-p 0.0 \ --presence-penalty 0.0 \ --repeat-penalty 1.0 \ --reasoning on \ --chat-template-kwargs '{"preserve_thinking": true}' On first run that…

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not—it’s all very confusing 22nd April 2026 Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it’s already reverted): The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max plans. Update: don’t miss the update to this post, they’ve already changed course a few hours after this change went live. So what the heck is going on? Unsurprisingly, Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter all caught fire. I didn’t believe…

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans

22nd April 2026 - Link Blog Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans (via) On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing. Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely. The key paragraph: Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. As Copilot’s agentic capabilities have expanded rapidly, agents are doing more work, and more customers are hitting usage limits designed to maintain service reliability. It's easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM…

Quoting Bobby Holley

22nd April 2026 As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...] Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. — Bobby Holley, CTO, Firefox Recent articles - DeepSeek…

Where's the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0)

Where’s the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) 21st April 2026 OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here’s how I put it to the test. My prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio gpt-image-1 First as a baseline here’s what I got from the older gpt-image-1 using ChatGPT directly: I wasn’t able to spot the raccoon—I quickly realized that testing image generation models on Where’s Waldo style images (Where’s Wally in the UK) can be pretty frustrating! I tried getting Claude Opus 4.7 with its new higher resolution inputs to solve it but it was convinced there was a raccoon it couldn’t…

Quoting Andreas Påhlsson-Notini

21st April 2026 AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality. — Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles

21st April 2026 - Link Blog scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles (via) I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles. (To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning too.) Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

llm-openrouter 0.6

20th April 2026 llm openrouter refresh command for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire. I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter as soon as it became available there. Here's its pelican - this time as an HTML page because Kimi chose to include an HTML and JavaScript UI to control the animation. Transcript here. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

SQL functions in Google Sheets to fetch data from Datasette

20th April 2026 TIL SQL functions in Google Sheets to fetch data from Datasette — I've been experimenting with ways to fetch data from Datasette and display it in Google Sheets. I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata() .) Here's an example sheet demonstrating all three methods. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons

20th April 2026 - Link Blog Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons. I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell Claude Opus 4.7 is the first model to change the tokenizer, so it's only worth running comparisons between 4.7 and 4.6. The Claude token counting API accepts any Claude model ID though so I've included options for all four of the notable current models (Opus 4.7 and 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5). In the Opus 4.7 announcement Anthropic said: Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that improves how the model processes text. The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. I pasted the Opus 4.7 system…

Headless everything for personal AI

19th April 2026 - Link Blog Headless everything for personal AI. Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common: Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse. Evidently Marc Benioff thinks so too: Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless. If this model does take off it's going to play havoc with existing per-head SaaS pricing schemes. I'm reminded of the early 2010s era when every…

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 18th April 2026 Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it’s always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models. Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026). I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts, break that up into separate documents for each of the models and then construct a Git history of those files over time with fake commit dates representing the publication dates of each updated prompt—here’s the prompt I used with Claude Code for the web.…

Claude system prompts as a git timeline

18th April 2026 Research Claude system prompts as a git timeline — Anthropic's published system prompt history for Claude is transformed into a git-based exploration tool, breaking up the monolithic markdown source into granular files and timestamped commits. By structuring extracted prompts per model, family, and revision, researchers can leverage `git log`, `diff`, and `blame` to trace prompt evolution, compare differences, and attribute changes to specific dates—all without manual parsing. Anthropic publish the system prompts for Claude chat and make that page available as Markdown. I had Claude Code turn that page into separate files for each model and model family with fake git commit dates to enable browsing the changes via the GitHub commit view. I used this to write my own detailed notes on the changes between Opus 4.6 and 4.7. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost…

Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool

Guides > Agentic Engineering Patterns Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a quite a lot of work done in a single shot. First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email. I generate the newsletter with my blog-to-newsletter tool - an HTML and JavaScript app that fetches my latest content from this Datasette instance and formats it as rich text HTML, which I can then copy to my clipboard and paste into the Substack editor. Here's a detailed explanation of how that works. I recently added a new type of content to my blog to capture content that…

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year 17th April 2026 This year’s PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It’s in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013. If you’re based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people and learn a ton of interesting things. In addition to regular PyCon programming we have two new dedicated tracks at the conference this year: an AI track on Friday…

datasette 1.0a28

17th April 2026 I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly: - Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_write_fn() callbacks with a parameter name other thanconn were seeing errors. (#2691)- The database.close() method now also shuts down the write connection for that database. - New datasette.close() method for closing down all databases and resources associated with a Datasette instance. This is called automatically when the server shuts down. (#2693) - Datasette now includes a pytest plugin which automatically calls datasette.close() on temporary instances created in function-scoped fixtures and during tests. See Automatic cleanup of Datasette instances for details. This helps avoid running out of file descriptors in plugin test suites that were written before theDatabase(is_temp_disk=True) feature introduced in Datasette…