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At the end of June, we lost access to GPT-5.6 Sol while it went through government review. Dan Shipper said returning to older models felt like going back to the Stone Age. Austin Tedesco compared GPT-5.5 to shooting a basketball twice as heavy.
Now Sol is back, alongside OpenAI’s new unified ChatGPT and Codex desktop app. OpenAI calls it the company’s strongest model yet. Our verdict is narrower: Fable still gets the biggest, loosest assignments. Sol is the model most of us want open all day.
We tested it across coding, writing, research, spreadsheets, and agent workflows. The results include a few contradictions worth understanding:
- Why Sol’s Senior Engineer score tells a complicated story about persistence, skill, and restraint
- How one of the weakest one-shot writers in our benchmark became my (Katie Parrott’s) favorite model to write with
- The spreadsheet test that made Arielle Shipper feel the magic of Sol—and then gave her whiplash
- When the Every team routes a job to Sol, Fable, or Opus
Sol changes the feel of everyday knowledge work. It finds the files, holds onto the context, and produces another pass while the decision is still fresh in your mind. The full Vibe Check includes our Reach Test ratings, benchmark results, screenshots, pricing analysis, and exact guidance on which model should get which job.
Katie Parrott is a staff writer at Every. You can read more of her work in her newsletter. To read more essays like this, subscribe to Every, and follow us on X at @every and on LinkedIn.
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