GPT-5.1 for Developers
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
openai.comTechstory
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GPT-5.1AI DevelopmentCoding Assistants
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GPT-5.1
AI Development
Coding Assistants
OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 for developers, with improvements in coding personality and steerability, sparking excitement and discussion among developers about its capabilities and potential applications.
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- 01Story posted
Nov 13, 2025 at 1:46 PM EST
about 2 months ago
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Nov 13, 2025 at 5:01 PM EST
3h after posting
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Nov 17, 2025 at 1:39 PM EST
about 2 months ago
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ID: 45918802Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:30:06 PM
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GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45904551 - Nov 2025 (672 comments)
You have to be called Apple to get raving reviews for that.
Why no GitHub?
Claude 4.5 Sonnet definitely struggles with Swift 6.2 Concurrency semantics and has several times gotten itself stuck rather badly. Additionally Claude Code has developed a number of bugs, including rapidly re-scrolling the terminal buffer, pegging local CPU to 100%, and consuming vast amounts of RAM. Codex CLI was woefully behind a few months ago and, despite overly conservative out-of-the-box sandbox settings, has quite caught up to Claude Code. (Gemini CLI is an altogether embarrassing experience, but Google did just put a solid PM behind it and 3.0 Pro should be out this month if we're lucky.)
Codex with 5.1 high managed to thoughtfully paw through the documentation and source code and - with a little help pulling down parts of the Swift Book - managed to correctly resolve the issue.
I remember getting the thread manager right being one of the harder parts of my operating systems course doing an undergrad in computer science; testing threaded programs has always been a challenge. It's a strange circle-of-life moment to realize that what was hard for undergrads also serves as a benchmark for coding agents!
What solved that for me was to leverage the for-LLM docs Apple ships with Xcode, and then build a swift6-concurrency skill. Here's an example script to copy the Xcode docs into your repo: https://gist.github.com/CharlesWiltgen/75583f53114d1f2f5bae3...
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/PlugIns/IDEIntelligenceChat.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AdditionalDocumentation/Swift-Concurrency-Updates.md
is exactly the primer to give an agent.
"consuming vast amounts of RAM" Also this. Claude will leave hanging instances all the time. If you check your task manager after a few days of using it without doing a full reset you'll see a number of hanging Claude processes using up 400 mb of RAM.
Claude actually has a huge number of very painful bugs. I'm aware of at least a dozen.
Citation?
- there's no good reason it's called "chat" instead of "Instant"
- gpt-5.1 and gpt-5.1-chat are different models, even though they both reason now. gpt-5.1 is more factual and can think for much longer. most people want gpt-5.1, unless the use case is ChatGPT-like or they prefer its personality.
This time, I just dropped it in and at first glance it seems to work well. I'll probably upgrade over the weekend if I see a boost in performance somewhere after tuning the prompts.