Opus 5.5 marks the same discontinuity that Opus 4.5 did for me. Before Opus 4.5, I wasn't really using AI to code. I knew the models were getting smarter as I was using them to help with writing It Follows, but they weren't trustworthy yet with actual work in my view. But then in November Opus 4.5 released and I saw everyone going crazy about it, I still had to finish It Follows, so I spent most of December actually building up a huge amount of FOMO over using it, but then once I was done I was finally able to try it and the rest is history.

Opus 5.5 is the same kind of improvement in trustworthiness of usage, except for game development. I was using previous models to help with making games, but as I mentioned in #527, I wasn't using them on huge runs yet, and in retrospect it wasn't because I missed it, it was because they were actually not that good at it yet. This changed now, Clean 360p Pixel 3D Style Development was me doing a 16 hour run with it that resulted in this game: https://a327ex.com/media/games/sun-court/v1.html.

It is extremely impressive. The model could do something kind of like this before, but now it has finally reached levels of taste and juice comparable to mine, and often times even better! There are still a few issues here and there, and sound is still fairly bad overall, so you still have to manually pick them yourself, but otherwise Opus 5.5 is finally a competent gamedev companion. I can finally trust it, and only have to fix its work lightly later.

As I said in the last post, this level of progress can be disorienting or discouraging for people who spent their lives learning how to make games, but personally... I have so many ideas I want to make that I can't help but feel excited about it all. It's time to reach the heavens!