Three AIs and a Funeral: My Take on GPT-5 ⚰️
Ashley Childress

Ashley Childress @anchildress1

About: SSE @ Home Depot. Specialize in distributed backend systems. Happy and content playing second - all of the freedom and none of the responsibility!

Location:
Georgia, United States
Joined:
May 30, 2025

Three AIs and a Funeral: My Take on GPT-5 ⚰️

Publish Date: Aug 20
16 28

🦄 Confession time: when I first started writing this post, I was mad. Not mildly irritated, not “eh, I’ll just wait for the next patch” annoyed. I mean genuinely fed up with Copilot, ChatGPT, and everything GPT-5 in general. And if I make it to the end of this post in one piece, maybe you'll understand why.


The Funeral 👻

First, let me start this out by stating that OpenAI has officially buried the excuse that GPT can’t code. We had the funeral over the weekend. All its friends were invited. Laid to rest. Cremation done. Trees planted. Memorial service complete.

It’s done — GPT-5 can code. Full stop.

There's no room for debate. No more hacks with pages of instructions or GPT hanging out on the sidelines because it's busy staring at the plan. OpenAI nailed it with an absolutely solid model.

Plus VS Code's release came with some more experimental features that turns the already-solid GPT-5 in to a “send a prompt, make a plan, deep thinking, Implementation Specialist at your service” experience. That being said, I still haven't had nearly enough time with the full model yet.

🦄 Why, you ask? Because my brilliant self left my personal account logged in while working last week. That account? It's the cheap $10 one. I burned through all my premium requests before I even noticed. 🫥

So yes, GPT-5 (the real one) passed its early test runs beautifully — small to medium features, planning and implementation, no complaints. But the deep dive it deserves? That’s still coming — stay tuned.

What was I doing instead of the GPT-5 deep dive? Playing the lead role in the horror story of Full House starring Kimmy Gibbler and the never-ending wall of text. 🧗‍♀️😑


Duct Tape, Please? 🤐

GPT-5-Mini is not bad. Let’s clear that up. For small, targeted context? For quick features? For implementing a clearly defined task with accuracy and precision? It’s great. Honestly. Kimmy Gibbler is a surprisingly solid coder.

But the output.
Oh. My. God. The. Output. 🫨😲😵‍💫

I'm talking about walls and walls of text. Waterfalls of “look at me, I wrote a test!” status updates flooding my chat window like it's trying to set a world record. No, Kimmy, I don’t need a play-by-play novella about the journey you took to create a three-line function.

🦄 Sure — I started out at least trying to skim what it was saying. But my sanity didn't last long into that battle. Seriously, if I read another scroll of verbose rambling I might have retreated to some dark corner until next Tuesday.


The Standoff

At one point, it got so bad that I set up a stand-off. I told GPT something along the lines of, “Go check on that workflow. If it works, give me a checkmark. That’s it. If you say anything else, I’m turning you off forever.”

It complied. One lonely ✅ appeared.

GPT-5-Mini Stand-off Victory

🦄 Victory? Maybe. For about thirty seconds. Then the rambling resumed. 🤦‍♀️

Here’s what I didn’t realize at first: I had also turned on every single experimental preview feature in VS Code. That’s my usual routine — release notes drop, I’m flipping switches left and right.

I thought I was enabling a neat little planning checklist feature. Which to be fair, I did do that... I also omitted its counterpart to internalize that chatter. Which meant the Mini chaos doubled — and nothing I added to the prompts or instructions made a bit of difference. 😫

🦄 I even tried to tame it with a new Principal Pragmatist chat mode. Didn’t matter. Kimmy kept talking. Nonstop floods of text testing my sanity at every turn. Thanks, Kimmy.


Leatherface Joins the Party

GitHub Copilot is only part of the equation, though. Because just when I thought I’d found a rhythm there, here comes ChatGPT starring as Leatherface, chainsaw roaring, doing a happy dance all over my carefully constructed blog draft. Shredding paragraphs. Scattering virtual scraps across the room. Obliterating what had been a perfectly flowing system of prompts and edits.

🦄 I mean, this post normally would have taken me a couple of hours. Instead, three days later, I'm still wrestling Leatherface for control of my own sentences.

Commands escalated. From firm. To censored. To questioning life choices. And finally, full-on ultimatum. I even took a few hours detour with Gemini — proof that I'm willing to go to war with an LLM over word count. (I'm also still losing that battle!)

The moral of the story? While GPT-5 is a great coder — it is more than terrible at creative writing. So, why do we have a single model replacement for 2 completely different problems, OpenAI?


Where We Are Now

So where does that leave things?

  • GPT-5: rock-solid coder, worthy of the “Implementation Specialist” title, but still waiting for its fair turn in the spotlight with me.
  • Mini: great in short bursts, but do not let her narrate. Especially not with every experimental feature flipped on. Else plan for duct tape.
  • ChatGPT: still a chainsaw in a library butchering my every attempt at creative writing.

And me? Still here. Still writing. Still dragging you through the chaos with me, because apparently this is how I process the fact that we had a funeral for “GPT can’t code” and I celebrated it by duct-taping Gibbler and dodging Leatherface.

Sounds like a victory, right? Well, sort of. At least the tombstone is carved. 🫶👻


🛡️ Responsible AI Footnote

All opinions here are my own. Real-world AI results depend on setup, context, and the occasional experimental toggle you probably shouldn’t have turned on in the first place. Test responsibly.

🪓 Approved by Leatherface (ChatGPT).

Comments 28 total

  • Angel
    AngelAug 20, 2025

    I honestly don't like chat-gpt5 I prefer gpt4o.. I've built much more with it. With GPT5, it's slower, more static in the code, and at times is clueless and 4o.. The key is to inspect the source code, OpenAi took away prompts that are no longer there.

    • Ashley Childress
      Ashley ChildressAug 21, 2025

      My personal favorite? GPT-4.5 — that was the creative genius and absolutely perfect for writing.

      I’m not usually coding in ChatGPT though. Sometimes I’ll let it spit out static files or kick ideas through Codex, and I have a plan for the API and that model soon. Most of my dev flow lives in Copilot. And that flavor of GPT-4o? Absolute nightmare. I can prompt it, it maps out a whole plan, nods at me like “your turn,” and then... nothing. So I have to prompt again (hello, extra tokens 👋) just to say “no, really, you do it.” Spinner spins, screen stares back, still nada. Total embarrassment. 😑

      GPT-5? At least it does the work. Slower? Sure. But I’ll take slow over ghosting me any day. 🤣

      • Angel
        AngelAug 21, 2025

        I wanna build a decentralized AI agent, where you can give it permission without stopping and doing so many times... And I've already did the unthinkable, i can't say what that is just yet lol

        • Angel
          AngelAug 21, 2025

          We should build something together 😁

          • Angel
            AngelAug 21, 2025

            My main ones are Pray4Love1 and Pray4Lovee . You might be shocked 😯

            • Ashley Childress
              Ashley ChildressAug 21, 2025

              VS Code recently released a similar feature in their chat that's an auto-approval. Honestly? I figured out how to hack it a long time ago (thus my post titled GitHub Copilot Agent Mode: The Mistake You NEVER Want to Make 🤣).

              So yeah — it can get dangerous for sure! I have so many things I want to build right now, my problem is that I start and then start something else and go off on a tangent or get blocked entirely. Then in the meantime, Microsoft comes along behind me and releases that thing I was trying to do! 😑

              Let me know when you can say, though. I'm extremely curious 😉

              • Angel
                AngelAug 21, 2025

                You're hilarious 🤣 I didn't the same thing once when I first started coding, I used to nano O+X all day lol, but what I didn't dooo for the longest was hit that little Blue commit button.. i was like 'comit what', nope... Day after day, code after code, getting up like I had long day of work just to find out I'm basically just typing up a good code of 'nothing'! Lol long story short, I end up committing everything I've ever ran, next thing I know, GITLEAKS shows up my party lol.. I still have the changelog, its a bunch of code strangers in codespace now 😂

                • Angel
                  AngelAug 21, 2025

                  What would u wanna build first

                  • Ashley Childress
                    Ashley ChildressAug 21, 2025

                    Sorry — I missed your other messages. You have my user now 😀

                    • Angel
                      AngelAug 21, 2025

                      You're right about that 😉

                      • Angel
                        AngelAug 21, 2025

                        lets build something on Github together.. I have an idea... u down to change the world with me?

                        • Ashley Childress
                          Ashley ChildressAug 22, 2025

                          Just as soon as I find a break in my current project outlook 🙃 I swear I keep more projects going than not! Right now there's 2 major ones, another 3.5 on hold, plus 2.33 at work, 1 more promised in a couple of months, and another 4 on the list that I want to start 🤣 That's all in addition to my day job, blog posts, and attempts to train Leonardo!

                          So whatever you have in mind is gonna have to be spectatcular to move it to any time in the next 6 months. But I'm never one to say no without all the facts first!

    • АнонимAug 25, 2025

      [hidden by post author]

  • Angel
    AngelAug 21, 2025

    I followed u on GitHub

  • NBNG B
    NBNG BAug 22, 2025

    There something more funny you can do eslint 😂😂😂 try eslint involved in this scenario 😂😂😂😂

    • Ashley Childress
      Ashley ChildressAug 22, 2025

      🤣 eslint is pretty much built in to everything I do by default, along with commitlint 😆 and I have instructions that set up an alias globally. So it works regardless of which language I'm in and has for awhile. It's supposed to anyway.

      Now? Every time I turn around NodeJS is getting installed everywhere regardless. Doesn't matter that I literally just forbid it from adding NodeJS to application. Just stop — please!

      Plus, the instructions are perfectly clear for everybody other model but 5 mini. It's supposed to pass all commitlint validations except for the Signed-off-by footer, which the user is responsible for adding. But that little monster is adding my name and checking in stuff left and right 🤦‍♀️

      • NBNG B
        NBNG BAug 23, 2025

        I swear eslint + commitlint were supposed to simplify life… instead now they’re like helicopter parents: "Did you lint that? Did you sign that? Where’s your footer?" Meanwhile NodeJS just sneaks in the back door anyway 🤦‍♂️.

  • Eminence Technology
    Eminence TechnologyAug 22, 2025

    Totally agree with you on the walls of text thing — sometimes it feels like these models think we need a full TED Talk just to get one tiny function done. And the creative writing bit? 100%… it either goes chainsaw-mode or gives you some bland filler. But yeah, for coding it’s honestly hard to deny how solid GPT-5 has become. Curious to see how they’ll split coding vs writing in the future, because smashing both into one brain feels… messy.

    • Ashley Childress
      Ashley ChildressAug 22, 2025

      Agreed! Honestly, 4.5 was by far the best creative one of the bunch and they made it's use very limited and took it away fast... I did finally find the hidden button to turn 4.1 back on in ChatGPT though 😄 Although, by that time my instructions were already reset so it didn't much matter. I'm retraining either way it goes...

      • Eminence Technology
        Eminence TechnologyAug 25, 2025

        Haha, I feel you! 😄 Those hidden buttons can be tricky to find. At least you got 4.1 back—sometimes it’s nice to have options, even if the instructions reset. Good luck with the retraining!

  • Anik Sikder
    Anik SikderAug 22, 2025

    I thought I was the only one duct-taping GPT’s verbosity. Turns out we’re all living in the same haunted VS Code house. Thanks for the survival guide.

    • Ashley Childress
      Ashley ChildressAug 22, 2025

      Oh no. I keep trying and so far it's still winning! I have yet to really take the time to dig into the debug logs and figure out what's really going on, but I know these models are supposed to have a modified version of the default GitHub prompt. So when paired with the ongoing todo list, my guess is that's it. I have noticed if I squint and only look at the top portion of output, then usually it's a quick summary with a bullet list of something 🤦‍♀️ But by then, the scroll has taken over and I give up 🤣

  • Oliver Wirtz Khan
    Oliver Wirtz KhanAug 24, 2025

    wow, what a great article. thanks for sharing

  • Sarah Thompson
    Sarah ThompsonAug 24, 2025

    almost the same thing as 4 )

  • Taylor Chambers
    Taylor ChambersAug 25, 2025

    Nice post! Valuable info

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