Article URL: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865093 Points: 115 # Comments: 71

GPT-5.6's new Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers go head-to-head with Grok 4.5, Claude, Meta's Muse Spark, and the open-weights crew on a raycaster, a Rubik's cube, a calculator, and Game of Life. Here's every build, with cost and latency. Our last build-off hit the Hacker News front page, and the comments did not hold back. Fair enough, a lot of it was good feedback. So we took it, and with GPT-5.6 landing in three tiers (Sol, Terra, Luna) and Meta surprise-dropping a coding model (Muse Spark 1.1), we ran the whole thing again, bigger: twelve models, four apps, five attempts each. Want to skip straight to poking at the raw builds? Jump to every attempt and run them yourself. The lineup, twelve strong: the new GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT-5.6 Luna; Meta's Muse Spark 1.1; Grok 4.5, GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Claude Fable 5; plus the open-weights crew: Qwen 3.7 Plus, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K2.6, and GLM-5.2. Here is each task: our pick of the five attempts playing up top, the cost and time for all five just below, and links to every raw attempt at the bottom of the post so you can judge for yourself. First-person raycaster you walk with WASD, shaded walls with depth, floor and ceiling, collision. How we counted "playable": the only question we cared about was whether you could actually walk through the labyrinth, move and turn. If yes, it counted. Overall, Claude did worse than we expected here. GPT outperformed every other model, Grok was a genuinely usable alternative at its price point, and Muse Spark was a real surprise on the runs that actually worked.