GoKawiilGPT-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.
What we changed based on your feedback:
You wanted open-weights models in the mix. So we added GLM-5.2, Qwen 3.7 Plus, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Kimi K2.6 as comparison points, all served via Fireworks.
So we added GLM-5.2, Qwen 3.7 Plus, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Kimi K2.6 as comparison points, all served via Fireworks. One attempt was weird, you said. Agreed. Every model now gets five attempts per task. Up top you get one sample run per model; each task table then says how many of the five we thought actually succeeded (and how we counted) and links the attempt we liked best; and every attempt is linked at the bottom so you can see how much these models swing run to run.
Agreed. Every model now gets five attempts per task. Up top you get one sample run per model; each task table then says how many of the five we thought actually succeeded (and how we counted) and links the attempt we liked best; and every attempt is linked at the bottom so you can see how much these models swing run to run. "This isn't objective." Correct, and we are not pretending it is. We are not handing down a scientific verdict. We generated a big pile of artifacts, we are publishing all of them, and you can form your own opinion. Everything below is just our observations from watching the results.
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.
Task 1: Doom-style raycaster maze
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