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I tested GPT-5's coding skills, and it was so bad that I'm sticking with GPT-4o (for now)

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ZDNET's key takeaways

OpenAI's new GPT-5 flagship failed half of my programming tests.

Previous OpenAI releases have had just about perfect results.

Now that OpenAI has enabled fallbacks to other LLMs, there are options.

So GPT-5 happened. It's out. It's released. It's the talk of the virtual town. And it's got some problems. I'm not gonna bury the lede. GPT-5 has failed half of my programming tests. That's the worst that OpenAI's flagship LLM has ever done on my carefully designed tests.

Also: The best AI for coding in 2025 (and what not to use)

Before I get into the details, let's take a moment to discuss one other little feature that's also a bit wonky. Check out the new Edit button on the top of the code dumps it generates.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

Clicking the Edit button takes you into a nice little code editor. Here, I replaced the Author field, right in ChatGPT's results.

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