Because Claude Code is stealing the thunder so OpenAI is focusing on coding now.

Yeah, Claude Code is what everyone is talking about these days and since OpenAI has always been the spending driver being 2nd or 3rd fiddle just isn't acceptable if they're gonna justify it.

That is where the money is.

This. I think software development is the best usecase for AI yet. I use it almost daily at work and it's a huge help.

Enterprise customers will happily pay even 100$/mo subscriptions and it has a clear value proposition that can be decently verified.

Revenue should not be confused with profit. The large AI companies must easily be spending more on compute than they're making from a $20-200/mo subscription. In the best case it might break even for the AI companies. There is no way that they're actually earning a profit from these subscriptions at this time.

It's where the revenue is, but it isn't going to be where the profit is. Developers will easily use absurdly large amounts of compute, costing the AI provider a lot more than they receive in revenue.

Let them fight, that's how we as users get more tokens for less money. If only all markets were so competitive...

Sure. At this point, what matters more to me imho is in effect the Plan stage where I refine my crude specification, iteratively and repeatedly, until I work out all the flaws and minimally necessary details in it. This is hard to do and uses up a lot of tokens, and it is where a lot of my initial effort goes. I have literally repeatedly exhausted my token quota just in this stage alone. I can take then take this refined specification to even a dumb agent from a year ago, and it would have no trouble producing decent code for it. This refined spec is what is equally important to me as the code. Tests, both unit and integration, also go hand in hand with the spec, although they're less important to me if I am carefully reviewing every line of code, and more important when vibe coding instead.

Why is it absurd?

At the very least, it is absurd to announce a model but not release it on the same day, making it vaporware. Was it released?

Which model, 5.3 or 5.3-Codex? Yes, 5.3-Codex was announced and released. 5.3 wasn't announced. None of it is "absurd", and it also wouldn't have been "absurd" if they announce something but don't release it that same day (which they didn't do, but if they had - what exactly is absurd about that? Companies make announcements about future releases ALL the time.)

I agree, I was confused about where 5.3 non Codex was. 5.2-Codex disappointed me enough that I won't be giving 5.3 Codex a try, but I'm looking forward to trying 5.3 non Codex with Pi.

GPT-5.x in general are very disappointing, the only good chat model was GPT-5 in the first week before they made "the personality warmer" and Codex in general was always kinda meh.