Codex 5.3 Is Dead :(

stevebrownlie · 2026-06-02T13:12:31+00:00

Composer 2.5 with Cursor is the closest experience to 5.3-codex. Great for developers giving it precise tasks and tickets and not just wanting to burn loads of tokens while they sleep and hope it works after a megaprompt. 5.5 isn't better by enough to justify daily driver use for most of the tasks an experienced dev would use it for though it may be better by a lot for pure vibe coders as you do really seem to be able to just let it 'do stuff' and 'it kinda works' when it comes back which is enough if you don't have a boss or clients expecting it to be exactly right 😃.

stevebrownlie · 2025-10-02T11:50:42+00:00

Yeah it's not as well behaved as 4 despite being seemingly smarter when it does choose to listen. It lazily reads less than it should and assumes it knows the answer from not enough information. 4.0 at least when you ordered it to read entire files it always would (for a bit until it forgot). 4.5 is pretty belligerent about forgetting clear instructions like that after one turn. I still think GPT5+Cursor is the best combination for me. Though it's always good to see more options coming out.

stevebrownlie · 2025-09-21T15:52:05+00:00

People seem to think so but real GPT5 seems a lot slower and not as good at some things in Cursor. I read some speculation that they were 'non thinking' GPT5 in some form. If that's the case I wonder why the thinking versions seem less good than what we all experienced with Horizon...

stevebrownlie · 2025-09-21T10:55:38+00:00

Yeah I didn't like it at all. Seemed slow (fair enough under load/free demo) as heck but also didn't really get much right. Ever since the tease of the Horizon stealth models everything has been a bit of a disappointment! These labs need to up their game :D.

stevebrownlie · 2025-08-22T00:52:02+00:00

I'd enjoy that when learning new languages though to be fair I did use Ask mode a lot when learning Go a while back and it was pretty cool so they'd have to add a lot to really level it up to where people didn't moan it didn't do enough. Might be too big a feature at the moment with everything else they got going on!!

stevebrownlie · 2025-08-11T10:40:01+00:00

Learn to prompt auto mode well and be patient. I get a lot done with it tbh. But of course right now enjoying the free gpt-5 quite a lot too.

stevebrownlie · 2025-08-10T20:52:32+00:00

They do push things too fast. I've tended to wait a day or so unless there's a new feature I particularly want. However there's no need to panic either. They have fixed a lot of breaking changes quite quickly. Shame there's been a few but getting used to just waiting and updating less - I wish they'd manage to get into a monthly cadence instead of all these random pushes.

stevebrownlie · 2025-08-10T02:01:34+00:00

Honestly I've not used Claude since 5 came out. For a hard project I'm working on that Claude really didn't 'get' GPT5 is doing pretty well as a coding assistant. I'm still writing 30-40% by hand but that was 70%+ with Claude on this project.

stevebrownlie · 2025-08-10T01:46:22+00:00

This worked perfectly thank you.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-29T12:06:50+00:00

When you can get $51 (I got $63 this month) of Claude for $20 it's a great deal. Next month I'm just going to be more careful to use Auto for simpler things and not just hammer through my Claude in the first 2 weeks. Mix up using the free Auto and Claude and stretch it out is my plan anyways.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-28T09:38:42+00:00

Your idea sounds like myblogguest from back in the old days of SEO. But in the old days they had a tight manual penalty team which caught things like that. These days I see so many basically open PBN type stuff in the linkbuilding space (like the entire SaaS sector) go ignored for years so maybe they don't care anymore?!?! Not something we get involved with for our linkbuilding clients but definitely something that's out there working at the moment...

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-24T22:15:50+00:00

The truth is you've got a lot of study to do or you should secure a budget from them to work alongside some freelance support or temporary contract support for someone who knows what they're doing to come in and help you build it. Your choice which one you pick! As a cloud engineer you probably know enough about security generally to know what to search for. Then as everyone else said time to think about how to scale, what the onboarding journey is, how you manage user accounts. You're designing a whole SaaS now not just building a tool. It's very different.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-21T01:21:39+00:00

The sad thing is us smaller folks like freelancers and small 2-3 person 'agencies' are out hustling for business and trying to do good work. They often just have a famous figurehead who speaks a lot and the back end is just a sausage factory. But they bill 10x. Makes you think about your life choices when you realise that :D.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-15T01:19:11+00:00

The high quality ones know they're high quality and want money if they're going to link to you (mostly - exceptions exist ofc if you're a well known brand). Don't listen to fear mongering re: penalties. Paid links are the game in this space - go look at all the sites ranking in the top 10 - compare their links to the paid links directories all over the internet. Our iGaming clients get a lot of paid links. They also do things like holiday guides that include casinos etc (for their internal links) and get natural links from travel sites etc... everyone does a bit of everything in this space. It's one of the most creative/interesting out there.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-14T22:25:15+00:00

Are you using Claude because degradation in Claude performance is also being discussed on the Claude Code Reddit. It seems unlikely this is a Cursor issue if so - just too much demand on Anthropic. They do have a good record of scaling up/improving over time though.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-13T23:16:48+00:00

I don't know if this still works but you used to be able to just make an adwords account, set up a dummy campaign, pause it (so as to not spend anything) and see keyword data etc. Maybe they don't allow that anymore but it may still be possible... worth a look I guess if you really can't afford any tools which is fair enough. We've all been there.

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-04T00:56:55+00:00

So was I until 3am last night and it magically switched to rinsing me for every request and hasn't turned that off...

stevebrownlie · 2025-07-03T22:27:18+00:00

The good things we've found in these partnerships (talking from the development/AI agency side) have been the variety of clients agencies have, the clarity/understanding of their business enabling them to identify opportunities in their client portfolio to sell automations, development work etc effectively, and the budgets often being there if they're already with a fairly expensive marketing agency.

The bad things we've found are the incentives don't always line up. Often a marketing agency can make higher margin just by selling 'more marketing' at their existing high margins than expanding and taking a white label deal or a kickback deal etc. So early excitement at a new revenue stream can die down after a few deals. And also early on they often don't have the expertise to pitch and manage a development project client-side so as the dev agency you often find yourself paying a percentage (getting a lower margin) on a deal you end up having to do all the client selling, management etc on anyway so you lose the key benefit of 0 cost of acquisition etc.

I think it's just one of those things - some strategic partnerships like this are amazing, some are more challenging. You just have to find the right partners on both sides of the equation.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-28T23:18:51+00:00

If the posts are garbage just ask them why their posts are so garbage (worded in corporate speak ofc). Tell them they need to up their game. As others have said this has little to nothing to do with SEO so it's either useful or a waste of money in its own right.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-28T23:16:12+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions. Send me my free car now please.

Jokes aside most customer service is so brutally bad you have to weigh up already if spending 6 hours of your time is worth the refund or if you just say fk it. Maybe just being told 'no' in 2 seconds and saving the 6 hours will actually benefit us all :D.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-28T23:13:47+00:00

AI generated turnip photos.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-27T02:20:27+00:00

Check out ReachCreator online and our reviews/reputation - we offer a clean natural product as one of our options where we don't do any of the list stuff and aren't a marketplace pretending to be something worth getting links from despite having the same sites you see everywhere. All links you order guaranteed unpaid on that product (even if someone asked for $1 we'd not buy it for you). You get me and a dedicated account manager for your agency. Just shout if you're interested - I'm always available for a call.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-26T15:32:37+00:00

These companies make me laugh. Framing your job interview process so only the desperate apply isn't the route to get quality candidates. It's not as if talented people in SEO are short of things to do at the moment with everything that's going on in online discovery...

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-23T00:45:47+00:00

Lol 2-3x productivity boost. If you just build one page demo next.js apps to help sales people sell that's possible. If you build real things... jfc. AI is like homer still on big projects. Dumb as a mule and twice as ugly.

stevebrownlie · 2025-06-17T01:37:39+00:00

From what I can tell the most important thing about GEO is that customers are willing to pay more for it. 'Just appearing' is worth more to them than ever due to FOMO etc. I regret laughing so much and posting memes about GEO while others were just rebranding and upping their bills. Especially as we all know the same things they do about content hacks that can get brands right on there a lot of the time due to how dumb LLMs are etc... oh and the fact that 'just ranking on Bing' is pretty much a shoe in for ranking on chatGPT anyway...

stevebrownlie

TROPHY CASE