Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra: visualizing 55 invisible cities
What happened
An experiment on the Hacker News front page on October 8 turned Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities into an interactive visualization. Claude Opus 5.5 got one prompt and a 6-hour budget to render the book's 55 imagined cities in three.js. GPT-6 Astra in Codex got the same task and finished end to end in 53 minutes for about $10 in API tokens. The experimenter called Astra's output visually noisy. The report gives no time, cost or verdict for Opus 5.5.
Written by AI from the coverage · updated 3 hours ago
Coverage
Follow the reports to see the story from different sides.
- Hacker News front pageI gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
实验者给 Claude Opus 5.5 一条提示词和 6 小时预算，让它将《看不见的城市》中的 55 座想象城市做成 three.js 交互可视化。相同任务下，GPT-6 Astra 在 Codex 中耗时 53 分钟，API token 费用约 $10，完成了端到端实现，但实验者认为存在视觉噪声。
Heat over time
Heat now 9·Comparable peak 10（Oct 8 21:00）·Comparable change over 24 hours –
The trend only compares accounts observed without gaps, so its range may be smaller than the current heat. Hover or tap the chart for each hour; the left and right arrow keys step through it.