SMRTR ProgrammingAug 14, 2025Daily.dev

GPT-5: A Choose Your Own Adventure for Frontend Developers

SMRTR summary

Purple buttons and React-free designs mark the early days of GPT-5, OpenAI's latest AI model that promised to revolutionize frontend coding. The company boldly claimed GPT-5 "excels at front-end coding, beating OpenAI o3 at frontend web development 70% of the time."

But developers are telling a different story.

YouTube influencer Theo Browne, initially featured in OpenAI's promotional materials, has dramatically reversed course. "The experience I'm having now using GPT-5 is significantly worse than the experience I had when I was testing it before," Browne admitted in a new video titled "I was wrong about GPT-5."

Other developers echo this disappointment. One GitHub Copilot user found GPT-5 "extremely underwhelming," suggesting Claude Sonnet 4 is "far superior."

This mixed reception raises an intriguing possibility: GPT-5 might enable developers to bypass React frameworks entirely, creating websites using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As Ben Hylak of Raindrop observed, "GPT-5 one shots things like no model I've ever seen before."

Results appear to vary significantly between different GPT-5 versions, with premium versions delivering superior coding capabilities than those available to most developers.

SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Daily.dev.

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