My suspicion that something was weird about one of OpenAI's GPT-5 coding examples^[1] seems to be confirmed. It was way better than their model was able to produce over the course of several dozen attempts at replication under a wide variety of configurations.

They've run the same example prompt for their GPT-5.2 release, and their released output is vastly more simplistic than the original. Well in line with what I've observed from GPT-5 and other LLMs.

I'd encourage spending 30 seconds trying each example to get a handle on the qualitative difference. The above image doesn't really do it justice.

1. ^{^}

   See the last section, "A brief tangent about the GPT 5.1 example".