tags: openai, ai, webdev, productivity
GPT-5 from a Developer's Perspective: API Changes, Costs, and When to Upgrade
I have been running GPT-5 in production for about three months across two services. One is a documentation summarizer hitting roughly 40k requests per day, the other is a code review assistant for our internal PR workflow. This post is what I wish someone had written before I migrated, with actual numbers and the things that broke.
What Changed in the API
The endpoint shape is mostly backward compatible. If your code uses client.chat.completions.create(model="gpt-4o", ...) you can swap to model="gpt-5" and most things keep working. The differences show up in three places.
