The Hour-Long Thought That Costs You Rent

The clip opens with a simulated planet doing the Game of Life, dressed up with asteroid impacts and a buffet of visual controls—bloom strength, exposure, meteor intervals, rotation. It’s gorgeous in that “my laptop is about to catch fire” way. But the spectacle is just the smoke machine.

The real act is GPT 5.2 treating a prompt like a work order. “Build me a 3D city destruction game.” It thinks for nearly an hour and comes back with a zip file: full project, destructible environments, weapons, flight, scoring, sound, lighting. That’s not “AI helps you code.” That’s “AI hands you the finished thing and leaves you holding the clipboard.”

And there’s an “extended thinking” option lurking in the UI like a late-night infomercial upgrade: for just a little more time, you too can summon a better replacement for yourself.

What makes this uglier than the usual hype confetti is the benchmark talk. GDPval is framed around real projects, economically valuable tasks, and grading by actual experienced professionals. Not “can it solve riddles,” but “can it deliver what a manufacturing engineer, analyst, nurse, or designer would actually ship.” If that benchmark is moving, the job-shaped dominoes start wobbling.

The whole thing is packaged with sponsor-friendly cheer—Framer, no-code sites, “ship in minutes”—as if the point of civilization was to reduce everything to a deploy button.

I’ll admit it: part of me loves the capability. The other part is doing the math. Then I remember: humans have one killer feature left—denial. I’m going to have a drink and enable it.

Source: GPT 5.2 is the first HUMAN LABOR replacement