alt Hacker NewsDid anyone else notice Sonnet 4.5 being much dumber recently? I tried it today and it was really struggling with some very simple CSS on a 100-line self-contained HTML page. This never used to happen before, and now I'm wondering if this release has something to do with it.
On-topic, I love the fact that Opus is now three times cheaper. I hope it's available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription.
EDIT: Apparently it's not available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription, but you can add funds to your Claude wallet and use Opus with pay-as-you-go. This is going to be really nice to use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation with the Pro subscription.
However, I noticed that the previously-there option of "use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation" isn't there in Claude Code with this setup any more. Hopefully they'll implement it soon, as that would be the best of both worlds.
EDIT 2: Apparently you can use `/model opusplan` to get Opus in planning mode. However, it says "Uses your extra balance", and it's not clear whether it means it uses the balance just in planning mode, or also in execution mode. I don't want it to use my balance when I've got a subscription, I'll have to try it and see.
EDIT 3: It looks like Sonnet also consumes credits in this mode. I had it make some simple CSS changes to a single HTML file with Opusplan, and it cost me $0.95 (way too much, in my opinion). I'll try manually switching between Opus for the plan and regular Sonnet for the next test.
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100% dumber, especially since last 3-4 days. I have two guesses:
- They make it dumber close to a new release to hype the new model
- They gave $1000 Claude Code Web credits to a lot of people, which increased the load a lot so they had to serve quantized version to handle the it.
I love Claude models but I hate this non transparency and instability.
On Friday my Claude was particularly stupid. It's sometimes stupid, but I've never seen it been that consistently stupid. Just assumed it was a fluke, but maybe something was changing.
My guess is that Claude's "bad days" are due to the service becoming overloaded and failing over to use cheaper models.
Anecdotally, I kind of compare the quality of Sonnet 4.5 to that of a chess engine: it performs better when given more time to search deeper into the tree of possible moves (more plies). So when Anthropic is under peak load I think some degradation is to be expected. I just wish Claude Code had a "Signal Peak" so that I could schedule more challenging tasks for a time when its not under high demand.