alt Hacker NewsI've only been using it a couple of weeks, but in my opinion, Opus 4.5 is the biggest jump in tech we've seen since ChatGPT 3.5.
The difference between juggling Sonnet 4.5 / Haiku 4.5 and just using Opus 4.5 for everything is night & day.
Unlike Sonnet 4.5 which merely had promise at being able to go off and complete complex tasks, Opus 4.5 seems genuinely capable of doing so.
Sonnet needed hand-holding and correction at almost every step. Opus just needs correction and steering at an early stage, and sometimes will push back and correct my understanding of what's happening.
It's astonished me with it's capability to produce easy to read PDFs via Typst, and has produced large documents outlining how to approach very tricky tech migration tasks.
Sonnet would get there eventually, but not without a few rounds of dealing with compilation errors or hallucinated data. Opus seems to like to do "And let me just check my assumptions" searches which makes all the difference.
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Cursor with Claude 4.5 Opus has been writing all my code since a few days. It's exhilarating, I can describe features and they get added to my code in a matter of seconds, minutes at most. It gets almost everything right, certainly more than I would at the first try. I only hand code parts that are small and tricky, and provide guidance on the general architecture, where to put things and how to organise them. It's an incredible way of working, the only nagging doubt is how long will it last before employers decide they don't need me in the loop at all.
Shhhh don't tell them!
I've decided we should lean in to the whole Clanker thing. Maximum Anti AI, folks! Gotta keep this advantage for ourselves ;-)
I had a situation this weekend where Claude said "x does not make sense in [context]" and didn't do the change I asked it to do. After an explanation of the purpose of the code, it fixed the issue and continued. Pretty cool.
(Of course, I'm still cognizant of the fact that it's just a bucket of numbers but still)
I'm not so sure. Opus 4.1 was more capable than 4.5, but it was too damn expensive and slow.
Opus 4.5 is like a cheaper, faster Opus 4.1. It's so much cheaper, in fact, that the weekly limits on Claude Code now apply to Sonnet, not to Opus, as they phased out 4.1 in favor of 4.5.
> I've only been using it a couple of weeks, but in my opinion, Opus 4.5 is the biggest jump in tech we've seen since ChatGPT 3.5.
Over Sonnet 4.5 maybe, but that's ignoring Opus 4.1 as well as Codex 5.1 Max.
In terms of capabilities, I find Opus 4.5 to be essentially identical to Codex 5.1 Max up until context starts to fill up (by which I mean 50% used) which happens much more quickly with Opus 4.5 than Codex AFAICT.
I think Codex is slower (a lot?) so it's not like it's just better, but I've found there are some tasks Opus can't do at all which Codex has no problem with, I think due to the context situation.
In any case it doesn't seem like a leap.