At this point Anthropic is a pure marketing and PR company. Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences. Boris Cherny coming to HN “Hi! it’s Boris from the Claude Code team” to get real tech people’s goodwill.
From Opus 4.6 there are no noticeable improvements for me in code generation. It works very well, till 90% completion, if you guide it correctly. And you need a little luck. For serious production code I need to understand what I’m doing so it helps a bit, sometimes.
> catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences
This is just good business sense. In what scenario would you ever make the names dumb and forgettable?
> Boris Cherny coming to HN “Hi! it’s Boris from the Claude Code team” to get real tech people’s goodwill.
This is good customer support, lol. From what I can tell, it is indeed Boris Cherny responding, not outsourced to AI or other staff. You're really getting a response from Boris. I suppose that is PR, but it's not unjustified PR, it's accurate.
I'm not even a crazy AI fan, but your criticisms are ridiculous here. It reminds me of the quote from Knives Out -- "Your Honor, she endeared herself to him through hard work and good humor."
Your observations are right but pretty insane to consider them a pure PR company lol. They are making more frequent releases so yes the release-to-release quality is smaller but we’re still ascending quality and reliability curves the same way we have since GPT-3. You get a GPT4->5 leap every like 17 or 18 months I think it is
> Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences.
They're originally named after the blends at a nearby coffee shop.
https://postscript.co/pages/brew-guide
I've noticed nobody at HN knows what "marketing" is or how to do it. It's not just naming things and being evil and cynical is not the most successful method.
…also frontier models are a superhuman life changing experience. If they aren't, what possibly could be?
I dislike Anthropic but I wouldn't argue 4.8 isn't an improvement on 4.5/4.6. Your tasks just might not typically need the extra intelligence.
I don't get it, your complaint is that they have catchy names rather than dry names like GPT-5.6? Does OpenAI hype their models less?
Not my impression. I felt 4.7 was a regression, but I am again badly in love with 4.8 with the level of insights it produces in design discussions, and how long can it go unattended while producing spec-adhering quality code. There are problems it still can't solve well, from the edges of algorithmics and far from the mainstream, but for lots of stuff it is godlike.
Also, I dont think Boris C. is coming here for PR. He is a tech guy, and this is the best place for tech discussions. Why so cynical? The guy is an engineer.
I don’t even think that Boris is really just one person. He apparently vibe coded Claude Code and is responding on Threads, Twitter, HN and everywhere.
They're good at marketing, but my first subjective assessment of Fable is that it's really smart.
I've been working with gpt 5.5 and opus 4.8 quite a lot, and interacting with Fable feels like a smart guy just entered the room.
>Hey! Boris from the Claude Code team!
>TOP 5 METHODS FROM BORIS ON HOW TO SPEND MORE MONEY ON TOKENS
>Boris from Claude just told he doesn't prompt anymore. He LOOPS instead
>"chatgpt has gotten soooo much better with the latest update."
>"codex is the best AI coding product and we want to make it easy to try."
Karpathy about Fable 5:
>"You can give it a lot more ambitious tasks than what you're used to, the model "gets it""
Sam Altman about gpt-5.4:
>In my experience, it "gets what to do"
What a time to be alive. Models are great, but all the slop, marketing, and fakeness around them is just unbearable.
If you truly believe this, you've discovered a superpower over everyone else in the industry.
While everyone else is wasting time and money on the slower, more expensive models, you've found a way to outpace everyone for less money. Everyone else is wrong and you will get rich.
(I don't actually believe the premise is true, I'm just pointing out the logical conclusion to what you're saying so maybe we can reconsider the premise)
> At this point Anthropic is a pure marketing and PR company. Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human
Lol anti-AI bias on HN is crazy. Simply giving your product a quirky name is now being considered manipulative advertising. Is just doing normal PR and marketing something AI companies aren't allowed to do?
How can you make this comment before even having a chance to try the new major model revision?
Current AI hype is built on marketing and PR, not capabilities, and has been from the start.
I still remember Sam Altman “begging AI to be regulated” and AGI being “some thousand days away”.
Breed faster horses and hope one will birth a locomotive.
Don't forget the DoD stint that gave them this recent public boost.
Defy standard DoD precedent going back forever, that every other country has some form of too, and championing it like they are some kind of moral freedom fighters.
Like selling the DoD guns and telling them they can only shoot bad guys with those guns, and that you will be the one to decide who counts as a bad guy...
I think this says more about your type of work than anything. For bugfinding/incident response in distributed systems - which often involves extensive use of Datadog/Sentry MCPs and poring over heaps of logs in addition to reading tons of code - 4.8 has been significantly better than 4.6.
Indeed, hearing "Mythos-class model" felt very icky to me.
You are right; all I noticed was a big-time slowdown. They increased the quota, but I cannot even reach the end of the day with these speeds. .NET coding somehow improved, though.
Doesn't this suggest your use case is simply insufficiently complicated?
When the Ai overlord is descending into pleb space to say Hi, you know stuff is real
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Hackernews not blindly hate on AI challenge: impossible
> Boris Cherny coming to HN “Hi! it’s Boris from the Claude Code team” to get real tech people’s goodwill.
This is a good thing. I wish every company would do this. I subscribed to Proton Mail after interacting with someone from their team here on HN.