Not impressed so far, to be honest. I'm having it try to optimize Stockfish in a loop (on xhigh mode) with a benchmarking oracle; even after giving it specific hints ("consider whether we're prefetching Y optimally, can we make function X branchless"), it's been so far unable to recover any of the recent optimizations we've implemented – let alone novel ones. Opus 4.8 felt a bit more creative to me ... but a small sample size so far. I'm next going to try it on some less open-ended problems.

Edit: It did correctly identify that transparent huge pages were off in its sandboxed environment and that enabling it was helpful, so that's nice. It also noticed that we skip THP on a certain less used path.

More importantly, I'm finding that the code that it produces for its experiments is a lot cleaner than what I'd expect out of Opus; there's fewer useless comments and it's more surgical and readable. I wonder if that explains the increased scores on benchmarks measuring mergability.