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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

21–30 of 344 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#21
post #9

it is barely an improvement according to their own benchmarks. not saying thats a bad thing, but not enough for anybody to notice any difference

That's why they named it 4.1 and not 4.5

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#23
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

If I'm using cursor then sonnet is better, but in claude code Opus 4 is at least 3x better than Sonnet. As with most things these days, I think a lot of it comes down to prompting.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#24
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

It's ridiculously overpriced in the API. Just like o3 used to be.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#26
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

I feel the same way. I usually use Opus to help with coding and documentation, and I use Sonnet for emails and so on.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#27
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

Every time that Sonnet is acting like it has brain damage (which is once or twice a day), I switch to Opus and it seems to sort things out pretty fast. This is unscientific anicdata though, and it could just be that switching models (any model) would have worked.

They both seem to behave differently depending on how loaded the system seems to be.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#28
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

Opus seems better to me on long tasks that require iterative problem solving and keeping track of the context of what we have already tried. I usually switch to it for any kind of complicated troubleshooting etc. I stick with Sonnet for most things because it's generally good enough and I hit my token limits with it far less often.

Same. I'm on the $200 plan and I find Opus "better", but Sonnet is more straight forward. Sonnet is, to me, a "don't let it think" model. It does great if you give it concrete and small goals. Anything vague or broad and it starts thinking and it's a problem.

Opus gives you a bit more rope to hang yourself with imo. Yes, it "thinks" slightly better, but still not good enough to me. But it can be good enough to convince you that it can do the job.. so i dunno, i almost dislike it in this regard. I find Sonnet just easier to predict in this regard.

Could i use Opus like i do Sonnet? Yes definitely, and generally i do. But then i don't really see much difference since i'm hand-holding so much.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#29
post #9

it is barely an improvement according to their own benchmarks. not saying thats a bad thing, but not enough for anybody to notice any difference

Good! I'm glad they are just giving us small updates. Opus 4 just came out, if you have small improvements, why not just release them? There's no downside for us.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#30
post #23
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

If I'm using cursor then sonnet is better, but in claude code Opus 4 is at least 3x better than Sonnet. As with most things these days, I think a lot of it comes down to prompting.

This is interesting. I do use Cursor with almost exclusively Sonnet and thinking mode turned on. I wonder if what Cursor does under the hood (like their indexing) somehow empowers Sonnet more. I do not have much experience with using Claude Code.
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