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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code CLI.

Thanks. With the CLI, can you get Copilot-ish things like tab-completion and inline commands directly in your IDE? Or do you need to copy/paste to and from a terminal? It feels like running a command on the IDE and then copying the output into your IDE is a pretty primitive way to operate.

My advice is this:

1) Completely separate in your mind the auto-completion features from the agentic coding features. The auto-completion features are a neat trick but I personally find those to be a bit annoying overall, even if they sometimes hit it completely right. If I'm writing the code, I mostly don't want the LLM autocompletion.

2) Pay the $20 to get a month of Claude Pro access and then install Claude Code. Then, either wait until you have a small task in mind or your stuck on some stupid issue that you've been banging your head on and then open your terminal and fire up Claude Code. Explain to it in plain English what you want it to do. Pretend it's a colleague that you're giving a task to over Slack. And then watch it go. It works directly on your source code. There is no copying and pasting code.

3) Bookmark the Claude website. The next time you'd Google something technical, ask it Claude instead. General questions like "how does one typically implement a flizzle using the floppity-do framework"? "I'm trying to accomplish X, what are my options when using this stack?". General questions like that.

From there you'll start to get it and you'll get better at leverage the tool to do what you want. Then you can branch out the rest of the tool ecosystem.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great use case for sub-agents IMO. By default, sub-agents use sonnet. You can have opus orchestrate the various agents and get (close to) the best of both worlds.

Is there a way to get persistent sub-agents? I'd love to have a bunch of YAML files in my repository, one for each sub-agent, and have those automatically used across all Claude Code instances I have on multiple machines (I dev on laptop and desktop), or across the team.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#93
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they named it 4.1 and not 4.5

When it's "that's why they incremented the version by a tenth instead of a half" you know things have really started to slow for the large models.

They released this because competitors are releasing things

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code has two usage modes: pay-per-token or subscription. Both modes are using API under the hood, but with subscription mode you are only paying a fixed amount a month. Each subscription tier has some undisclosed limits, cheaper plans have lower usage limits. So I would recommend paying $20 and trying the Claude Code via that subscription.

No Opus in the $20 tier though sadly

What does Opus do extra?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#95

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

I'm not sure what's complicated about what you're describing? They offer two models and you can pay more for higher usage limits, then you can choose if you want to run it in your browser or in your terminal. Like what else would you expect? Fwiw I have a Claude pro plan and have no interest in using other offerings so I'm not sure if they're super simple (one model, one interface, one pricing plan)?

When people post this stuff, it's like, are you also confused that Nike sells shoes AND shorts AND shirts, and there's different colors and skus for each article of clothing, and sometimes they sell direct to consumer and other times to stores and to universities, and also there's sales and promotions, etc, etc?

It's almost as if companies sell more than one product.

Why is this the top comment on so many threads about tech products?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#97

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

VSCode has a pretty good Gemini integration - it can pull up a chat window from the side. I like to discuss design changes and small refactorings ("I added this new rpc call in my protobuf file, can you go ahead and stub out the parts of code I need to get this working in these 5 different places?") and it usually does a pretty darn good job of looking at surrounding idioms in each place and doing what I want. But gemini can be kind of slow here.

But I would recommend just starting using Claude in the browser, talk through an idea for a project you have and ask it to build it for you. Go ahead and have a brain storming session before you actually ask it to code - it'll help make sure the model has all of the context. Don't be afraid to overload it with requirements - it's generally pretty good at putting together a coherent plan. If the project is small/fits in a single file - say a one page web app or a complicated data schema + sql queries - then it can usually do a pretty good job in one place. Then just copy+paste the code and run it out of the browser.

This workflow works well for exploring and understanding new topics and technologies.

Cursor is nice because it's an AI integrated IDE (smoother than the VSCode experience above) where you can select which models to use. IMO it seems better at tracking project context than Gemini+VSCode.

Hope this helps!

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#98
Claude Code has honestly made me at least 10x more productive. I’ve burned through about 3 billion tokens and have been consistently merging 5+ PRs a day, tackling tons of tech debt, improving GitHub Actions, and making crazy progress on product work

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#99

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

[dead]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#100
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. With the CLI, can you get Copilot-ish things like tab-completion and inline commands directly in your IDE? Or do you need to copy/paste to and from a terminal? It feels like running a command on the IDE and then copying the output into your IDE is a pretty primitive way to operate.

My advice is this: 1) Completely separate in your mind the auto-completion features from the agentic coding features. The auto-completion features are a neat trick but I personally find those to be a bit annoying overall, even if they sometimes hit it completely right. If I'm writing the code, I mostly don't want the LLM autocompletion. 2) Pay the $20 to get a month of Claude Pro access and then install Claude Code.…

Interesting about the auto-completion. That was really the only Copilot feature I found to be useful. The idea of writing out an English prompt and telling Copilot what to write sounded (and still sounds) so slow and clunky. By the time I've articulated what I want it to do, I might as well have written the code myself. The auto-completion was at least a major time-saver.

"The card game state is a structure that contains a Deck of cards, represented by a list of type Card, and a list of Players, each containing a Hand which is also a list of type Card, dealt randomly, round-robin from the Deck object." I could have input the data structure and logic myself in the amount of time it took to describe that.

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