Claude Opus 4.6

Not sure which circles you run in but in mine HN has long lost its cache of "brilliant minds in IT". I've mostly stopped commenting here but am a bit of a message board addict so I haven't completely left.

My network largely thinks of HN as "a great link aggregator with a terrible comments section". Now obviously this is just my bubble but we include some fairy storied careers at both Big Tech and hip startups.

From my view the community here is just mean reverting to any other tech internet comments section.

He probably had a bigger context window

Dumb question. Can these benchmarks be trusted when the model performance tends to vary depending on the hours and load on OpenAI’s servers? How do I know I’m not getting a severe penalty for chatting at the wrong time. Or even, are the models best after launch then slowly eroded away at to more economical settings after the hype wears off?

It's too much energy to keep up with things that become obsolete and get replaced in matters of weeks/months. My current plan is to ignore all of this new information for a while, then whenever the race ends and some winning new workflow/technology will actually become the norm I'll spend the time needed to learn it. Are we moving to some new paradigm same way we did when we invented compilers? Amazing, let me know when we are there and I'll adapt to it.

I can run the comparison again, and also include OpenAI's new release (if the context is long enough), but, last time I did it, they weren't even in the same league.

When I last did it, 5.X thinking (can't remember which it was) had this terrible habit of code-switching between english and portuguese that made it sound like a robot (an agent to do things, rather than a human writing an essay), and it just didn't really "reason" effectively over the poems.

I can't explain it in any other way other than: "5.X thinking interprets this body of work in a way that is plausible, but I know, as the author, to be wrong; and I expect most people would also eventually find it to be wrong, as if it is being only very superficially looked at, or looked at by a high-schooler".

Gemini 3, at the time, was the worst of them, with some hallucinations, date mix ups (mixing poems from 2023 with poems from 2019), and overall just feeling quite lost and making very outlandish interpretations of the work. To be honest it sort of feels like Gemini hasn't been able to progress on this task since 2.5 pro (it has definitely improved on other things — I've recently switched to Gemini 3 on a product that was using 2.5 before)

Last time I did this test, Sonnet 4.5 was better than 5.X Thinking and Gemini 3 pro, but not exceedingly so. It's all so subjective, but the best I can say is it "felt like the analysis of the work I could agree with the most". I felt more seen and understood, if that makes sense (it is poetry, after all). Plus when I got each LLM to try to tell me everything it "knew" about me from the poems, Sonnet 4.5 got the most things right (though they were all very close).

Will bring back results soon.

Edit:

I (re-)tested:

- Gemini 3 (Pro)

- Gemini 3 (Flash)

- GPT 5.2

- Sonnet 4.5

Having seen Opus 4.5, they all seem very similar, and I can't really distinguish them in terms of depth and accuracy of analysis. They obviously have differences, especially stylistic ones, but, when compared with Opus 4.5 they're all on the same ballpark.

These models produce rather superficial analyses (when compared with Opus 4.5), missing out on several key things that Opus 4.5 got, such as specific and recurring neologisms and expressions, accurate connections to authors that serve as inspiration (Claude 4.5 gets them right, the other models get _close_, but not quite), and the meaning of some specific symbols in my poetry (Opus 4.5 identifies the symbols and the meaning; the other models identify most of the symbols, but fail to grasp the meaning sometimes).

Most of what these models say is true, but it really feels incomplete. Like half-truths or only a surface-level inquiry into truth.

As another example, Opus 4.5 identifies 7 distinct poetic phases, whereas Gemini 3 (Pro) identifies 4 which are technically correct, but miss out on key form and content transitions. When I look back, I personally agree with the 7 (maybe 6), but definitely not 4.

These models also clearly get some facts mixed up which Opus 4.5 did not (such as inferred timelines for some personal events). After having posted my comment to HN, I've been engaging with Opus4.5 and have managed to get it to also slip up on some dates, but not nearly as much as other models.

The other models also seem to produce shorter analyses, with a tendency to hyperfocus on some specific aspects of my poetry, missing a bunch of them.

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To be fair, all of these models produce very good analyses which would take someone a lot of patience and probably weeks or months of work (which of course will never happen, it's a thought experiment).

It is entirely possible that the extremely simple prompt I used is just better with Claude Opus 4.5/4.6. But I will note that I have used very long and detailed prompts in the past with the other models and they've never really given me this level of....fidelity...about how I view my own work.