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Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

tokens.billchambers.me

201–210 of 620 posts

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#201
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much atrophy as apathy. I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance. It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?

We've had such developers around, long before LLMs.

They're so much louder now, though.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

qwen3.5/3.6 (30B) works well,locally, with opencode

Mind you, a 30B model (3B active) is not going to be comparable to Opus. There are open models that are near-SOTA but they are ~750B-1T total params. That's going to require substantial infrastructure if you want to use them agentically, scaled up even further if you expect quick real-time response for at least some fraction of that work. (Your only hope of getting reasonable utilization out of local hardware in sing…

What near SOTA open models are you referring to?

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was worried about skill atrophy. I recently started a new job, and from day 1 I've been using Claude. 90+% of the code I've written has been with Claude. One of the earlier tickets I was given was to update the documentation for one of our pipelines. I used Claude entirely, starting with having it generate a very long and thorough document, then opening up new contexts and getting it to fact check until it stopped…

Are you sure you would know if it didn't work? I use Claude extensively myself, so I'm not saying this from a "hater" angle, but I had 2 people last week who believe themselves to be in your shoes send me pull requests which made absolutely no sense in the context of the codebase.

That’s always been the case, AI or not.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#204
I spent one day with Opus 4.7 to fix a bug. It just ran in circles despite having the problem "in front of its eyes" with all supporting data, thorough description of the system, test harness that reproduces the bug etc. While I still believe 4.7 is much "smarter" than GPT-5.4 I decided to give it ago. It was giving me dumb answers and going off the rails. After accusing it many times of being a fraud and doing it on purpose so that I spend more money, it fixed the bug in one shot.

Having a taste of unnerfed Opus 4.6 I think that they have a conflict of interest - if they let models give the right answer first time, person will spend less time with it, spend less money, but if they make model artificially dumber (progressive reasoning if you will), people get frustrated but will spend more money.

It is likely happening because economics doesn't work. Running comparable model at comparable speed for an individual is prohibitively expensive. Now scale that to millions of users - something gotta give.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#205
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we don't want a hard dependency on another multi-billion dollar company just to write software One of two main reasons why I'm wary of LLMs. The other is fear of skill atrophy. These two problems compound. Skill atrophy is less bad if the replacement for the previous skill does not depend on a potentially less-than-friendly party.

Not so much atrophy as apathy. I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance. It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?

Is this the same subset of people who copy/paste code directly from stack overflow without understanding ? I’m not sure this is a new problem.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#206

Brutal. I've been noticing that 4.7 eats my Max Subscription like crazy even when I do my best to juggle tasks (or tell 4.7 to use subagents with) Sonnet 4.6 Medium and Haiku. Would love to know if anybody's found ideal token-saving approaches.

I haven't seen a noticeable difference BUT I've been always using the context mode plugin.

What plugin is this?

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m impressed with anyone who can read English right to left.

You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

Whoa! TIL! I struggled a bit to read this style at first, but felt it get easier after a few tries.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#208
One thing I don't see often mentioned - OpenAI API's auto token caching approach results in MASSIVE cost savings on agent stuff. Anthropic's deliberate caching is a pain in comparison. Wish they'd just keep the KV cache hot for 60 seconds or so, so we don't have to pay the input costs over and over again, for every growing conversation turn.

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am learning at an incredible rate with LLMs. I don't believe it. Having something else do the work for you is not learning, no matter how much you tell yourself it is.

If you've seen further it's only because you've stood on the shoulders of giants. Having other people do work for you is how people get to focus on things they actually care about. Do you use a compiler you didn't write yourself? If so can you really say you've ever learned anything about computers?

You have to build a computer to learn about computers!

Re: Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

#210
post #46

We dropped Claude. It's pretty clear this is a race to the bottom, and we don't want a hard dependency on another multi-billion dollar company just to write software We'll be keeping an eye on open models (of which we already make good use of). I think that's the way forward. Actually it would be great if everybody would put more focus on open models, perhaps we can come up with something like the "linux/postgres/git…

Is that why they are racing to release so many products? It feels to me like they want to suck up the profits from every software vertical.

Yeah it seems so. Anthropic has entered the enshittification phase. They got people hooked onto their SOTAs so it's now time to keep releasing marginal performance increase models at 40% higher token price. The problem is that both Anthropic and OpenAI have no other income other than AI. Can't Google just drown them out with cheaper prices over the long run? It seems like an attrition battle to me.
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