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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#121
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download Cursor and try it through that, IMO that's currently the most polished experience especially since you can change models on the fly. For more advanced usecases, CLI is better but for getting your feet wet I think Cursor is the best choice.

Thanks. Too bad you need to switch editors to go that path. I assume the Cursor monthly plans are not the same as the Claude monthly plans and you can't use one for the other if you want to experiment...

Cursor is built on VSCode.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

When you walk into a store, you can see and touch all of these products. It's intuitive. With all this LLM cruft all you get is essentially the same old chat interface that's like the year 2000 called and wants its on-line chat websites back. The only thing other than a text box that you usually get is a model selector dropdown squirreled away in a corner somewhere. And that dropdown doesn't really explain the differ…

Claude.ai, ChatGPT, etc. are finished B2C products. They're black boxes, encapsulated experiences. Consumers don't want to pick a model, or know what model they're using; they just want to "talk to AI", and for the system to know which model is best to answer any given question. I would bet that for these companies, if their frontend observes you using the little model override button, that gets instrumented as an "oops" event in their metrics — something they aim to minimize.

What you're looking for, are the landing pages of the B2B API products underlying these B2C experiences. That would be https://www.anthropic.com/claude, https://openai.com/api/, etc. (In general, search "[AI company] API".)

From those B2B landing pages, you can usually click through to pages with details about each of their models.

Here's the model page corresponding to this news announcement, for example: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/opus

(Also, note how these B2B pages are on the AI companies' own corporate domains; whereas their B2C products have their own dedicated domains. From their perspective, their B2C offerings are essentially treated as separate companies that happen to consume their APIs — a "reference use-case" — rather than as a part of what the B2B company sells.)

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#123

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…

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.

I’m looking for cursor alternatives after confusing pricing changes. Is Claude code an option? Can be integrated on an editor/ide for similar results?

My use case so far is usually requesting mechanic work I would rather describe than write myself like certain test suites, and sometimes discovery on messy code bases.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#124

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

I also have this feeling that I'm 2-10x more productive. But isn't it curious how a lot of devs feel this way, but no devs that I know have the experience that any of their colleagues have become 2-10x more productive?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

In this case, they tried something and were told they were doing it wrong, and they know there's more than one way to do it wrong - wrong model, wrong tool using the model, wrong prompting, wrong task that you're trying to use it for. And of course you could be doing it right but the people saying it works great could themselves be wrong about how good it is. On top of that it costs both money and time/effort investm…

> I think it's pretty different from buying shoes.

Shoe shopping is pretty complex, more so than trialing an AI model in my opinion.

Are you a construction worker, a banker, a cashier or a driver? Are you walking 5 miles everyday or mostly sedentary? Do you require steel toed shoes? How long are you expecting them to last and what are you willing to pay? Are you going to wear them on long runs or take them river kayaking? Do they need to be water resistant, waterproof or highly breathable? Do you want glued, welted, or stitch down construction? What about flat feet or arch support? Does shoe weight matter? What clothing are you going to wear them with? Are you going to be dancing with them? Do the shoes need a break in period or are they ready to wear? Does the available style match your preferences? What about availability, are you ok having them made to order or do you require something in stock now?

By comparison I can try 10 different AI services without even needing to stand up for a break while I can't buy good dress shoes in the same physical store as a pair of football cleats.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#126
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

There's a sweet spot in terms of generalization. Yes, painstakingly writing out an object definition in English just so that the LLM can write it out in Java is a poor use of time. You want to give it more general tasks.

But not too general, because then it can get lost in the sauce and do something profoundly wrong.

IMO it's worth the effort to know these tools, because once you have a more intuitive sense for the right level of abstraction it really does help.

So not "make this very basic data structure for me based on my specs", and more like "rewrite this sequential logic into parallel batches", which might take some actual effort but also doesn't require the model to make too many decisions by itself.

It's also pretty good at tests, which tends to be very boilerplate-y, and by default that means you skip some cases, do a lot of brain-melting typing, or copy-and-paste liberally (and suffer the consequences when you missed that one search and replace). The model doesn't tire, and it's a simple enough task that the reliability is high. "Generate test cases for this object, making sure to cover edges cases A, B, and C" is a pretty good ROI in terms of your-time-spent vs. results.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#127

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…

> use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose.

Anthropic has this useful quick start guide: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/quickstart

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#128

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…

Kilo Code for VSCode is pretty solid. Give it a try.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#129

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…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#130

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…

Yes. You basically need an LLM to provide guidance on product selection in this brave new world.

It is actually one of my most useful use cases of this tech. Nice to have a way to ask in private so you don’t get snarky answers like: it’s just like buying shoes!

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