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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#151

Post by potatolicious »

ryandrake wrote: post #131
potatolicious wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this seems like a take that reeks a bit of "everyone is stupid except me". I do know the answer to OP's question but that's because I pickle my brain in this stuff. It is legitimately confusing. The analogy to different SKUs strikes me also inaccurate. This isn't the difference between shoes, shirts, and shorts - it's more as if a company sells three t-shirts but you can't really tell what's different about them.…

> It's Claude, Claude, and Claude. Which ones code for you? Thanks for articulating the confusion better than I could! I feel it's a similar branding problem as other tech companies have: I'm watching Apple TV+ on my Apple TV software running on my Apple TV connected to my Google TV that isn't actually manufactured by Google. But that Google TV also has an Apple TV app that can play Apple TV+.

It's a bit worse than a branding problem honestly, since there's legitimate overlap between products, because ultimately they're different expressions of the same underlying LLMs.

I'm not sure if you ever got a good rundown, but the tl;dr is that the 3 products ("Desktop", Code, and API) all expose the same underlying models, but are given different prompts, tools, and context management techniques that make them behave fairly differently and affect how you interact with them.

- The API is the bare model itself. It has some coding ability because that's inherent to the model - you can ask it to generate code and copy and paste it for example. You normally wouldn't use this except that if you're using some Copilot-type IDE integration where the IDE is doing the work of talking to the model for you and integrating it into your developer experience. In that case you provide API key and the IDE does the heavy lifting.

- The desktop app is actually a half-decent coder. It's capable of producing specific artifacts, distinguishing between multiple "files" it's writing for you, and revisiting previously-written code. "Oh, actually rewrite this in Go." is for example a thing it can totally do. I find it useful for diagnosing issues interactively.

- "Claude Code" is a CLI-only wrapper around the model. Think of it like Anthropic's first-party IDE integration, except there's not an IDE, just the CLI. In this case the integration gives the tool broad powers to actually navigate your filesystem, read specific files, write to specific files, run shell commands like builds and tests, etc. These are all functions that an IDE integration would also give you, but this is done in a Claude-y way.

My personal take is: try Claude Code, since as long as you're halfway comfortable with a CLI it's pretty usable. If you really want a direct IDE integration you can go with the IDE+API key route, though keep in mind that you might end up paying more (Claude Code is all-you-can-eat-with-rate-limits, where API keys will... just keep going).

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#152

Post by wahnfrieden »

Filligree wrote: post #69
ryandrake wrote: post #60

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…

You need Claude Pro or Max. The website subscription also allows you to use the command line tool—the rate limits are shared—and the command line tool includes IDE integration, at least for VSCode. Claude Code is currently best-in-class, so no point in starting elsewhere, but you do need to read the documentation.

Correct. Claude Code Max with Opus. Don’t even bother with Sonnet.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#153

Post by AstroBen »

samtp wrote: post #144
AstroBen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only 10x? I'm at least 100x as productive. I only type at a measly 100wpm, whereas Claude can output 100+ tokens a second I'm outputting a PR every 6 minutes. The reviewers are using Claude to review everything. It used to take a day to add 100 lines to the codebase.. now I can add 100 lines in one prompt If I want even more productivity (at risk of making the rest of my team look slow) I can tell Claude to output do…

So no human reads the actual code that you push to production? Are you not worried about security risks, spaghetti code, and other issues? Or does Claude magically make all of those concerns go away?

forgot the /s

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#154

Post by generalizations »

djha-skin wrote: post #150

Opus 4(.1) is so expensive[1]. Even Sonnet[2] costs me $5 per hour (basically) using OpenRouter + Codename Goose[3]. The crazy thing is Sonnet 3.5 costs the same thing [4] right now. Gemini Flash is more reasonable[5], but always seems to make the wrong decisions in the end, spinning in circles. OpenAI is better, but still falls short of Claude's performance. Claude also gives back 400's from its API if you CTRL-C in…

Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#155

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

haaz wrote: 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

I will only add that it's interesting that in the results graphic, they simply highlighted Opus 4.1 - choosing not to display which models have the best scores - as Opus 4.1 only scored the best on about half of the benchmarks - and was worse than Opus 4.0 on at least one measure.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#156

Post by samtp »

AstroBen wrote: post #153
samtp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So no human reads the actual code that you push to production? Are you not worried about security risks, spaghetti code, and other issues? Or does Claude magically make all of those concerns go away?

forgot the /s

Sorry lol, sometimes difficult to separate the hype boys from actual sarcasm these days

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#157

Post by globalise83 »

zamadatix wrote: post #76
phonon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus 4 came out 10 weeks ago. So this is basically one new training run improvement.

And in 52 weeks we've gone 3.5->4.1 with this training improvement, meanwhile the 52 weeks prior to that were Claude -> Claude 3. The absolute jumps per version delta also used to be larger. I.e. it seems we don't get much more than new training run levels of improvement anymore. Which is better than nothing, but a shame compared to the early scaling.

Is it really a bigger jump to go from plausible to frequently useful, than from frequently useful to indispensable?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#158

Post by ryandrake »

potatolicious wrote: post #151
ryandrake wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's Claude, Claude, and Claude. Which ones code for you? Thanks for articulating the confusion better than I could! I feel it's a similar branding problem as other tech companies have: I'm watching Apple TV+ on my Apple TV software running on my Apple TV connected to my Google TV that isn't actually manufactured by Google. But that Google TV also has an Apple TV app that can play Apple TV+.

It's a bit worse than a branding problem honestly, since there's legitimate overlap between products, because ultimately they're different expressions of the same underlying LLMs. I'm not sure if you ever got a good rundown, but the tl;dr is that the 3 products ("Desktop", Code, and API) all expose the same underlying models, but are given different prompts, tools, and context management techniques that make them beh…

Wow. After 50 replies to what I thought wasn't such a weird question, your rundown is the most enlightening. Thank you very much.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#159

Post by mwigdahl »

steinvakt2 wrote: post #124
OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #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

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?

Our automated test folks were chronically behind, struggling to keep up with feature development. I got the two assigned to the team that was the most behind set up with Claude Code. Six weeks later they are fully caught up, expanding coverage, and integrating AI code review into our build pipeline.

It's not 10x, but those guys do seem like they've hit somewhere around 2x improvement overall.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#160

Post by tgtweak »

generalizations wrote: post #154
djha-skin wrote: post #150

Opus 4(.1) is so expensive[1]. Even Sonnet[2] costs me $5 per hour (basically) using OpenRouter + Codename Goose[3]. The crazy thing is Sonnet 3.5 costs the same thing [4] right now. Gemini Flash is more reasonable[5], but always seems to make the wrong decisions in the end, spinning in circles. OpenAI is better, but still falls short of Claude's performance. Claude also gives back 400's from its API if you CTRL-C in…

Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.

Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits?

Same context length and throughput limits?

Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.

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