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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

191–200 of 344 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#191

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

> What incentives are they trying to create?

One obvious explanation is that pricing is strongly related to the price to them, and that their only incentive is for people to use an expensive model of they really need it.

I forget which one of the GPT models was better, faster, and cheaper than the previous model. The incentive there is obviously, "If you want to use the old model for whatever reason, fine, but we really want you to use the new one because costs us less to run."

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Nike shoe is best for basketball? The Nike Dunk, Air Force 1, Air Jordan, LeBron 20, LeBron XXI Prime 93, Kobe IX elite, Giannis Freak 7, GT Cut, GT Cut 3, GT Cut 3 Turbo, GT Hustle 3, or the KD18? At least with those you can buy whatever you think is coolest. Which Claude model and interface should the average programmer use?

What's the average programmer? Is it someone who likes CLI tools? Or who likes IDE integration? Different strokes for different folks and surely the average programmer understands what environment they will be most comfortable in.

> Different strokes for different folks and surely the average programmer understands what environment they will be most comfortable in.

That's a silly claim to me, we're talking about a completely new environment where you prompt an AI to develop code, and therefore an "average programmer" is unlikely to have any meaningful experience or intuition with this flow. That is exactly what GP is talking about - where does he plug in the AI? What tradeoffs are there to different options?

The other day I had someone judge me for asking this question by dismissively saying "dont say youve still been using ChatGPT and copy/paste", which made me laugh - I don't use AI at all, so who was he looking down on?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#193

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…

Github Copilot and Claude code are not exactly competitors. Github Copilot is autocomplete, highly useful if you use VS Code, but if you are using e.g. Jetbrains then you have other options. Copilot comes with a bunch of other stuff that I rarely use. Claude code is project-wide editing, from the CLI. They complement each other well. As far as I'm concerned the utility of the AI-focused editors has been diminished by…

Opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode provides a CC like interface for copilot. It's a slightly worse tool, but since copilot with Claude 4 is super cheap, I ended up preferring it over CC. Almost no limits, cheaper, you can use all the Copilot models, GH is not training on your data.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#195

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

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…

Not sure if joking...?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why is there supposed to be no step between frequently useful and indispensable? Quickly going from nothing to frequently useful (which involved many rapid hops between) was certainly surprising, and that's precisely the lost momentum.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#197
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt Opus is technically superior, but it's not practically superior for me. It's still pretty much impossible to have any LLM one-shot a complex implementation. There's just too many details to figure out and too much to explain for it to get correct. Often, there's uncertainty and ambiguity that I only understand the correct answer (or rather less bad answer) after I've spent time deep in the code. Having…

I've been having a great time with Windsurf's "Planning" feature. Have a nice discussion with Cascade (Claude) all about what it is that neerds to happen - sometimes a very long conversation including test code. Then when everything is very clear, make it happen. Then test and debug the results with all that context. Pretty nice.

Can you explain what you do exactly? Do you enable plan mode and use with chat...?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#198

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…

Not sure if joking...?

This is only the beginning. I can see myself having 100 Claude tasks running concurrently - the only problem is edits clash between files. I'm working on having Claude solve this by giving each instance its own repo to work with, then I ask the final Claude to mash it all together as best it can

What's 100x productivity multiplied by 100 instances of Claude? 10,000x productivity

Now to be fair and a bit more realistic it's not actually 10000x because it takes longer to push the PR because the file sizes are so big. Let's call it 9800x. That's still a sizable improvement

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#199
post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

That’s very strange. Sonnet is hot garbage and Opus is a miracle, for me. I also don’t see anyone praising sonnet anywhere.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#200

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…

Cursor + Claude 4 = best quality + UX balance. Pay up for 20/month subscription.

Cursor imports in your VSCode setup. Setting it up should be trivial.

Use Agent mode. Use it in a preexisting repo.

You're off the races.

There is a lot more you can do, but you should start seeing value at this point.

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