Claude Sonnet 4.5

> I worry everyone is chasing benchmarks to the detriment of general performance.

I’m not sure this is entirely what you’re driving at, but the example I always think of in my head is “I want an AI agent that will scan through my 20 to 30,000 photos, remove all the duplicates, then organize them all in some coherent fashion.” that’s the kind of service I need right now, and it feels like something AI should be able to do, yet I have not encountered anything that remotely accomplishes this task. I’m still using Dupe Guru and depending on the ref system to not scatter my stuff all over further.

Sidebar, if anybody has any recommendations for this, I would love to hear them lol

Sonnet is just so expensive comparing to other competitors. Have they fixed this?

I think what you are saying is true for CLI-only development using Swift. It is possible, but LLMs often get the commands wrong or don't realize how to accomplish something. There have been a number of times when claude/codex has told me I have to edit a plist manually in XCode before progress can continue.

Definitely an overall positive with the negatives actually being kind of hilarious and no big deal which I'll also discuss.

I can only list my open source outputs concretely for obvious reasons but https://github.com/rubberduckmaths/reddit_terraforming_mars_... was a near one shot. It's a Reddit bot that posts card text to the Terraforming Mars subreddit when asked which is helpful for context on discussions of that board game. Appreciated and used a lot by the community there. There's a similar project i used AI for to scrape card text that was also near one shot. I'd say for these two hobby projects 50x productivity is a reasonable statement. I wrote Reddit bots ~10 years ago without coding assistance - https://github.com/AReallyGoodName/xwingminibot i get to reasonably absolutely compare two very similar projects. I think it's totally fair for me to say 50x for this example. The Reddit API even changed completely in that time so no one can really say "you used past experience to move faster, it's not the ai giving a 50x boost" but I really didn't. My memory is not that good except for memory of an entire weekend previously vs As for the negatives they are never serious. A couple of good examples;

"Please correct all lint errors in this project" only to have @lintignore added to all files. Lol! Obviously i just more clearly specified the prompt and it's not like it's hard to catch these things and not ship to prod. It was funny to everyone i showed and no big deal.

Another similar case, "please make the logging of this file less verbose especially around the tight loop on line X". Instead of changing log level or removing some of the log statements the ai redirected stdout at the initialization of the command line program (would completely break it of course). Again hilarious but also not big deal. Not even much of a waste of time since you just change the prompt and run again and honestly a few silly diversions like this now and then is kind of fun. As in the comments of "OMG AI sometimes gets it wrong" aren't at all serious. I have version control, i review code. No big deal.

I too eye roll massively at some of the criticisms at this point. It's like people are stretching to claim everyone who's using a coding assistant is newb who's throwing everything into prod and deleting databases etc. That's just not reality.

Pricing is the same as sonnet 4