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Claude Opus 4.1

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Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#231

Post by Aeolun »

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…

In every price comparison I make. Claude (API) always comes out cheapest if you manage to keep most of your context cached. 90% price reduction for input is crazy.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#232

Post by Aeolun »

jzig wrote: 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?

My opinion of Opus is that it takes the correct action 19/20 times, where Sonnet takes the correct action 18/20 times. It’s not strictly necessary to use Opus, but if you have the subscription already it’s just a pure win.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#233

Post by [deleted] »

AstroBen wrote: post #136
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

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…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#234

Post by MarcelOlsz »

tgtweak wrote: post #160
generalizations wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use Claude Code with a subscription and run `ccusage` [0] you can get an idea of your "true usage" and cost.

[0] https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#235

Post by Aeolun »

furyofantares wrote: post #115
Bolwin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's insane. Are you accounting for caching? If not, there's no way this is going to last

I'm using ccusage to get the number, I think it just looks at your history and calculates based on tokens vs API pricing. So I think it wouldn't account for caching. But I totally agree there's no way it lasts. I'm mostly only using this for side projects and I'm sitting there interacting with it, not YOLO'ing, I do sometimes have two sessions going at the same time but I'm not firing off swarms or anything crazy. Ju…

Claude Code definitely reports cached tokens, and I think CCusage does too, so it wouldn’t make sense for the calculation to be based on full pricing when they have the cached values.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#236

Post by Aeolun »

biinjo wrote: post #35
jzig wrote: 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?

Im on the Max plan and generally Opus seems to do better work than Sonnet. However, that’s only when they allow me to use Opus. The usage limits, even on the max plan, are a joke. Yesterday I hit the limits within MINUTES of starting my work day.

Is this on x5? Because ever since they booted all the freeloaders I’ve not once seen the “you are approaching usage limits” message. Anyway, the “you are approaching usage limits” message shows up when you are over 50% of your tokens for that timeframe, so it’s not sure useful.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#237

Post by Aeolun »

taormina wrote: post #48

Alright, well, Opus 4.1 seems exactly as useless as Opus 4 was, but it's probably eating my tokens faster. Wish they let you tell somehow. At least Sonnet 4 is still usable, but I'll be honest, it's been producing worse and worse slob all day. I've basically wasted the morning on Claude Code when I should've just been doing it all myself.

I feel like this is just related to my projects getting bigger. Claude Code is trying to keep up with my project evolving from 2k lines of code to 100k lines. Of course it’s going to feel worse.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#238

Post by Larrikin »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #228
jstummbillig wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In Zed I switch the AI panel to ask mode and chat with the agent about different approaches and have it draft patches. Then when I think there's a design worth trying, switch to Write mode and have it implement that change + run the tests and diagnostics to verify the code at least compiles, tests pass and follows our style guides. Finally a line by line review + review of the test coverage (in terms of interface sur…

After watching a few videos trying to understand how people were using LLMs and getting useful results I found that even making a simpler version of the fancy planning mode in the LLM IDEs via the instructions.md produced hugely better productivity gains.

I started adding an instruction file along the lines of "Always tell me your plan to solve the issue first with short example code, never edit files without explicit confirmation of your plan" at the start and it is like a day and night difference in how useful it becomes. It also starts to feel like programming again where you can read through various files and instead of thinking in your head, you write out your thoughts. You end up getting confirmation or push back on errors that you can clean up.

Reading through a sort of wrong sort of right implementation spread across various files after every prompt just really sucked.

I'm not one shotting massive amounts of files, but I am enjoying the lack of grunt work.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#239

Post by wahnfrieden »

kelnos wrote: post #203
wahnfrieden wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wouldn't be too prescriptive. I have Pro, and it's fine. I'm not an incredibly heavy user (yet?); I've hit the rate limits a couple times, but not to the point where I'm motivated to spend more. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard from people that Opus can be slow when using it for coding tasks. I've only been using Sonnet, and it's performed well enough for my purposes.

Opus is slow, so sessions should be used in parallel, likely across work trees. You shouldn't sit and wait on an Opus agent.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#240

Post by UncleEntity »

taormina wrote: post #48

Alright, well, Opus 4.1 seems exactly as useless as Opus 4 was, but it's probably eating my tokens faster. Wish they let you tell somehow. At least Sonnet 4 is still usable, but I'll be honest, it's been producing worse and worse slob all day. I've basically wasted the morning on Claude Code when I should've just been doing it all myself.

Other than it starting out trying to produce a full and complete web app (or whatever) for my daily yak shaving session instead of the normal "let's talk about and work through this thing" the new Opus 4.1 seems to 'get it' a lot quicker than the old daffy robot did. It asked pertinent questions to understand the system we are working on and accomplished the goal of updating the design document so I don't have to keep explaining details at the start of every chat session. Something, by the way, it always previously failed to do causing me to have to explain stuff each and every time before forward progress could be made.

I do agree it did hit the token limit a lot quicker than before where I could chat for hours without worrying about it.

Either way, still have one last yak to shave for this project so we'll see how efficient it is with that. If it accomplishes the task before burning through all the tokens then win, win, I suppose.

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