Live data from Hacker News

Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

251–260 of 344 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#251

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.

Yes, it’s much better.

It uses way less tokens or much more effectively when running locally.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#252

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…

Large models are for querying the model Small models are for querying the context Opus is cheap if you use it for its niche

> Large models are for querying the model

> Small models are for querying the context

I respectfully disagree.

My experience is that large models are capable of understanding large contexts much better. Of course they are more expensive and slower, too. But in terms of accuracy, large models are always better at querying the context.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#253
post #237

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.

My project is basically the same size as when I started using it.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#254

Claude lost me after I used it for a day. Their pricing model is bonkers. There is no way any developer in their right mind would go with Claude.

Their API pricing is bonkers, their subscription is a great deal for what you get

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#255

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…

Lets see: We have GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise Server, and a GitHub API. Then there's the command line and a desktop version, and one that is just browser based I guess. Then you have different pricing plans, Free, Team, and Enterprise? How is Enterprise different than GitHub Enterprise Server? It's very easy to find evidence to confirm our bias.

Claude code is actually one of the most straightforward products I've used as far as onboarding goes. You download the tool, and follow the instructions. You can use one of the 3 plans, and everything else is automatic. You can figure out token usage and what models and versions to use and how to use MCP servers and all of that -- there's a lot of power -- but you don't need to do ANY of that to get started trying it out.

You're not being:

> That critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes

You're being:

> That critic who is trying to confirm their biases

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#256
post #208

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 there a way to sign up for Claude code that doesn't involve verifying a phone number with Anthropic? They don't even accept Google Voice numbers. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm not handing out my phone number to sign up for random SaaS tools.

It's maybe the leading subscription based tool in our field, not a random SaaS tool.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#257
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?

Every time that Sonnet is acting like it has brain damage (which is once or twice a day), I switch to Opus and it seems to sort things out pretty fast. This is unscientific anicdata though, and it could just be that switching models (any model) would have worked.

switching models great best practice whether get stuck or not

can look at primal check the mean or dual get out of local minima

in all cases, model, tokenizer, etc is just enough different that will generally pay off in spaces quickly

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#258
post #231

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.

Cached prices: $.31 for Gemini Pro / Mtok, $1.50 for claude opus 4.1 / Mtok

There's additional storage costs with google caching, around $3.75 for 5 minutes/Mtok, and Claude Opus is $3.75 for 5minute Cache Writes / Mtok.

For cached reads Gemini Pro is 5X cheaper than Opus and like $0.01 more than Sonnet.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#260

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.

> Get a subscription and use claude code

I find the token/credit restrictions on Opus to be near useless even when using Claude Code. I only ever switch to it so get another model's take on the issue. Five minutes of use and I have hit the limit.

Post reply on HN