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Claude Sonnet 5

anthropic.com

651–660 of 822 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#651

In our coding evaluations, we found Sonnet 5 is more capable than Sonnet 4.6 (which was an underrated model itself), but is now faster and slightly cheaper. Sonnet 5's performance is comparable to GLM 5.2 in both one-shot coding and agentic ability. However, it's about ~20% less verbose than GLM 5.2 in average code submission sizes, and uses fewer reasoning tokens, which reduces the cost gap and suggests it writes cl…

Artificial analysis shows Sonnet 5 as ~2 times more verbose than GLM 5.2. I wouldn't call Sonnet 4.6 underrated, it's in "chinese open source model territory" and unless you rely only on subscriptions it has alternatives.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has also been telling bald-faced lies about open source/open weights models that are easily disproved. For example, he claimed that they lack the collaborative benefits of open source because "we can't see inside the model". Open weights models are responsible for enabling reams of research on interpretability methods that do just that. And they have facilitated so much collaboration on architecture, inference opt…

Doesn’t this seem true / self-evident: “His warns that once powerful models are released openly, companies lose the ability to monitor misuse, revoke access, or update safety guardrails.”

Either

1) the company has device-level control to the degree that they can not only restrict which API endpoints people can connect to but which accounts they use to do so (in which case this already isn't an issue); or

2) they don't, and all bets are off anyway, open weights or not.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

The skilled seniors better stop downplaying what actually led them to be skilled in the first place, and realize that the conditions to develop that skill has been gone and almost deemed unproductive in today's workplace. Not disagreeing that LLM's are a force multiplier, but I highly doubt whatever value will end up finding multiplying in the next generation of seniors, at this rate. It's surreal to me that I have t…

This is something for educators to deal with, not a 50+ senior IC, but yes your point is extremely important.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#655
I appreciate they added thinking. Sonnet used to think in the actual response, leading to a lot of unnecessary burden for me. "This thing is X, no wait, it's actually Y. Therefore..." - now it's hidden in the thinking trail, so I don't have to read it unless I want to.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#656
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a health problem that puts an end date on your effort must tint your business choices in a unique and interesting way. I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

We all have a health problem that puts an end date on our efforts.

Not if Bryan Johnson can help it!

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

I think I might have written a comment similar to yours maybe 6 months or a year ago. I'm not quite sure to respond to these sorts of replies. I have used LLMs/Claude Code quite extensively professionally and was a very early adopter, have built tooling around LLM/agentic development, and genuinely embraced it. They aren't useless, but the short term gains you think you're getting come at a very steep price that you…

It’s hard to know if your experience is relevant from 6 months to year ago. The models are getting better every couple of months. My current experience is mostly like the other senior above. For me the last 4 months I’ve gone from mostly writing code by hand to writing almost no code by hand. I guide the LLM and it’s a force multiplier. I review its code and discuss with it how to test and what needs changing and it does it. I point out things it didn’t handle and it handles them.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

The skilled seniors better stop downplaying what actually led them to be skilled in the first place, and realize that the conditions to develop that skill has been gone and almost deemed unproductive in today's workplace. Not disagreeing that LLM's are a force multiplier, but I highly doubt whatever value will end up finding multiplying in the next generation of seniors, at this rate. It's surreal to me that I have t…

i would rephrase "Force multiplier" as "Force power up".

If your "force" is above 1 then its ok to have AI power up your force. 2.3 to the power of 3 is 12.169.

But if you're a beginner and your "force" is bellow 1 so power upping this makes it worse. 0.2 to power of 3 is 0.008

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...badly architected, often redundant, feature-bloated code which always looks good, even upon earnest review, but actually sucks and becomes extremely difficult to maintain in ways which are not obvious in code review. I can only judge from my own experience but with or without LLMs, these are the codebases that I have worked with during most of my career. To me, much of the question is whether LLMs produce worse…

LLMs can produce bad code in ways no human ever would. I remember working on headscratcher problem of walking a tree while gradually building up state, and since LLMs are supposed to be good at algorithms, I asked Claude. It came up with a correct LC-hard tier solution that involved dynamic programming, and was essentially an unreadable dense mess that was impossible to reason through as a human. It worked, but it wa…

I’ e written bad code and I’ve reviewed bad code by other humans. In both of those cases the code gets re-written. In the first the reviewer tells me the code is hard to understand, can it please refactor. In the 2nd I tell the person I’m reviewing the same thing, maybe with some suggestions.

I do the same with the LLM. I tell it that solution is convoluted and hard to understand, if I have a concrete suggestion I suggest one, otherwise I ask it for ideas. We get there just like I do with humans

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. So I'm just not going to use their services at all anymore. I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior, and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. I'll be okay without their bullshit generator.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

We've just done an official evaluation at work, using extensive statistics on our gigantic monorepo in a company with ~2000 devs over the course of 2 years, everyone from hardware engineers to regular old frontend engineers. It's a highly profitable and mature public company, and has been for going on a decade at this point without missing a beat. We were given infinite access & budgets to basically any and all AI tooling we could imagine, and we have several "AI Native" teams (whatever the fuck that even means). We're doing agentic coding, we have harnesses of all kind, skills, we have many teams doing spec-driven development, designers using all the various things like Figma Make and access to tools like Devin/Factory Droid/Claude Code/Codex/etc.

This is all to say, we as a company are using AI a lot in all possible corners, but thankfully our leadership isn't schizophrenic and isn't mandating everyone hit token limits or whatever, it's more of a "Let's see what works and what doesn't" type of thing, and we measure a lot of statistics. Nobody here really cares whether LLMs are the next coming of Christ or not, as a company there are many people (even in SLT) that are indifferent to LLMs, and many who are reasonably hyped.

I wish I could link to the actual document we were all shown since it has a beautiful breakdown of the methodology and a fine-grained breakdown of the stats and the categories measured, but in the grand scheme of things, ALL the AI tooling we have implemented (at least on the engineering side of the equation) has contributed to a total of... drum roll please... 7 (seven) Percent overall productivity increase! The most productive teams saw a productivity increase of around 20%, while some teams actually saw drops in productivity into the negative percentage points. My team, none of us really give a shit about AI and we're somewhere in the 3-5% range on certain categories of tasks, which I'd say is a fairly good assessment.

Productivity here is measured in many ways, including but not limited to speed of MR review and merge times, feature/ticket/roadmap closure/delivery, rollback/revert incidence rate, how often people interact with the MR review bots and implement their suggestions/fixes, how many times people check back on AI transcriptions/meeting notes (hint: Nobody looks back on any of it, it's all just noise that gets generated and never actually referenced outside a few extremely rare cases) and many more things I'm forgetting. It is an imperfect number of course, because measuring productivity in engineering is a sisyphean task, but in my opinion it is accurate to the reality on the ground and outside of all the hype and marketing bullshit.

So, I remain thoroughly unconvinced of these personal anecdotes of people being "massively" more productive, especially once you factor in the fact that we now have a 2000EUR budget/month/dev for all the AI tooling, those productivity numbers start looking pathetic once you factor in the costs (which are only increasing as the AI companies need to start recouping the gazillions they've burned). Some teams have started begging to disable coderabbit and other similar tools in their MRs because they're producing nothing but walls of noise that makes reviewing any MR a nightmare of sludging through endless slop of useless bullshit, ours included.

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