Robert Ta and Jonathan discuss how Anthropic's Opus 5.5 fixes what went wrong with Opus 5. It matches Fable 5.1's performance, costs 40% less, handles loops better, and makes Claude Code usable for full-stack development again.
All right, so Opus 5.5 is out and Anthropic says it's at Fable 5.1 levels on most work, 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5. Opus 5 was kind of terrible. And this tweet came out from Nat Michaelesi, I think. Opus 5.5 is way better than Opus 5. Sorry about that model. Please try this one. 1 million views, a bunch of retweets, 11,000 likes. This person here, extremely impressive after the upset of Opus 5, might have to try running it again daily. Gotta admit, you guys cooked. We'll test out a plan for you, Nat. That's cruel towards Opus 5. Models are not disposable. At least Opus 5 spoke up. I can't tell if this person's serious. I cannot believe that person's being serious. And Nat is a researcher from Anthropic AI, was previously at OpenAI and DeepMind. So, you know, a heavy hitter over there apologizes. For the atrocity that is Opus 5. We've shat on Opus 5 enough on this podcast. We don't need to shit on it more. Look at our old content for that. In the past month, we have extensively tried it and found it wanting. And Jonathan, I guess before I turn it to you, before launch, users really complained about Opus 5. We complained too that it was verbose. It was very low agency. It would forget it could do things. I have to remind it like, hey dude, you could do this. You have an API key right there. You could do this thing.
Yeah.
You've done it before. It had slow first replies at like max effort. And then the review fixed loops and goal loops I was getting out of it wasn't as performant in real-world cases working on full-stack backend and frontend code as compared to other models, including those from ChatGPT. Jonathan, what's your take on Opus 5.5 and how did Anthropic handle this release as compared to the Opus 5 release?
Yeah, I guess I just reflect what everybody else is kind of saying and feeling. I'd stopped using Claude for a lot of stuff. Just my fable tokens were the only ones I was really using, and I feel like it's back. It's back in a big way. And remember, like, Opus 5.5 was released on the same day as GPT-6 Sol, and they're both very good models. It's like one of the first times I can remember both companies released a great model update on the same day. And I think that the Opus 5.5 is just like more fun, more impressive, more capable even than the ChatGPT-6 Sol, which is also a good model. It made me so much happier, man. I don't know about you, but like, I was just like, uh, you know, I could finally just use Cloud Code again and get work done and not like, you know, and it felt like the magic of Opus 4.6 back but better. And I think that was like, you know, almost a universal experience amongst developers that are using it. So good.
So Cloud Code, Cloud Code's made it back to your daily driver for some activities or?
Yeah, I can rely on it for more tasks. You know, one habit I've gotten into is that if I have a Codex session, I can just say like, hey, Opus 5.5, take that Codex session and then continue it and finish it off or something like that. So use the existing Codex session as context. I had almost all my sessions over at Codex, then I just could easily move them back, you know, just by having Opus 5.5 read the files on my hard drive and like, you know, continue them. And I was really impressed with what it got done. So, and I think like I just want to play with it more and do more stuff. And I think it's both getting work done and then there's some of the new stuff you see, like people making videos And its ability to like use new visuals is something that I want to play with more. So I was really— and I think the feeling of the relationship with Anthropic that we all have, right, is like, okay, who are these guys and why did they give us such a shitty model? Do they really know what they're doing? Can they be consistent? This is a big trust bridge that they just threw out. Yeah. And I know I'm not the only one feeling that. So yeah.
I shat on Opus 5 a lot. I think deservedly so. I think they needed the feedback to be like, guys, this is a developer tool. Like we developers, we Us builders, we need to build production-level applications with it.
