I left Claude for months. Opus 5.5 is why I'm back

Claire Vo (0:00)

I haven't said this out loud much, but I will tell you all this. I have been off Claude for months. Yes, I loved Fable when it came out. It was a real step change in intelligence. Then they took it away. Then we got Opus 5, and I'm going to be honest, I stopped using Claude not because of its intelligence or its models. I stopped using Claude because it was annoying, annoying. As I said in another episode, Claude Slopp was Sloppin. I found using Claude, whether I was using Fable or Opus or even Sonnet, so frustrating. My blood would boil because Claude was so annoying. It rambled on. It made no sense. I was constantly asking it, can you talk to me like a human? And I found it so frustrating to work with that I just abandoned the Claude harness entirely. I found it so annoying. I would keep it around for a couple background tasks, but if I had to talk to something, I was choosing not to talk to Claude. Well, we're back, baby. Anthropic just dropped Claude, Opus 5.5, and their pitch is Fable level performance for about 40 percent less than Opus 5, and it's 30 percent faster. But I don't care about that. I care. Is it annoying? And guess what, guys? We did it. It is not annoying anymore, or at least it's minimally annoying. I love it. I got a little bit of early access to this model, was able to play with it across coding tasks, across knowledge work tasks, and even just chit chatting with it. And I have to tell you, I finally am back to a Claude model that does not bother me. Now, does that mean that I'm moving all my workloads over to Opus 5.5? Probably not, but we will tell you at the end of this episode where I think it's really useful, where I found value in the model, and where I think it still needs a little bit of work. Okay, again, I know you all can read the model cards. You don't need me to do that. You can have your agents do it for you, but let's just give you the world tour of exactly what Opus 5.5 is or what Anthropic says it is. It is frontier performance at a fraction of the cost. So it is cheaper. It is 40 percent cheaper than Opus 5 It is faster. Actually, I found myself accidentally testing Opus 5 versus 5.5, and I was so frustrated with how slow Opus 5 is. Opus 5.5 does feel zippier. It's responsive except for, in one exception, I'll tell you what that is in a minute. And then it's supposed to be close to Fable 5.1 on most works. So get an agent at CodingTask. Get at the things that Claude be Claude in. Here's the cost. It's $4 per input token, $20 per output token. You can do fast mode at 8 and 40

Cash reads and writes are discounted, as they are with most models. Now, I don't love running through benchmarks. They're always like, it's good, except when it's not. Then they bury where it's not good kind of down below. But I will say Anthropic's own benchmarks, it beats Opus 5 at max, it matches GPT-6 Astra, my favorite babe, and it's cheaper. So that could be a benefit and it beats Sol, another fave for me, a third of the cost. Now these are like very specific benchmarks. As you see here, here's the whole comparison. You can read the charts, come to your own conclusions. Does not matter. Will it blend? AKA, is it annoying or not? Before we get to, is it annoying? Let's let Anthropic be Anthropic and talk about safety. Anthropic's making a big deal that this is the first model release since they called for pacing the frontier.

So it was evaluated by external evaluators. It is their strongest on alignment. It's supposed to reject prompt injections, which I did test. And it tried less to escape containment boundaries. It's also tagged for the same controls on cybersecurity that the other fabled models are. So if you try to do a no-no, it's going to bump you to Opus 4.8. Again, you'll see this in one of my benches. It's still like an annoying scold.

That's just life with Claude. Claude is going to scold you. Claude is kind of square. Claude is not going to drink with you in a field behind your friend's house. Like Claude's not a party boy. Claude is here to work unless he disagrees with the work and then you're SOL. So we are going to see a little of this come out in its personality and its working style. It's going to be really fascinating to see how other labs kind of reply to this pacing the frontier concept and whether or not they're going to be putting this sort of stuff front and center and whether or not the balance at the end for normal day-to-day developers or users of these models is going to be the right one. This is the first Opus model to launch with the fabled cyber and bio safeguards. You should be able to fix code. You should be able to fix bugs in your own code, but cybersecurity tasks will likely be bumped to Opus 4.8. You're going to see some more blocks.