> If by Opus you mean Opus 4 and not Opus 4.8, then sure

I meant Opus 4.8 which is rather dumb and ineffective in coding harness, especially with higher thinking levels.

I can’t believe that anyone would actually think this. This

My experience was so much different to this, that I have the unfortunate impression that you're shilling. It really was not a capable model, it felt like the old oai models back when we were all excited but couldn't actually trust them even in the littlest ways. What harness were you using, did you do any work to make it better? What was I doing wrong? I just pointed opencode at it, with a pretty simple (large-ish) data cleaning project.

> My experience was so much different to this, that I have the unfortunate impression that you're shilling

I think you might both just be reading way too much into one-off random experiences that you've decided are evidence of significant and stable capability.

Have you actually used Opus 4.8 in Claude Code? It takes way too long to do any practical task on higher thinking levels due to over-engineering. And I am not the only one complaining. Lots of people downgrade to Opus 4.6 exactly for this reason.

Opus 4.8 training works well for agentic work. Not for code harness.

Works extremely well for us. I never know what other people are doing when we read these stories.

Yeah I found 4.7 and 4.8 to be downgrades from 4.6. I don't know if it was the model or just Anthropic's scaling issues though TBH. I found working with the Claude Code max (20x) sub would work awesome in between new models. A week before up to 2 weeks after, it would go to crap, dumber, slower, outages, harness churn, etc.

I'm finding the same with ChatGPT recently since the 5.6 release. Not as bad though, but sluggishness at times, harness churn (creating bugs and crashed), and occasional availability issues that cause me to downgrade to 5.5.

It's gotten to the point where I dread a new model release from these companies because it's guaranteed to be disruptive! I assume the pay per use API is less impacted.

Reddit is the absolute worst way to find real experience. Opus 4.8 is a very capable model and no chinese model can outdo it.

It’s so fascinating watching people on here bicker about models like fine wines. Wild times we live in. Wild times.

It's not a frontier LLM if it's not made in the Silicon Valley region of California, otherwise it's just a sparkling LLM.

Comments like this boggle my mind.

The model which everyone else raves about and is wildly successful with legions of programmers virtually demanding access while abandoning ChatGPT and Copilot in droves, is rather dumb?

Have you considered that it's more likely that you're doing something wrong?

My own experience is that the vast majority of programmers have experience with one model and maybe some short usage of earlier models from a competing choice but want to be using the model with the highest popularity and reputation. I've worked with people who actually had to test multiple choices for their team who didn't understand why they were pressured to select Claude for programmer morale.

I went from cycling between models all the time in Cursor (some would randomly be better at certain tasks than others) to just going pure Opus 4.5 when that came out - it was so far ahead of anything else at the time.

Interestingly with Fable vs GPT-5.6 I think they've lost their lead a bit. I'm finding Fable can't do certain work that 5.6 Sol Ultra can - especially when it comes to webpage design.

Grok 4.5 was fast but made mistakes that GPT/Fable just don't.

I'm curious to try Kimi.

When iOS users are given an Android phone, they complain about how awful of an OS it is.

In reality, they just aren't used to it.

What exactly is there to get used to? Do people really use each model very differently? There's a learning curve as in everything, but there is nothing that comes to mind for me when I use codex as opposed to claude

I realized how awful of an OS modern android is when I bought an iPad. I later fully switched to iOS and never looked back.

Point is, sometimes people just have different experiences from you.

Exactly what I’m thinking, too.

> is wildly successful with legions of programmers virtually demanding access while abandoning ChatGPT and Copilot in droves

Do you have a source for that? Codex went from 5 million users to 9 million users in the past few weeks since GPT 5.6 released. It was so popular that Claude was forced to extend Fable access by a week and then permanently for some plans.