I love seeing this verbalized. We are pretty much at the point that increased model capability will only have utility to folks that are willing to let go of even more understanding of whatever the model is producing.
The best models can/will produce a year's worth of output that would take several days to weeks to properly understand in the span of an afternoon.
For everyone that still wants to feel like they own the end result, just use the lesser models with less ambitious tasks.
Big caveat: I think this mainly applies to coding. I would still like the best models possible to be working on e.g. new drug research to cure our various ailments.
I wish I had a bigger N so I could rely on that experience a bit more, but it sure does feel like I'm not really contributing anything in terms of "Data Science expertise" in my own research right now.
But then I'm someone who hasn't found Opus 5.5 good for much beyond web UIs and related frontend development. I find it more forgetful than GPT-5.6 or 6.1 or Fable, so despite having a 1M context window it gets lost in a big codebase or goes of target. Opus 5.5 doesn't manage agents particularly well IMO.
I'm surrounded by people raving about Opus 5.5 and God only knows why I'm not getting their results.
I’ve been shifting away from using more traditional GenAI models in favor of just giving LLMs access to a custom drawing language (LOGO-like) to generate imagery and its been going shockingly well - Opus 5.5 in particular.
I put together a simple LLM driven skill that creates old adventure game (EGA) environments from simple pencil sketches and it works really well. And being procedural, they're much easier to make surgical changes to without degradation.
- Anthropic is finally well balanced across models. Meaning: Opus 5.5 is so good that I do not feel Fable FOMO as I did when they were paired with Opus 4.8/5. And Sonnet sometimes makes me forget about Opus.
- Fable is good, but you really have to push the ambition of your prompt in order to see proper separation from Opus 5.5.
- It’s way faster and more reliable: one of the worst things about fable 5.1 was how slow it was an, on top of that, how frequently it would suffer from max output token overflows. I got none of these issues with 5.2.
- Fable is truly exceptional at drawing now. Fable’s ability to render an image with JavaScript actually has me questioning the value of dedicated image models. I prefer the images I’ve gotten fable/opus to make for me over the gpt-image lineup, it’s wild to think we’re at this point.