5 ms·

"Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago." That sounds great for hobbyists but IMHO it wasn't until Opus 4.6 was released six months go (Dec 2

"Quality is like running edge models from 8-12 months ago." That sounds great for hobbyists but IMHO it wasn't until Opus 4.6 was released six months go (Dec 25, 2025) that we had a model good enough for professionals to use as a primary driver of their coding agents. That seems to be the threshold worth aiming for.

pierotofy 4mo ago
I use it for work.
- jacobgold 4mo ago
  That's cool if you prefer it, but it is hard to imagine it being a strictly rational choice when much better quality is available at a price that is small relative to the cost of an employee. Or is there something specific about your use-case?
  - vector_spaces 4mo ago
    Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun. Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say
  - lokar 4mo ago
    Won’t it depend on what you use it for? A less capable system might be fine for boilerplate, moderate re-factoring, etc. Not everyone is building whole features in one go.
  - pierotofy 4mo ago
    To me, what's not rational is believing you must rent the tools of your trade while exposing all of your employer's intellectual property to a third party. Difference of opinion.
    - jacobgold 4mo ago
      It's not my opinion that you "must" rent tools but it certainly is the pragmatic choice in 2026. I would be as happy as anyone for this situation to change and I expect it to at some point.
sbrother 4mo ago
I strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.
- dnautics 4mo ago
  for me (might be because of the language im using) i had a substantial bump around september and a huge bump around January. in my stuff now i use an OT library that claude put finishing touches on in September.
- deaux 4mo ago
  Your skepticism led you to underrate the usefulness until then. Those who have been using agentic coding for the last 2 years can tell you Opus 4.6 was not a step change in quality, it was mostly a step change in the Overton Window and narrative.
Projectiboga 4mo ago
So thalen it might be 6-8 months to get to useable on a local open model? Of course state of the art will be a year ahead, a generation at the current pace.
epolanski 4mo ago
Why don't you people bother to try instead of chasing the latest shiny thing? You must be the type of crowd that writes websites with React and Tailwind and pretend to be engineers and have an opinion on everything.
storus 4mo ago
You can already get Opus 4.6 level of performance on subtasks with some local models. So you need to pick a proper code writer, plan writer, code tester etc. model that matches your target expectations and use a coding tool that allows calling different LLMs for different subtasks. For example, people use StepFun 3.x or DeepSeek4-Flash for planning, Qwen3.6-27B for coding.
alexandra_au 4mo ago
You have your dates and models wrong, it was Opus 4.5 released in November 2025, that changed everything, Opus 4.6 was released in February 2026.
- jacobgold 4mo ago
  You're right. December is when things felt differnt but Opus 4.5 was actually released November 24, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5
kelnos 4mo ago
Not sure what you mean by "primary driver", but I was finding even Sonnet quite useful for coding tasks, even about 12-14 months ago (I was too cheap to pay more than $20/month back then, and Opus hit my limits too quickly). Certainly I get a ton more value out of Opus today, but I could absolutely see someone deciding to limit themselves to 8-to-12-months-ago Opus performance for privacy (or other) reasons.

pierotofy 4mo ago

I use it for work.

jacobgold 4mo ago
That's cool if you prefer it, but it is hard to imagine it being a strictly rational choice when much better quality is available at a price that is small relative to the cost of an employee. Or is there something specific about your use-case?
- vector_spaces 4mo ago
  Not all work requires every facet to be so sharply optimized, and there may be other constraints that are completely invisible to you. Some that were easy for me to imagine: the parent works in a heavily regulated industry, their IT team is slow-moving and paranoid and this is a safe, under-the-radar workaround, the output is "good enough" for their purposes and they find tinkering with it to be fun. Regardless I don't think it's fruitful to be so condescending with such little insight into this person's situation. Even if you had total insight -- let people be and withhold your judgement, or at least keep it to yourself. Making people feel stupid is a great way to turn people off to pretty much anything else you have to say
- lokar 4mo ago
  Won’t it depend on what you use it for? A less capable system might be fine for boilerplate, moderate re-factoring, etc. Not everyone is building whole features in one go.
- pierotofy 4mo ago
  To me, what's not rational is believing you must rent the tools of your trade while exposing all of your employer's intellectual property to a third party. Difference of opinion.
  - jacobgold 4mo ago
    It's not my opinion that you "must" rent tools but it certainly is the pragmatic choice in 2026. I would be as happy as anyone for this situation to change and I expect it to at some point.

sbrother 4mo ago

I strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.

dnautics 4mo ago
for me (might be because of the language im using) i had a substantial bump around september and a huge bump around January. in my stuff now i use an OT library that claude put finishing touches on in September.
deaux 4mo ago
Your skepticism led you to underrate the usefulness until then. Those who have been using agentic coding for the last 2 years can tell you Opus 4.6 was not a step change in quality, it was mostly a step change in the Overton Window and narrative.

Projectiboga 4mo ago

So thalen it might be 6-8 months to get to useable on a local open model? Of course state of the art will be a year ahead, a generation at the current pace.

epolanski 4mo ago

Why don't you people bother to try instead of chasing the latest shiny thing? You must be the type of crowd that writes websites with React and Tailwind and pretend to be engineers and have an opinion on everything.

storus 4mo ago

You can already get Opus 4.6 level of performance on subtasks with some local models. So you need to pick a proper code writer, plan writer, code tester etc. model that matches your target expectations and use a coding tool that allows calling different LLMs for different subtasks. For example, people use StepFun 3.x or DeepSeek4-Flash for planning, Qwen3.6-27B for coding.

alexandra_au 4mo ago

You have your dates and models wrong, it was Opus 4.5 released in November 2025, that changed everything, Opus 4.6 was released in February 2026.

jacobgold 4mo ago
You're right. December is when things felt differnt but Opus 4.5 was actually released November 24, 2025. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5

kelnos 4mo ago

Not sure what you mean by "primary driver", but I was finding even Sonnet quite useful for coding tasks, even about 12-14 months ago (I was too cheap to pay more than $20/month back then, and Opus hit my limits too quickly). Certainly I get a ton more value out of Opus today, but I could absolutely see someone deciding to limit themselves to 8-to-12-months-ago Opus performance for privacy (or other) reasons.