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Claude Sonnet 5 is built to be the most agentic Sonnet model yet. It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that
by microtonal 4mo ago
Claude Sonnet 5 is built to be the most agentic Sonnet model yet. It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models.
I have been using Sonnet 4.6 more than Opus, because I'm mostly doing agent-assisted development and not fully agent-driven development. This announcement does not make me positive, I have found that the more models are optimized for fully agentic development, the worse they get at assisted development and often start doing too much despite very strict/specific instructions.
I have been moving more and more to K2.7 Code and GLM-5.2 the last few weeks. They are often good enough for assistance, very fast, and cheap.
- mohamedkoubaa 4mo agoI've been moving more to Composer 2.5 for the same reason. KISS principle.
- AdminAdmim 4mo agoSame for me, downgraded Cursor Subscription because when i use Cursor i use 90% Composer 2.5 fast
- everfrustrated 4mo agoComposer 2.5 fast (via Grok) is honestly amazing. Its been implementing everything I've asked and getting it right first time. Been impressed with it's front end ability. If this was the last model I could ever use I think I would be happy.
- jklmnopqrstuvw 4mo agoFrom my own experience, GLM-5.2 generally cost more tokens and much more slow.
- microtonal 4mo agoWhich inference provider do you use? (Admittedly, I currently use K2.7 a lot more currently.)
- james2doyle 4mo agoTokens and speed are a factor but does it require less back and forth to get things right? Being "fast and cheap but wrong" still has a cost that an otherwise "expensive and slow" exchange does not
- paradox460 4mo agoIn my experience it spends a lot more tokens to do things. I wrote a tiny extension for omp that counts the number of "Actually" in the response, and if it exceeds a threshold stops execution and waits for me to tell it what to do. Even then it frequently just ignores basic instructions like "only write boilerplate, I will fill in the functionality" Imo MiniMax and MiMo are a lot more reliable (and cheap) Not opus level, but close enough and cheap enough to get the job done
- pimeys 4mo agoI use GLM 5.2 Fast from Fireworks and its very fast. Where are you using it from?
- xpct 4mo agoI've been largely disappointed how much the Claude models ignore custom instructions, and sometimes even prompts on the chat interface. It sometimes feels like talking to a wall, or as if there was a third person in the chatroom whose messages I can't see. I can't help but feel this is intentional towards the 'Agentic' workflow.
- manveerc 4mo agoTotally agreed. I sometimes wonder if they are making the model "lazy" with each iteration, it keeps getting better at avoiding work.
- skerit 4mo agoThis is why Fable was so good. It followed instructions and it was in no way lazy.
- acters 4mo agoI've been seeing LLMs act lazy from the very beginning. They got a little better but smaller models really only want to have a single task given to them. Mythos at least does work. RIP
- DontchaKnowit 4mo agoPeople keep making comments about fable like this? You could only use it for what like a week? How is that at all enough time to evaluate? Opus 4.6 didnt suffer from this problems for a hot minute and then when newer models were released it got worse. I think they change a ton behind the scenes and allocate compute however they want, so the model you use today may behave much differently than how it behaved yesterday
- Analemma_ 4mo agoHeh, it's not crazy if you're here in the Bay: I know multiple people who more-or-less disappeared for days when Fable came out because they were running their benchmarks, and only emerged blinking into the sunlight when the USG banned it. That's just how things are here now, most people are normal but there are some serious LLM dope addicts out and about.
- epolanski 4mo agoI've been saying for ages that since Opus 4.6 models are increasingly smarter but further unhelpful as assistants. Fable was amazing as a vibecoder but as an assistant it can't resist jumping into implementation and filling chats of pointless jargon. It's really grim if you're looking for assistance instead of an implementor. GPT 5.5 Pro and Fable are gorgeous bullshitters that pretend to be right (often convincingly because they are very smart) even when they are wrong and I need tons of energy to process their information. I don't like it but don't know what to do, Anthropic models especially increasingly ignore instructions whether in memory or agents files.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoBy design, unfortunately. If they are just assistants, they can't sell the dream of "we're going to replace human labor completely" to the C-suite.
- epolanski 4mo agoI think that they are simply evaluated on prompt to solution benchmarks.
- baq 4mo agoIt isn’t a dream, it’s a reality for some of us here and it will be increasingly so for everyone else. Amazingly, USG intervening slowed the dynamic greatly (fortunately?) The problem is obviously who will be left. There’s a lot of scifi to catch up on.
- mullingitover 4mo ago> I don't like it but don't know what to do, Anthropic models especially increasingly ignore instructions whether in memory or agents files. I've taken to instructing the agent to manage the subagent, and the principal agent's sole job is to ensuring the subagent follows instructions to the letter.
- whstl 4mo agoYep, this is why experiences and ratings of models vary so wildly. I recently migrated a very large web app to Tailwind and Opus kept screwing up over and over, refactoring and changing the design, the more complex the component became. I ended up asking Haiku to do it and it managed to do everything correctly, pretty much without intervention.
- Brendinooo 4mo agoYeah, there's a real opportunity for one of these companies to invest time in a model that's tuned for, to use your term, agent-assisted developement. Trouble is, everyone inside their buildings seems to believe that no one will be working like that in a year or two.
- popalchemist 4mo agoWhether they believe it or not is immaterial. It is the end-goal they want to achieve, because then they own the means of production entirely.
- jatora 4mo agoI find these nefarious intention theories shallow. It can both be the case that the endstate is them owning the means of production without that being the intended guiding goal. Companies can chase profit without being Leninistic boogeymen.
- cousinbryce 4mo agoSam Allan has said some things that would make Lenin blush
- WhyIsItAlwaysHN 4mo agoThere is no nefariousness in owning all the means of production, it's the endgame of maximizing profit. However the result is exactly the same, concentration of power.
- pigpop 4mo agoThis is such a defeatist and low agency take. "means of production" are not a limited resource like gold that you have to extract from natural sources or divvy up. They are fundamentally skill and knowledge that anyone can attain and put to use, maybe not on the same scale as a well funded business but even those businesses had to start somewhere in order to grow to the size they are now. So rather than casting aspersions on them, your time would be better spent learning how you too can create some means of production and start producing value.
- whateveracct 4mo agoagent-assisted development uses orders of magnitude fewer tokens than agent-driven development the incentives aren't there sadly
- sanderjd 4mo agoNot for a business model that scales revenue by token usage. But other business models are available.
- whateveracct 4mo agoLike?
- sanderjd 4mo agoI dunno. That's the kind of thing the people who come to this site are meant to figure out though :) (I mean, I have some ideas, but I don't know if they are good.)
- nozzlegear 4mo ago> I have been moving more and more to K2.7 Code and GLM-5.2 the last few weeks. They are often good enough for assistance, very fast, and cheap. I've moved completely to local models that I run with my M1 Mac Studio (64gb ram) some time ago. But for the rare times when I feel the local, quantized Qwen3.6 isn't enough, I just connect to Openrouter and use something like Kimi, GLM or Deepseek for a fraction of the price of Anthropic et al.
- kamranjon 4mo agoThis is the way
- nimchimpsky 4mo ago[dead]
- plasticsoprano 4mo agoWhich quant do you use? I have a similar setup and the speed is atrocious at 4-bit.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoI'm using 4-bit as well, with the MoE model. I also use the MLX versions which are optimized for Apple CPUs (from what I understand anyway, I'm just an LLM layman). According to my oMLX dashboard, I'm getting about 50 tokens per second out of this model – not blazing fast, but more than fast enough to be useful to me. https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4bit https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4...
- sparkling 4mo agoWhat is your motivation? Privacy and/or data protection? I currently don't see a world where it makes sense to run a local model that will eats up 60% of my RAM, 20-30% of my disk space while providing worse quality output than a $20/month subscription.
- jerf 4mo agoI've been using Kimi K2.6 lately (don't have 2.7 available through blessed work channels yet) for tasks where I already know what it is I want to do and I want to just step through the process in pieces, and it's fine. Do I have to correct it maybe a bit more than Opus? Yeah, but the real cutoff would be between "I have to read every line" and "I can just trust it without reading every line" and for me neither model hits that mark, and I expect it to be a while yet for that. Is it as good as Opus if I want to spit ball about architecture and then convert that to code? No, but I don't have that problem all the time, and it's there if I do need it. And now in a heavy coding week rather than bumping up against my spend limit by late Wednesday or Thursday I'm comfortably below it all week. That said if anything I feel like I have to reign in K2.6 much more than Opus, actually. If I want to just ask it a question without it inferring some coding task to immediately start doing, it takes a lot more care to prevent it from just running off half-cocked off of an only 3/4s-cocked idea of my own. I use "plan" mode with both but it's somewhat more defensive with K2.6 than Opus.
- a_c 4mo agoI actually use sonnet 4.6 for my day to day coding too. It consumes much less token and good enough. Opus is just too token consuming for it to be useful to me.
- bazhand 4mo agoHave you tried '/model opusplan' I've had strong results mixing opus for planning with sonnet implementing.
- vtail 4mo agoFascinating! How did you learn about this?
- bazhand 4mo agoIt was something that was used for token efficiency. Most of the settings and use cases are quite poorly communicated but asking Claude to review the latest release changelog (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO...) is quite useful. Combined with @"claude-code-guide (agent)" to read it's own docs for settings/configs is super helpful. The quite useful tool is to use /opusplan along with /codex:rescue (https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc) means you get quite a strongly reviewed plan using native claude + codex without having to implement the mostly useless trust-me-bro plugins and other bs.
- addozhang 4mo agoThat's really a great way for the agent to understand itself.
- a_c 4mo agoI haven't. Thanks for the heads up will give it a try! I use opus to comment on code design quite often though. It became a pattern that I made a skill for me to ask for second opinions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733092 Would love to hear your feedback if you don't mind!
- trollbridge 4mo agoNo kidding. I expect to have models to use which are optimised for different use cases. Sonnet as an autonomous agentic model is silly. We already have other models for that if you want something weaker and cheaper than Opus.
- m3h 4mo agoI think you should try an OpenAI model like GPT 5.5. It is better at following instructions and boundaries set during prompt. It feels like a more capable "agent assistant" than Claude models but without loss of intelligence. Most of my work involves "Agentic engineering" instead of fire-and-forget. I like to stay involved during the planning as well as review and ask a lot more questions from the agent than I've seen others doing. In a way, I'm using the agent in a sort of "hyper auto-complete" mode to fill in the blanks (rather big blanks) once I've set out the requirements, scope and design (sometimes specific module boundaries). This works best for me.
- ifwinterco 4mo agoI prefer GPT 5.5 to Opus but both are absurdly expensive token hogs, I can't afford to use either as my main model at $work with the monthly spend cap we have. I use Composer (since we use Cursor) or GPT 5.3-codex as my workhorse models and only break out the big guns when I have a genuinely difficult problem to solve. IMO somewhat weirdly 5.3-codex might be the best overall coding model OpenAI have ever released. It's 90% as good as 5.5 and costs about 20% as much, since it's both cheaper per token and uses fewer tokens for the same task. I'll miss it when they inevitably deprecate it, but hopefully I can use Kimi K2.7 by then
- m3h 4mo agoI didn't realize GPT 5.3 Codex was that good. OpenAI claims to have made their new Terra model as good as GPT 5.5, but with half the cost per intelligence. Hopefully, this will bring it closer to the price you're expecting (or even better considering GPT models have good acceptance/success rates according to benchmarks).
- skeptic_ai 4mo agoBuy 5 accounts at 20usd each. It’s 100 and lasts decently on single threaded work
- ifwinterco 4mo agoThis is at work, we have to pay the actual cost of tokens, no way around it
- arikrahman 4mo agoI have also started shifting to models more reasonable for my wokflow. I've been using the Reasonix harness for Deepseek, and cache hits make the token use basically free. This is with unsubsidized models as well, using American providers.
- mattmatheus 4mo agoI've been working to use the best model for the task for about 6 months and have found great success doing plan with the 'frontier' model but punting implementation down to a 'lesser' model. I'm using the Beads-Rust (a rust fork of GasTown's beads) as my issue tracker. So far, so good.
- bckr 4mo agoI suggest you encoding your invariants in the harness. Architectural invariants that can be mechanically checked, including which modules are approved, which dependencies, etc.
- mark_l_watson 4mo agoGood point, I also like to do the work myself, with an assistant under my control. I am usually really happy with DeepSeek v4 Flash that I feel just mostly does what I tell it to do, but I do switch to Pro for harder tasks. There are so many models, and I personally ignore benchmarks so it takes some time to try different models on my use cases. Fortunately, it is ‘good enough’ to do the work to find a few models that work for me, and just use them for a month or two before re-investing time for my own evals to possibly change models. People should evaluate what works for them and ignore other people and benchmarks. (Apologies if that sounds snarky.)
- spullara 4mo agoif you like that, use gpt models instead.
- duxup 4mo ago“Hey I saw some messed up function commented out that at face value is a bad idea… so here it is again with some nonsense assumptions ….” I ask “where did you get that?” … too often if I’m not constantly guiding it, and even then it still goes off the rails.
- lacoolj 4mo agogemma-4-e4b is very good at assistance too, and is local and fast and small (and "free")
- addozhang 4mo agoI feel pretty much the same way, and the scenarios are similar too. Using Sonnet has a bigger advantage when it comes to response time.
- indoordin0saur 4mo agoYeah. Opus is nice for tasks that require significant planning and considering broader effects on other parts of the code. But it likes to go off the rails and do too much. Often it gives good-sounding ideas but it has a tendency to distract me by giving me a huge to-do list.
- nsoonhui 4mo agoSorry, exactly what is the distinction between agent-assist and agent-driven? T I give AI an image and just it what's wrong, and then it goes on to fix the bug in the codebase for me ( and write the tests), is this agent-assist or agent-driven? Sometimes I just give the AI my description, and mockup, and it creates a plan and implements the details for me, and I verify visually ( this is the weak spot of AI), is this agent-assist or agent-driven?