> Claude Opus 5.5 is our first release since we called for pacing the frontier.
Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing.
It seems like they are. I mean, this is similar in performance to Fable (ish). It seems like more focus on making existing capabilities more accessible.
Fable 5.1 came out just 21 days ago. Only 3 weeks! And this is 20% relative improvement on terminal bench vs Fable 5.1 at less than half the price, and more human sounding output. does not feel paced to me tbh.
I used Fable some a bit back but have been using mostly Codex, and it seems pretty clear to me: the big models are not there to do terminal bench. They're there to plan and strategize and tell lesser models what they should do in terminal bench.
We've had a year of nearly every model getting quite good at programming. I think with Fable & Astra we are seeing models trained to think at a different level, and I'm not at all surprised or shocked to see them getting passed by their smaller models at coding tasks.
Astra For Coding: Why Are We Doing This? was a great post that didn't say exactly this, but that shows what a weirdo Astra is. <a href="https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/" rel="nofollow">https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
sailingparrot · · focus · HN ↗
Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing.
dmazin · · focus · HN ↗
sailingparrot · · focus · HN ↗
davrosthedalek · · focus · HN ↗
nwah1 · · focus · HN ↗
jauntywundrkind · · focus · HN ↗
We've had a year of nearly every model getting quite good at programming. I think with Fable & Astra we are seeing models trained to think at a different level, and I'm not at all surprised or shocked to see them getting passed by their smaller models at coding tasks.
Astra For Coding: Why Are We Doing This? was a great post that didn't say exactly this, but that shows what a weirdo Astra is. <a href="https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/" rel="nofollow">https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/