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Sonnet 5.5

884 points · 613 comments · D2OQZG8l5BI1S06

  1. Sol- · · focus · HN ↗
    Probably a first world problem, but with Opus 5.5's efficiency, the limits on the 5x plan are simply sufficient for my everyday work, even when running 2-3 sessions at a time. So I wonder when I would use Sonnet 5.5.

    More concurrency than that isn't really practical for me if I want to retain some semblance of understanding. Perhaps it's different for purely web app or frontend tasks, where the outcome is more relevant than the process, I don't have much experience there (and also don't want to belittle these domains, I might be underestimating their complexity).

    So surprisingly, my own work is at least for the time being almost saturated by the model capabilities. I am not sure how I'd scale from here. Sure I could run all requests at max effort to burn tokens for the sake of it, but that can't be it. And for many tasks, I am not really able to define so clear cut success criteria or self-verification loops that I could benefit from letting an agent (or a fleet thereof) autonomously run for a day.

    So I realize it's a skill issue on my side, but I can't be the only one. I wonder if there is a limit to token demand, at least short term. Feels like either they accelerate to AGI and RSI, where the AI can find uses for token, or things might plateau at some point.

    Note I don't think this because I'm an AGI skeptic or think there's a ceiling to intelligence, but there might simply be a valley of economic hardship for the companies where the supply of tokens outpaces the demand, due to a lack of ideas of what to do with them. And this might slow down the funding enough that they never reach escape velocity with the training run scaling. But we'll see.

    1. maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
      There's lots more you can do! Use the model to monitor your deployments after they get deployed. Have them fix and watch CI issues for you. Run adverserial review. Automatically watch metrics every day and highlight performance regressions. Start reviewing your previous sessions to find ways to statically reject different failure modes and have the agent have more success earlier on etc.

      Another thing to think about is, what would it take for you to care less about the understanding. Better integration / e2e tests? Performance validation? visualizing program and data flows? Better refactoring of your modules?

      1. Hauthorn · · focus · HN ↗
        > Another thing to think about is, what would it take for you to care less about the understanding.

        Could you explain why it would be a goal to understand the system less, rather than more?

        It seems harder to know if you have good tests while lowering your expertise in the system.

        1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

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