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Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code

232 points · 156 comments · saikatsg

  1. rdli · · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a really good model. Over the past few days, I give Opus some general directives to basically speed up our CI, and telling it I care both about billing minutes and wall clock time. I told it to create a plan after analyzing everything in our CI, run the plan by a Fable subagent, and then focus on low-risk, high-reward changes.

    9 hours later, I had 12 PRs ready to be merged, and the net result is CI time has dropped from ~10 minutes to ~4 minutes, and billing minutes have dropped around 60%. Less than an hour of my attention.

    1. chewchewchew · · focus · HN ↗
      9 hours?!
      1. rdli · · focus · HN ↗
        Yes. It spawned multiple subagents to run different experiments to benchmark a lot of different things, reviewed CI logs from past runs, etc. In the end, there were changes to what/how we cached, various code quality checks, speeding up test runners, and many other things.
        1. Tade0 · · focus · HN ↗
          I dare not ask about the cost, having burned $60 on a task running for 1h 16min once.
          1. rdli · · focus · HN ↗
            I’m on the $100/month subscription; this session took about $500 in token-equivalent costs.

            (Note that it wasn’t all Opus 5.5; I have a setup that uses Fable 5.1 as an advisor, Sonnet 5.5 for mechanical changes, etc.)

            1. tripleee · · focus · HN ↗
              God I hope the prices drop quick. Once they stop subsidizing it these kinds of workflows will be unaffordable for anyone who isn't already wealthy
              1. debatem1 · · focus · HN ↗
                Assuming this isn't some toy CI a 60% drop in billable minutes will make $500 back pretty quick. Github is wildly expensive.
                1. simon-b · · focus · HN ↗
                  The cost of the standard `actions_linux` is $0.006/minute, so spending $500 to save 6m per invocation, break-even is at ~14k invocations. But, if they're using larger machines and/or parallel jobs the $$$ saving accrues faster. IMO the wall-time saving shortening feedback loop may be a bigger win, but harder to value.
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