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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. Waterluvian · · focus · HN ↗
      Every time weird stuff happened this week it was because the model choice in VSCode got set back to “auto” and some other model was trying its best. 5.5 is what I just set it to. Even Fable feels worse for my use cases.
      1. AnotherGoodName · · focus · HN ↗
        Even Anthropic rates Fable lower than 5.5 on pretty much all benchmarks.

        "Why does Fable even exist" is a very very reasonable question right now.

        1. wyre · · focus · HN ↗
          Because Anthropic releases their different model level's at very different points in time, they seem to always have one model that is by far an away the best to use for everything. Haiku 4.5 is almost a year old. Sonnet is fine, but idk if it has any real benefits over Opus. It's only been since Fable has been released that you get to choose between Fable and Opus, but not with 5.5 there is no reason to use Fable.

          I feel like instead of releasing fable, they should have released it as Opus 5, then their next Opus release they would call Sonnet, and their next Sonnet release they would have called Haiku. I don't know if their pricing structure would have been able to support that, but Anthropic has always been the least competitive regarding token pricing.

          1. comradesmith · · focus · HN ↗
            Fable came with a new set of api prices, and a special allowance for subscriptions.

            If they did what you suggested either they eat a ton of additional costs, or send a signal to the market that they’re increasing costs more generally.

            Also Fable and Opus have different specialties so they really are best presented as different models

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